By Nick Miller
Communications & New Media Major
In an all-ditch effort to make a zombie game that stands out form the rest, Warner Brothers and partner Techland have worked together to create an all new experience exclusive for the next generation of gamers.
The premise of Dying Light is pretty basic. You play as a renegade government operative sent into the quarantine zone, the fictional Middle Eastern city of Haran to recover a file from a terrorist mastermind that contains the cure for the zombie virus.
Within ninety seconds of arriving in the quarantine zone your character is ambushed by raiders (classic Mad Max post-apocalyptic style) and is bitten by an infected moments after firing your gun. Talk about one bad way to start your mission, right? And if it wasn’t for the story’s female lead, Jade, a leader of the group of survivors known as “The People of The Tower”, your character would surely have died.
Ironically, the game has come under critique from the feminist community, prominently Anita Sarkisian, who runs the blog “Feminist Frequency.” She has accused Techland of making the game a stereotypical “Damsel in Distress” story where your character is out only to protect Jade from the zombies and terrorist threat. If you actually play the game you will see that is far from the truth. In fact, Jade saves the main character more often than he saves her!
Dying Light combines parkour aspects from games like Mirror’s Edge to give you more of a real life feeling system for avoiding the infected. It reminds us of the later games of the Far Cry series in terms of handling, exploration, gunplay, and survival. Ammo and firearms are scarce for the first 20 hours of the game, which leaves you stuck with melee weapons at the start, ergo, Dead Island (perhaps the most similar zombie game to Dying Light at the moment).
But it’s done much more sincerely than Dead Island was. It gives you reason to care about non player characters, it gives you motive to use your wits rather than to run right into battle, machine gun ready, mowing down everything in your path. It makes the game challenging but in a way that makes you wish to continue to learn from each mistake and build your character into the ultimate undead fighting warrior.
The controls are a bit different than a traditional shooter, aimed more like first person shooter controls from the days of the original Xbox and the Playstation 2.
Dying Light is exclusive to Xbox One, Playstation 4, and PC and is definitely recommended to the hardcore gaming crowd who love nothing more than a good fight and a good scare.