It’s a shame that Dying Light’s story can’t match the highs of these random encounters and experiences. It’s this need to restock your inventory that forces you back out into the danger zone, with each trip carrying equal amounts of danger and excitement. You can upgrade your items with modifications and elemental effects to deal more damage, and repair them a limited number of times before they inevitably break, but you’ll constantly be on the lookout for replacement gear. combat feels visceral, with zombies recoiling realistically from your swings - particularly once you unlock more damaging power attacks and context-sensitive finishing moves. Crane might have a mean swinging arm, but all weapons eventually break after too much use wear one down enough at the wrong moment and you’ll quickly get swamped by attackers. With any zombie attack dealing lots of damage, any very close encounter - whether it be a Volatile or simply a crowd of regular zombies - carries a risk. Instead, you’ll need to rely on an array of improvised melee weapons to avoid drawing too much attention. They can climb small obstacles, chase you across the map, and dodge your attacks, so it’s worth saving firearms for emergencies to stay undetected. Viral zombies, akin to the 28 Days Later “runner”-style undead, will be on you in a matter of seconds, and are much more dangerous than regular shamblers. There’s only a small selection of guns strewn throughout Harran, and using them instantly draws attention to your location. It gets rather crowded, but rarely reaches Ubisoft-like levels of clutter. Movement doesn’t feel as natural or fluid as Mirror’s Edge, with Crane hauling himself up over tall obstacles rather than gracefully scaling them, but it’s enough liven up the numerous optional objectives and fetch quests that litter the map. Protagonist Kyle Crane is something of a free running expert, able to climb almost anything, vault over walls and leap across rooftops to avoid the slow-moving zombies on the streets below. It’s true that the downtrodden slums of Turkish city Harran aren’t as picturesque as the beaches of Dead Island’s Papua New Guinea, but a new day/night cycle and acrobatic parkour movement transform the experience. Both put a heavy emphasis on melee combat, and both can be tackled co-operatively with three friends. On the surface, Dying Light should be little more than a rehash of Dead Island both are first person adventures set in an exotic location, currently under siege by the living dead. Amazingly, it has fallen to developer Techland, whose previous efforts Dead Island and its expand-alone Dead Island: Riptide were distinctly average at best, to put a fresh spin on the undead formula. It’s not unfair to say that zombies are some of the most overused tropes of modern gaming - we’ve been fighting them off for years now across a multitude of genres and it was beginning to get a little stale.
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