I tried to fight this game, but I can't go on any longer. After 6 hours of utter frustration, i declare Dying Light unworthy of any more of my time.

I cannot say it all started well, because it actually started rather terribly. Cliché beginning, atrocious writing and dumb story, that got only slightly better later. And it has some pacing issues as well, the story does not flow, you often loose track of it during all the backtracking and running up and down the relatively small map.

Because there is no freaking fast travel, and if you die you are put at the nearest safehouse and if you happen to be at a more remote location, well fuck that noise, i refuse to subject myself to this repetitive insanity.

And it's grindy as hell too, weapons don't last 10 hits, and enemies often seem indestructible. It takes a good 10 minutes to clear out an area just to unlock a safehouse or do some required story activity, while you use up all your weapons, and resources, and then you are forced to grind for resources to even be able to continue playing.

It's so freaking bad that I even tried trainers to try and overcome the grind. But unfortunately none I found worked with the latest version of the game. I just hope they didn't contain malware, because if they did, I fully blame techland for making such a shitty game, that I needed to resort to that.

So here we are at an impass. The game is not all bad, the parkour running would actually be enjoyable, if the game wasn't designed to be such a grind.

The combat is unfortunately atrocious, unless you have firearms, but then your problem becomes ammo. If you try to fight zombies with melee weapons, sometimes they die in 2 hits, other times you spend 10 freaking minutes smashing their head and they still refuse to die. Melee weapons break constantly, and are completely ineffective, firearms don't have ammo, so you are screwed either way. The game would actually be enjoyable despite the weak story if the combat was good.

But both being bad is a deal breaker. I fought my way through The Last of Us on the PS3, which was about as frustrating as this POS, but that one at least had the characters and the story going for it, that made it worth my while.

The running controls are also rather weird, you have to hold down space to catch ledges, you can't just press space to jump on them like in any normal game, and you also have to look right at the ledge otherwise you can't catch it, which is another odd thing, completely alien to all first person view games. It took hours before I finally got used to the fact that I both had to look at the ledge and hold space to jump on it. Until then I was constantly falling and missing everything becuase I forgot one or both of these arbitrary rules.

+

  • Graphics, for a 2015 game is not bad
  • Freerunning can be fun

-

  • Atrocious writing and story
  • Frustrating combat
  • Ineffective weapons
  • More backtracking than all the games I ever played combined
  • Constant grind for resources that overshadows everything else
  • Impossible mash key mechanic
  • Weird controls

Scores

Graphics/Realization: 8/10
Story/Atmoshpere: 1/10
Gameplay/Controls: 5/10

Overall impression: 3/10

I might have had some fun for a minute in there, but the cost is too much.