I really did. It might come as a surprise to you if you know how I dislike the pointlessly drawn out titles, how bored I was of Dead Island and how I find about 60% of stuff in Far Cry titles extremely tedious and boring. But Dying Light seemed different. So I tried it back when it was just released and decided that it was a mistake to do. Yet, AGDQ 2018 happened and it had a very entertaining to watch run of TheFuncannon and Amyrlinn that made me want to give the game another chance. It made it look exactly like what I was hoping the game to be when it was first shown – Mirror’s Edge with a more open-ended level structure and zombies. I suppose, I should’ve taken into account that to achieve that, the runners had to break the whole game balance first…
I’ve played for 14 hours, and I’m going to tell right away – I just switched to full offline single player and started outright cheating about 6 hours in just to escape the boredom and get to the levels of fun you can see in the run. They never came. I’ve dropped the game about half-way in story-wise, so, as such, I cannot technically review it by my own standards. But I can tell what it could be.
It could be exactly what I’ve described. Mirror’s Edge, the first one not the boring new one, zombies to make things more tense and a bit Dead Rising-ish and open-ended structure of the levels. The freerunning in the game is great. Not as fluid as Mirror’s Edge, hell, probably not even as Brink, but it’s good. When you unlock things. And the world is pretty interesting to run around, with varied areas and different outside and inside areas. When you unlock them. And the zombies are here, and escaping and fighting them is actually pretty good. When you unlock things.
Because, you see, what the speedrun does is just unlock the potential of the game to be fun from the start and avoids the tedious and absolutely pointless grind you need to have otherwise. You start out averagely mobile, dying quickly, with crap weapons which break and not a lot of moves, ridiculously low stamina for fighting (Dead Island had the same issues, actually). But if you unlock everything, you’re fast, you’re agile, you’re effective in both running and combat and you have a grappling hook which is extremely fun to use. I cheated (with infinite health and weapon durability) for about 8 hours and I didn’t get there so i could only imagine that to get through this grind and get the game evolved from “tedious bs” to “wow, this is fun and quick” it would take most of the game content. The content that would’ve been more fun if you had all that crap unlocked from the start instead.
Though, of course, it wouldn’t have fixed all the issues. The enemies are usually more annoying than dangerous, often too grabby (which stops you outright – always a smart design decision in a game about quick running), some too agile, some too persistent and I can’t see how even with everything unlocked they can be any fun during moments when you can’t simply run – though, again, this has been the issue in Dead Island and simply remained unchanged here, without any creativity of games like, same, Dead Rising. The story is dreadfully serious and boring, this time even without funny over the top characters, with rare attempts at humour being annoying rather than cute. The music’s pretty good, though, influenced by the horror synth soundtracks of the 80s, so it’s good you at least get the soundtrack with the game for free.
Anyway. Maybe someday someone, who understands that to make a good game one shouldn’t take great ideas and than spread them really thin on a giant toast, but rather just make good use of them no matter how short or “easy” the game will be, will take on the same concept and will make an actually fun quick paced parkour first person zombie game about crowd surfing zombies and doing stuff in a cool looking open-ended world. Dying Light isn’t it, though. And it’s kinda funny how it made all the same mistakes Mirror’s Edge Catalyst did a year later.