Dying Light was originally released in January 2015 as a spiritual successor to the Dead Island series (Dead Island 2 is still in development apparently). I played the demo a few years ago at EGX and fell in love with it, so grabbed it on release day and played through the story, completed all of the side missions and maxed out my character’s skill tree. I couldn’t recommend Dying Light enough, and if zombies are your thing I would be surprised if you haven’t tried the firstperson, parkourbased, zombieslashing game already.
Just over a year later and an expansion titled The Following has been released, alongside an update to the main game referred to as the Enhanced Edition. The Enhanced Edition download weighs in at around 17GB and gives you access all to available DLC, whilst The Following is around 4GB. The Enhanced Edition includes “the brandnew legend system, improved visuals, major gameplay enhancements and more”, and The Following provides more mission content in a new area, with the story missions revolving around a cult who apparently have a cure for the virus outbreak in Harran, so as Kyle Crane you need to infiltrate the cult and get some answers. The Following’s story took me around 10 hours to complete, but that’s only a rough estimate as it’s so easy to get distracted whilst your racing your buggy through the countryside, tearing down zombies who are scattered around the vast new map which is as big as the slums and old town from the original game put together.
The buggies are the major addition to the game, and whilst you could ignore them and run across the map there is some back and forth required for missions so buggies are pretty much a necessity. The driving mechanics are really well done, and being able to add a flamethrower to your buggy is awesome. Buggies take damage though, and run out of fuel, so you’ll have to constantly be on the search for screws and fuel which can get a bit frustrating after a while.
The legendary levels go all the way up to 250! After playing through The Following story content I only managed to reach legendary level 5 though, and to be honest there’s not much incentive to grind through the levels as they only really add to things like weapon damage and maximum health increases. I’ll probably finish off the side quests and rank up a bit more, but I imagine it’ll be a case of booting up the game every now and then when I’ve got a spare hour and just fancy decapitating some zombies. The graphics still look the part, the realism really helps immerse you and some of The Following’s story content really benefits from it (the finale is brilliant). I really like the new music too, as I found some of the music from the original a bit boring. I can’t say that I’ve noticed much in the way of ‘improved visuals’ over the original, or ‘major gameplay enhancements’ either for that matter.
It’s not without its glitches though, whether it’s dialogue crossing over in co-op, or getting stuck in a box whilst fighting a demolisher in singleplayer (and dying as a result, when the demolisher was already down to half-health), they happen a bit too regularly. Buggies are quite easy to get stuck too, but luckily you can reset them, and I’ve lost count of the number of zombies randomly appearing out of nowhere in front of my buggy whilst I’ve been driving along. One of our team was suffering with frame rate issues, but switching the game install between internal and external hard drive and/or hard rebooting seemed to fix it (not sure which did the trick).
Summary
It’s definitely worth playing through, and if you can get some buddies together you should definitely go exploring and close a few of those volatile nests, and all racing across the fields in your buggies is great fun, maybe just take turns on the ramps though. The Following and the Enhanced Edition update add nicely to Dying Light, and even with the glitches and minor frustrations I’d still highly recommend this as a purchase.
