Dying Light: The Following

Kyle Crane has helped defeat Rais and bring some measure of relief to the plague-infested city of Harran, but supplies of the drugs needed to control the plague are running low. Following rumours that some people living just outside the city have found a cure, Crane finds that the infection is also spreading into the countryside, and he has to ally with a religious cult and help out the local survivors before he can learn the truth about what's going on.

Dying Light was a splendid game, an open-world, zombie survival game with added parkour. The Following is an expansion to the game, rivalling the original in size, and changes things up by taking Kyle out into the countryside. Wide open fields replace the dense urban jungle, but to get around faster Kyle has the added ability to drive a souped-up buggy around. Harran's backwater includes a chemical plant, a granary, a lighthouse, a coastal town, a dam, mountains and forests among other attractions, which makes for a nice change of scenery from the original game.

Your progress from Dying Light carries over to The Following (and vice versa, as you can return to Harran at any time to address any left over business there), meaning that if you've completed the base game you will already be a relatively skilled and badass zombie-slaying, wall-running hero. The Following is a tougher game than Dying Light, so I would not recommend tackling it without having finished off the base game first.

The setup is pretty standard. Early in the game you befriend a bunch of survivors holed up in a farm, who give you missions. As you complete missions, your standing with the community grows. As it grows, the "Faceless" (acolytes of the mysterious "Mother," a religious figure) get in touch and give you more dangerous tasks, which eventually culminate in you learning more about their alleged cure to the plague. Unlike Dying Light, which had you frequently running into the main villain or his henchmen, the story in The Following is much less dominating to the narrative. Instead, the game encourages you more to go off-script and deal with side-missions, help out random survivors in the wilderness and take part in optional activities like time trials and races (amusingly, Crane is as bemused as the player that people are setting up races in the middle of a zombie apocalypse). A completionist approach makes The Following almost as long as Dying Light itself, so you get plenty of game here for your buck.

Despite being an expansion rather than a sequel, The Following has a different feel to the base game. The wild open spaces means that you'll be relying more on the buggy and less on your parkour skills. Indeed, it's only in the coastal town area and the granary and adjacent industrial plant that you'll be making a lot of use of your old parkour skills from the base game. Combat is also different, as guns are much more commonplace and you should have some meaty high-value melee weapons from the end of the original game as well. This takes away some of the incipient, claustrophobic terror of the original, particularly when your buggy is seriously upgraded and becomes capable of mowing down hordes of Volatiles with flamethrowers, an electrified cage and UV lights, but it does make the game's power fantasy much stronger, especially given that the rate of progression through the game remains modest, and it's still unlikely you'll max out the skill tree in any one playthrough.

The gameplay loop remains compelling, the graphics are effectively gory, combat is more satisfying and the buggy is fun to drive around. But The Following has several weaknesses, some of which it shares with the base game. The game regularly gets context-confused about what you're doing, resulting in you jumping off a wall to your death instead of pulling yourself over the top of the roof. A good 50% of my deaths in the game were from the game getting itself into a tiswas rather than my own errors, which is frustrating. The game also carries on the tiresome modern gaming phenomenon of making your character "respawn" rather than actually reloading an earlier saved game, sometimes resulting in you dying and reappearing halfway across the map for no discernible reason, or being able to cheese a challenging fight by constantly dying and charging back into the fight (as the zombies you killed previously are still dead). The rather odd ability to fast-travel around the map by dying and respawning in a tower closer to where you're trying to get to also remains intact. The buggy is also not entirely well-integrated with the base game. It's too easy to get the buggy stuck in an unrecoverable position which the "reset buggy" command won't fix, forcing you to walk on foot to the nearest garage to summon the vehicle back again. The buggy is also hungry on petrol, making the early game a bit boring as you constantly stop to loot gas from cars until you finally start unlocking the gas station safehouses, at which point you never need to worry about petrol again.

These niggles make The Following (****) occasionally frustrating, but when the game lines up and everything starts working as it should, it becomes a genuine joy to play. The combat is crunchy, the story is unobtrusive until the very end when it suddenly asks the player some very tough questions, the environment is fun to explore and at 20-25 hours in length, it's neither too short nor outstays its welcome. It is available now on Steam for PC and via the relevant online stores for X-Box One and PS4. Dying Light 2 will be released in the spring of 2020.

Dying Light

The city of Harran has been overrun by a mysterious virus which transforms those it effects into feral, deranged monsters. The city has been quarantined which international organisations and the government ruthlessly enforce. The Global Relief Effort (GRE) presents itself as a humanitarian organisation, but a more sinister side emerges when they send operative Kyle Crane into the city to find a file stolen from them by Kadir Suleiman. Arriving in the city, Kyle finds refuge at the Tower, a stronghold defended by "runners", survivors who have picked up parkour skills to avoid the infected. Despite himself, Kyle finds himself drawn into the lives of the runners and their perilous battle against a local warlord.

Dying Light is a survival horror open world zombie game, which sounds like a concept created by throwing darts randomly at genres and mashing together whatever they hit. Against the odds, it's a concept that works tremendously and surprisingly well. Although certainly not obscure, Dying Light didn't make a lot of noise on its original release in 2015, but over time has gained an impressive reputation for quality, most of it well-deserved.

The game is an open-world title, with the (very large) slums of the city of Harran open for exploration from the start. In the open world you can rescue survivors, hunt for supplies, kill zombies (who are vulnerable alone but dangerous in numbers) and upgrade your skills. The survival horror element comes from the fact that decent supplies and weapons are rare, so you have to craft your own out of the spare parts you find lying around, and from the day/night cycle. The zombies are more irritating than dangerous during the day, but at night their skills and agility increase and more dangerous zombie variants appear, including ones that can chase you up the sides of buildings. Going out at night is dangerous, but rewarding: any skill points you gain at night are doubled. Survive the night, and you get a healthy skill point bonus (if you die, they're lost). Two-thirds of the way into the game, you unlock a second region, the Old Town, which is even more fun to run around in.

The game's main selling point is parkour, or free-running: Kyle is a nimble character and can jump large gaps between rooftops, haul himself through windows and made dangerous ascents of rickety towers. As his skills unlock, he gains the ability to grapple his way between buildings and fall greater distances without taking harm. Kyle is arguably the most nimble such character since Faith from Mirror's Edge, and it's as much fun to run and jump across the city as it is to defeat a zombie pack in combat.

The zombies are also interesting, being surprisingly quiet and challenging in battle with a number of variants who make things more interesting and lethal. Their biggest threat is their sheer numbers and their response to noise: a loud, long-running battle can draw hundreds of zombies into the area and the mid-game discovery and use of firearms and grenades turns out to be more of a liability than a useful development. However, the game also allows you to make strategic use of this fact: rival human factions can be overwhelmed by summoning a vast zombie horde and then setting them loose on the enemy rather than rushing in yourself.

All of these elements interact really well with one another. Overlaid over the top of this is a strong narrative. There's a core storyline following Crane's attempts to find the enigmatic Suleiman but there's also a sizeable number of side-missions. Surprisingly, there's only a few fetch quests with instead most of these side-missions developing into labyrinth storylines of their own, often spawning their own related secondary missions and objectives. These missions usually expand on how the city fell into its current state and tell lots of short stories about people's lives, many of them falling into standard horror-tragedy tropes but are still generally well-told.

Graphically, the game is very solid (although rarely spectacular) and special mention must be made of the electronic, minimalist soundtrack, which is very accomplished. There's also some great sound effects (the shotgun is satisfyingly meaty in battle and the shuffling undead are accompanied by the gruesome schlopping sounds of bits of them falling off) and the fact that most of the game can be played co-op, which makes it even more fun.

A couple of problems do emerge. The central, main storyline is pretty predictable. Even worse, it becomes progressively linear as it continues, with the end of the game seeing it transform into a standard corridor shooter where most of your parkour skills are unusable. There's also the feeling that the game hasn't really thought through some of the consequences of its abilities: the ending missions disable your grapple, for example, because it would make them far too easy, and a very lame "you are too tired to use the grapple" message pops up if you try. Eventually this narrowing of the game's focus reaches utterly farcical levels: the final battle of the storyline is, astonishingly, a Quick Time Event like it's 2006 or something.

A more omnipresent issue is that, in order to overcome the problem of memory-intensive saves and lengthy reloading screens, the game just respawns you if you "die", with all of your items and inventory intact (you just lose some of your accrued experience points). This means that there is no real price to be paid for dying and, weirdly, you can abuse this respawning system to brute force your way through problems. You may even get to the point where simply killing yourself to get to the nearest shelter is a viable alternative to running there (the game has no fast travel system), which kind of goes against the serious ethos of the game.

It'd be easy to let these problems drag the whole game down, but Dying Light does so much, so well it's hard to criticise it for things that make up a tiny amount of the 30+ hours if takes to complete the base game (not including the numerous DLCs and the expansion). At its best, Dying Light sells the fantasy of surviving against the odds in a post-apocalyptic city, with a rich atmosphere and satisfying combat. At its worst, it turns into a bog-standard linear borefest. But the game spends far more time at its best.

Dying Light (****) is available now in the UK (PC, PlayStation 4, X-Box One) and USA (PC, PlayStation 4, X-Box One). An expansion, Dying Light: The Following, is also available now. A full sequel, Dying Light 2, will be released in 2019.