Zombies don't climb trees. They are also not very good with high rise buildings. But they will quietly climb over small obstacles if there is something interesting nearby. And then night falls. And in Dying Light, that means someone is going to die.
Maybe it's just you.
Techland's spin on open-world adventure and survival horror is now on Nintendo Switch, with all the trimmings. Despite a few rough edges and a lackluster story, Dying Light is still, all these years later, one of the most unique and cleverly designed zombie games.
Dying Light Switch Review: The Dead Rise Again
Zombies have taken over the world in the not so distant future. Bands of brave and often criminal survivors fight to hold off the hordes, brave scientists try to find a cure, and nefarious organizations want to use this research for their own ends. Into it all falls, literally, Crane, a double agent trying to infiltrate one of these criminal gangs before they unleash unspoken horrors on the remaining human population.
Dying Light's story is not its forte. The narrative is standard fare for the genre, and you can see most of its twists long before they happen. Most of the characters, including Crane, are flat and forgettable. This is something I hope Dying Light 2 improves on, but for now, the city of Harran is good enough to get by.
Harran is a playground like few others, an urban land of death full of traps, zombies, treasure, zombies, secret safe rooms and even more zombies. The streets are littered with the walking dead, and it's both a clever bit of world-building and vital to Dying Light's identity.
There's a handful of uninfected humans in the apartment building that's your home base, and nearly 30 viruses - Dying Light - speak zombies - just in the two streets out front. It's one thing to be told you're the last of us and another thing to see it unfold before you.
Sunlight stuns most of these viruses during the day, but their numbers mean you need to think carefully about the route you take. Terror reigns at nightfall (hence "Dying Light"), when viruses become faster, more vicious, and much harder to kill. In a twist that can only happen in video games, the nights are much shorter than the days in Dying Light. It's a quirk that I'm happy to accept without question.
That's partly thanks to the combat of Dying Light, which is another spin on the survival horror genre reminiscent of Dead Island. Normally you get guns and search ammo in these post apocalyptic adventures. In Dying Light, much like Techland's other zombie game, you use everyday objects as weapons: a table leg or an old lead pipe, for example.
And, if you're lucky, you might have some random chunks you can mod it with, but only once you learn how to survive first.
There's a rambling feel to all of Crane's encounters, even with more powerful weapons, that lends an added sense of dread to fights with any virus. Your combat stamina meter dictates how many hits you can try to land before you have to retreat, and retreating is usually the smarter option in most cases anyway. Too much noise only brings more viruses running.
It also makes Crane surprisingly accessible to a character with so little development. If I was dropped off at an apartment complex full of zombies with blood and dismembered body parts everywhere, I too would swing a wrench wildly at anything in sight before fleeing as fast as I could.
You end up getting more and better guns, and I don't think I've ever felt so relieved in a survival game when that happened.
What really sets Dying Light apart from other survival horror games is how Crane navigates the city: via superhuman parkour feats. Almost everything is climbable in Harran. Construction equipment, houses, fences, train carriages – if it has an edge, Crane can probably cling to it or precariously walk along it to reach his goal.
Dying Light's parkour is messy at times, and it's easy to miss a jump if the camera is angled slightly off, but it's still exhilarating. Roaming the streets freely is out of the question, given the number of viruses, so getting around the city becomes a headache in itself.
Planning your way through the city based solely on the routes that keep you the most above viruses is an absorbing task and more difficult than I expected. However, you'll eventually have to descend from your perch, and there's a palpable sense of dread as you wonder if your distraction might work or if you'll encounter a horde of viruses you overlooked around the next bend.
Dying Light's nature of exploration keeps Crane's tasks from becoming too repetitive most of the time, though they frequently falter. It was tempting to groan inwardly at the prospect of arming yet another set of traps or hunting down another survivor, as it once again involved walking from point A to point B with nothing else to do. .
However, the trek itself has always been hectic and requires full attention, especially if you don't want to be caught out at night.
This is all familiar to anyone who's ever played Dying Light, but the Switch version bundles all of the existing DLC ​​released, including four expansions and several cosmetics. The Bozak Horde and Hellraid are good if you want more combat, but I enjoyed Cuisine & Cargo and The Follow much more.
Both DLC packs add new locations and challenges, and The Follow even gives you new weapons and enemy types to deal with.
The downside is, of course, that it's all on the Switch. The performance of the Dying Light Switch port is nearly flawless, but it comes at the cost of good resolution in handheld mode, where Harran gets very blurry. Still, it's a small price to pay for one of the most unique survival games in handheld mode.
Dying Light Switch Review - The End Result
Benefits
- One of the most unique survival horror games still hasn't lost its touch
- Huge urban open world (and beyond)
- Brilliant parkour system
- Desperate and desperate fights
- So much DLC
The inconvenients
- Blurry resolution on Switch
- Underdeveloped story and characters
- Identical objectives
Dying Light is six years old, but he hasn't lost his edge. A fantastic parkour system, extensive combat customization, and a unique take on the zombie-filled post-apocalyptic world means that Techland's horror game is still holding its own after so long.
Sure, the resolution could be better on Nintendo Switch, and it's still the same dodgy story, but having Dying Light handheld and with all the DLC more than makes up for that.
[Note: Techland provided the Nintendo Switch copy of Dying Light used for this review.]
