Dying Light.

So who likes Dead Island? If so I’d say you can’t go wrong with Dying Light. It’s fun. Flawed, but not fatally so and a hell of a lot of fun. Best played with friends, you play the part of Crane, a secret agent with an even more secret agenda dropped into Harran. A city taken over by shuffling, brain eating monsters & a few slightly more mobile creatures that can certainly make you jump, especially in the city’s night time.

I won’t post too many spoilers for the story but you start with some explanation of a file you need to find & you parachute in to Harran. Where you are quickly set upon by a bunch of Zombies & some humans come to your rescue. too late though…. You are bitten & you rely now on a drug called Antizin to stave off the effects of the “Harran Virus”. 
Strangely though, you don’t need to keep your stock of Antizin kept up. Remember Far Cry 2 & needing medication every now & then to stave off Malaria? Not so here, which after making a big point of showing you have The Harran Virus seems a little odd.

And then you’re free. Free to explore a massive map, that can only be crossed by free running, and Parkour. The Parkour mechanics work perfectly in free running mode, however the controls are to start with quite unintuitive. The Jump button is mapped to your right shoulder button & numerous times I found myself mashing A only to find myself mobbed by Zombies.
The Zombies also in the early hours of the game take a fair bit of punishment from your lower grade weapons & its not until you unlock skills on your skills tree & find more powerful weapons that you can take the majority of the lower powered monsters in one or two strikes. 
Your weapons naturally degrade as you beat them round the head and/or torso & you will require replacement metal scrap to fix the weapons as they do so. Careful though, hand held weapons only have a limited amount of times you can repair them till they degrade so far they become useless. However as one of the skills you can unlock you can earn the skill that improves your repair skills, thus earning a chance to not use up one of the allocated repairs of a weapon.
Once you have worked the skills up a bit & you become used to the jump button, the whole game becomes a lot easier to navigate. Zombies, once seemingly overpowered, even when they were the low grade shufflers, become objects of fun that you leap over, slide under & slice & dice to your hearts content.

So Dead Island. The comparison is there for all to see. It started off as a sequel and there is a real Dead Island 2 in the works, so this feels more of a spiritual successor to Dead Island.

There are rooms & boxes to unlock & the lock picking is essentially identical to Fallout 3. Insert pin, rotate to find the sweet spot & then roll the lock with your screwdriver.
You have a bunch of Safe houses scattered across the map, however they are not all unlocked. Some need to be cleared of brain eaters & the power restored, or doors closed/blocked before they become a safe haven against the Walking Dead. 
A few are located high up in towers, and Parkour allows you to climb up them & restore power. Then to get back down you step off or jump into a pile of full bin bags or a skip full of rubbish to break your fall.
Hang on? I’ve done that before? Climb a tower to stop a radio transmission or reveal a new part of the map & then plummet to a soft landing below. More Far Cry & now an Assassins Creed comparison? Does this game do nothing original? the short answer. No, not really.
Basically you’re playing a game that pulls from numerous other games, Far Cry, Assassins Creed, Dead Island and old favorite Left 4 Dead.
I say Left 4 Dead as there is a game mode where you can invade your friends game as a zombie & hunt down your friends in a quite intense feeling mini game.

The only really major grumble I have with Dying Light, is I feel no connection to Crane. The story is a tad flimsy at times, and I find myself not really caring about Crane’s story. The missions are largely fetch & carry, or get from A to B quests.

But what can’t be denied, is the game has a major fun factor. Especially with friends. As you upgrade skills its hilarious to see a friend sail past your head as he drop kicks a zombie. Equally hilarious was standing by a pile of rubbish to guide a friend to where he needed to drop safely from up a tower, only to see him land the other side of the bags & missing them by a fraction, dying instantly (Laughed for ages over that)

As I alluded too the game does have some flaws. The lead character being one, the climbing being another. For the most part its fluid, and fairly easy to navigate around. Me and a friend were playing one night though & we found a horrendous area to navigate. moving through some sewers we found that the method of turning round to face another direction & grab a pipe or wall behind us just wasn’t working! We got through it eventually but not without much swearing!
Also spotted a bug with some dead bodies, becoming wedged in walls & on one occasion a zombie landed face first on a crate I was to unlock. Yet my character was able to reach straight through the zombies corpse & unlock/open the crate. The zombie remained attached to the crate & lifted into the air.

The long & short of it is, it is a lot of fun. It looks lovely, the game is pretty atmospheric. As you get the radio message every evening warning you to get to a safe house & sleep till morning, the atmosphere goes up a few notches. more deadly creatures come out at night. Creatures that Parkour & track you, every bit as well as you can.
For me it was well worth the investment & waiting for the disc copy. I saved £30 on that, getting a season pass & launch DLC that wasn’t available on the digital version on the Xbox Store.
The game has its flaws, none of them game breaking, most of them thoroughly amusing.
But unless you were a big Dead Island fan, I’d wait for a price drop.

Goodnight. And Good Luck.

Nice review mate, i've just started playing it tonight, and although i'm not that far into it I am enjoying it so far.

Good review dude loving the game so far and theres lots of secret stuff to find and references to other video games.

Good work mate, I will move it to official to get more exposure!

Great review fella, nice read. I'm keeping game titles to a minimum on the One so I don't end up with a pile of shame this gen... maybe one to grab down the line.

Good review bud. I wasn't sure about this, but know a good few playing it and after mentioning I might get it if I can afford it this week, FBG suprised me and got it for me instead looking forward to having a crack.

Nice review mate.

nice Darth matey

Good review I may wait for this to drop in price.