Dying Light — ReviewThe open-world benchmark that welded first-person parkour onto zombie survival, with night-time escapes as its still-uncopied signature mechanic

Some games you remember for their plot. Dying Light you remember for a single night.

Its aggregate score sits in the mid-seventies. Read the reviews and you will find "forgettable story" and "cardboard villain" printed in almost every one. And yet the thing sold twenty million copies, and players on Steam handed it a ninety-five percent approval rating. That gap is where the game's real signature hides — not in its story, but in a day-night system that quietly splits one game into two.

By day you are a hunter, vaulting across the rooftops of Harran, scavenging supplies and bolting modules onto your weapons. The moment the sun drops, every rule inverts. Volatiles spill out of the dark, faster and deadlier than anything you met at noon, and you stop being the hunter and become the prey. Your only way home is the parkour muscle memory you built in daylight, sprinting roof to roof toward the nearest safe house with your heart in your throat. That role reversal is what nothing else has managed to copy, and it is what this review is going to take apart, layer by layer.

The story is the one place Dying Light visibly stumbles. The strange part is that its world and its side characters hold you better than its main plot ever does.

Harran, Kyle Crane, and an opening that bites back

The game drops you into Harran, a fictional Middle Eastern metropolis sealed off by the military after a viral outbreak. Order has collapsed. Survivors huddle together and improvise. You play Kyle Crane, an operative parachuted into the quarantine zone by a global relief agency, ostensibly to recover a file of critical virus research.

The hook clamps down the instant you land. Crane is bitten before he can find his feet, and from that moment he depends on a suppressant drug to hold the infection at bay or slowly lose himself to it. It is a smart piece of design, because it lashes the protagonist and the player to the same survival clock. You are not a detached hero passing through; you are one more person who could be swallowed by this thing at any moment, exactly like everyone else in the city. A tower stronghold becomes your makeshift home, and somewhere across the rooftops sits a cruel, cartoonish faction that wants you gone.

This stretch — dropped in, infected, forced to fight for one more day — is the most charged part of the whole narrative. There is no grand save-the-world arc here, just a man in a dead city suppressing the virus in his own blood while he hunts for a reason to keep going.

The one moral knot worth untying

Past the midpoint, Dying Light finally throws a question with real weight behind it.

Crane comes to understand that the agency he serves is no savior. The file he risked his neck to retrieve is valuable precisely because it exposes the organisation's plan to weaponise the virus and profit from other people's suffering. Duty and conscience start to pull in opposite directions. Does he take the data and walk away clean, or stay and hand the city's only hope to a doctor still trying to build a cure?

The ending picks a side. Crane defeats the warlord perched in his tower, turns his back on the agency, and gives the research to the doctor, seeding a sequel. It is the rare moment the narrative earns its keep, the one time "who am I actually fighting for" stops being a slogan and becomes a choice you feel. The trouble is how rarely that altitude shows up across the rest of the campaign. One genuine moral reckoning, surrounded by hours of errand-running, cannot carry a whole story on its own — it can only remind you of the better game the writing occasionally gestures toward.

Why a six is honest, not harsh

Scoring the story a six is not cruelty. It is candour.

The villain is the blunt problem. Rais, the man in the tower, is a textbook brute from first frame to last — menacing, vicious, in your way, but starved of any motive worth remembering. He functions like a boss gate rather than an antagonist who can stand toe to toe with the hero in ideas. A great antagonist forces the hero to question himself; Rais only forces you up another flight of stairs. Without a villain who holds his ground, half the campaign's emotional weight simply caves in, and the climactic confrontation lands with a thud rather than a reckoning.

Pacing is the second wound. The middle act sags under filler, with a parade of go-there-fetch-this errands thinning out an already lean story.

China's Gamersky landed a 7.6 and a line that cuts to the bone — the trailer outshone the game. That sombre piano-scored teaser about family in the apocalypse set an emotional bar the campaign was never built to clear, and the gap between that promise and the delivered plot is the single loudest complaint you will read about the game's writing.

The tower's quiet people, and a sibling comparison

Write off the whole story for a flat main plot, though, and you miss where it actually moves you: the people in the margins.

The survivor side quests inside the tower are written with far more humanity than the spine of the campaign. A mother chasing medicine for her kid. A radio host who refuses to abandon his booth. A journalist who still wants to film the truth in a place where the truth is a fatal liability. These scraps assemble the dignity and struggle of ordinary people in a dead city, and they give Harran a weight the main plot can't. Plenty of open worlds lean on "weak main, strong side" structure, but here the supporting cast genuinely carries the world's credibility.

Set it beside Techland's own Dead Island and the narrative growth is plain — a clearer protagonist arc, a real moral knot. Yet Eurogamer's verdict still stings: the technical leap came at the cost of the predecessor's loose, knockabout charm, and a more serious story only exposes how thin the spine really is. You do not come to Dying Light for the plot. You stay, a little longer than you meant to, for Harran and the people stranded inside it.

If the day-night cycle is the skeleton of Dying Light, the score is the blood moving through it — a synthesizer soundtrack you might never name, yet one that tugs at your nerves the entire time.

Synthesizers tired enough to sound like a dead city

The score comes from Polish composer Paweł Błaszczak, roughly seventy minutes of it, built almost entirely on synthesizers.

The restraint is what makes it. The lazy answer to a viral-apocalypse game is to pile on strings and jump-scare stingers and keep the player flinching. Błaszczak does the opposite. He reaches for the most exhausted, deadened corner of the synth palette and uses it to paint the emptiness and sorrow of an abandoned city. Long sustained tones breathe like the city itself, and a metallic chill rides the edge of melody throughout. Critics have heard a Terminator-grade industrial cold in it, laced with the eerie, sad wonder of a NeverEnding Story.

The effect is that Harran stops being a map and becomes something that breathes. Cross a rooftop alone in daylight and those long hollow tones keep murmuring the same thing — this city is already dead, and you are only the one still moving through it.

It is a counter-intuitive choice that pays off precisely because it never reaches for spectacle. A bombastic orchestral score would have fought the open-world quiet; these tired synths sink into it instead, so that the music feels less like a soundtrack laid over the city and more like a sound the city itself is leaking.

Writing the night was the hard part

Błaszczak has said the single hardest thing to write was the night.

No surprise there. Night is the game's most prominent, most stressful feature, and the music had to pull off two contradictory jobs at once: make you feel hunted, without grinding you into the kind of numb dread that makes a player quit. It took him a long time to land a night theme that fit the world yet left a sliver of room to breathe.

You feel that care in play. Daytime music is a whisper, background you can tune out. The instant night falls and the Volatiles start to roam, the tension snaps tight, rhythm and pressure crowding in together until your pulse and the score are running on the same wire. The music here is not decoration. It is a hidden mood switch wired straight into the game's signature mechanic.

What sells the night theme is its refusal to over-play its hand. There are no frantic drums hammering the panic home, just a held, unresolved low note that keeps you braced in that worst state of all — the danger hasn't arrived, but it is coming. That negative-space fear gnaws harder than any jump scare, and it outlasts the credits; plenty of players can still hum Harran's night years later.

Footsteps, voices, and an atmosphere-first mix

Beyond the score, the sound design serves immersion above all.

Footfalls ringing differently across surfaces, the blunt thud of a melee weapon connecting, the rising snarl of a Volatile closing in through the dark — together they weave a soundstage thick with threat. At night, hearing matters almost as much as sight; with your vision choked, it is sound that tells you which way danger is coming first. Roger Craig Smith voices Crane, and the tower's survivors are performed well enough to give those side-quest portraits a vocal backbone.

Set against a co-op contemporary like Left 4 Dead 2, the two follow different audio philosophies. That game leans functional and immediate, using sound to bark "special infected incoming," a stinger that tells you precisely what is about to attack. Dying Light leans atmosphere-first, slowly marinating you in a sense that the city could end you at any second without ever spelling out where the blow will land.

It will not suit everyone — players who want their audio cues sharp and informative may find it vague. But it locks perfectly into the night-escape core, and it is the quiet reason the dread holds for a whole night without breaking. The sound design is not telling you what to do; it is telling you how to feel, and in a game about surviving the dark, that is the harder and more valuable trick.

Dying Light does not win on raw fidelity. It wins on a city designed to be absurdly clever in three dimensions, and a day-night lighting system that serves art and mechanics at the same time.

A vertical city held up by an in-house engine

The game runs on Techland's own Chrome Engine 6, and its biggest achievement is holding up Harran as one seamless, large-scale open world.

But what makes Harran special is not that it is big. It is that it is tall. This is no map laid flat against the ground; it is a vertical city you climb endlessly and traverse rooftop to rooftop. The low, dense roofs of the slums, the weathered high walls of the old town, a tower clawing at the skyline in the distance — together they form a three-dimensional, climbable space. That verticality is no idle showpiece. It feeds the parkour directly, because every ledge, every utility pole, every zipline is both scenery and the path beneath your feet.

The engine carries the big vistas too. Stand atop the tower and look out over all of Harran — the city silhouette far off, the rubble detail up close, dust drifting in the air — and you get that bleak, ruined grandeur the apocalypse trades in. For 2015 that put the game in the first tier of its peers, and the draw distance alone sold the illusion that the whole sealed city was a single continuous, climbable space rather than a series of stitched-together zones.

Lighting that is both art and rulebook

If you could praise only one thing about how this game looks, it would be the day-night lighting.

The genius is that the system is simultaneously a visual feat and a gameplay mechanic. Daytime Harran runs warm, sunlight spilling across the broken districts with a faint poetry to the ruin. Then the sun sinks, night presses down inch by inch, and the city's colour temperature, visibility and danger level all flip together. The same rooftop you crossed freely at noon becomes a hunting ground after dark. Light here is not just rendering; it is the rule itself. The sky is your survival timer.

That "light as mechanic" design is exactly why the visuals have outlived their era. You will not remember the game for its texture resolution. You will remember the way your pulse quickened as the sun went down. And because the transition is continuous rather than a hard cut, the slow orange sag of dusk works as a wordless warning — you catch yourself speeding up, doing the math on how far the nearest safe house is. Few games in 2015 pushed dynamic lighting this far while binding it this tightly to their core loop.

Platforms, revisions, and a sibling comparison

Honesty demands a caveat: the visual experience was never uniform across platforms.

At launch the PC build drew broadly positive notices and a 75 on Metacritic — the complete version. The two console builds stalled in the mid-range at 74, dragged down by launch-window framerate and optimization trouble.

It was a common affliction for cross-platform releases of the era, when ambitious open worlds routinely outran the hardware they shipped on. For newcomers the lesson is practical: if you have the choice, PC remains the cleanest way to see this game's lighting at its intended quality, though the modern console re-releases have long since closed most of the gap.

Techland patched its way out of the hole over time. The later Enhanced and Definitive editions polished the lighting and materials further and carried the game onto new-generation hardware, letting that day-night system shine again at higher resolutions and framerates. It is a rare case of a game's visual reputation improving years after launch, because the underlying art direction was sound enough to reward the extra horsepower.

Against its own sequel, Dying Light 2 Stay Human, the follow-up goes bigger and more advanced — more sprawl, more buildings, more lighting tech. Yet many veterans still prefer the original Harran's tighter vertical density and heavier lighting mood. The first game used a smaller footprint to make a purer statement about the vertical city, and in art direction, as in so much else, focus often beats scale. Harran is not the biggest open world of its decade, but it may be the most legible one to climb.

Gameplay is the soul of Dying Light and the entire reason it earns a nine. It takes one deceptively simple idea — make movement itself the point — and pushes it to the ceiling of the genre.

First-person parkour, where moving is the game

You understand within the first minute that this is not the other post-apocalyptic survival games.

Here you do not trudge clumsily along the ground; you flow across the skin of a vertical city. Rooftops, car roofs, ledges, ziplines, utility poles, air-conditioning units — nearly every protruding surface becomes a foothold. The first-person camera gives the parkour a presence hard to find elsewhere. Vault the gap between two buildings and the view sways with your body's momentum; land and your hand instinctively grabs a ledge. That sense of physically clearing the city with your own limbs is among the best first-person traversal since Mirror's Edge.

What matters more is that parkour is never an ornament. It is survival itself — your way of exploring by day, your route to supplies, and above all your only lifeline when night comes. Movement is fully mechanised here, and it is the bedrock every other system is built on.

It also reshapes how you read the world. In most survival games you scan the ground for cover; here you scan the skyline for routes, instinctively chaining ledge to pipe to zipline before you have even decided where you are going. The city teaches you to think upward, and that vertical literacy becomes its own quiet pleasure long before any combat enters the picture.

The night, the Volatiles, and a hunt that flips on you

Pick the single hardest-to-copy mechanic and it is unmistakably the day-night cycle and the Volatiles it releases after dark.

Daytime Harran is your turf. The infected are sluggish and clumsy; you vault rooftops at leisure, lay traps, pick them off, every inch the hunter in control. Then the sun drops, and the game tells you with a spine-prickling prompt that the rules have changed. Volatiles pour out of the dark — they sprint after you at full speed, hit far harder than anything in daylight, and follow you up walls and across buildings. In a heartbeat the hunter becomes the hunted.

The tension this manufactures is one of a kind. Every night excursion is a gamble: richer experience rewards tempt you out, but the moment a Volatile locks on, all you have is the parkour muscle memory you drilled by day, a frantic sprint roof to roof toward the nearest safe house. The pulse, the ragged breathing, the snarl growing louder behind you — this is the most unforgettable adrenaline escape the game has, and that one mechanic nearly pays for the whole ticket on its own.

Weapon modding, three skill trees, and the wider arena

Combat is another badly underrated layer, and modding is its heart. The game ships with over a hundred base melee weapons, but the blueprint system is what makes fights endlessly variable: a plain blunt instrument gains a shock module to stun crowds, a fire module for lingering burn, a toxic module for spreading damage. By Techland's own count those hundred-plus bases spin out into more than fifteen hundred combinations. Add craftable throwables — knives, grenades — plus environmental traps like electrified fences, spikes and cars, and every encounter has countless solutions. Better still is how it pairs with parkour: drop from a rooftop into a momentum-loaded heavy strike, or lure enemies onto a trapped stretch of terrain. The vertical map gives combat a dimension flat brawlers cannot.

Progression is split across three trees — Power, Agility, Survivor — and the clever one is Agility. It does not level from kills; it levels from actually moving. The more you run, climb and leap, the faster it climbs, a use-it-or-lose-it loop that rewards you directly for exploring the vertical city and welds growth to the core. Power turns your fragile early pipe into a steel-shearing modded weapon; Survivor handles economy and convenience, cutting shop prices and unlocking blueprints sooner. The multiplayer is just as strong: up to four-player co-op lets you push the campaign, scavenge and run challenges together with enemies scaling to suit, while the asymmetric Be the Zombie invasion — one player piloting a Night Hunter into another's world — is the most-talked-about wrinkle of all, divisive in balance yet a massive extender of the game's lifespan.

The steep climb in, and a parkour comparison

A nine does not mean flawless, and the biggest gameplay grievance is that steep difficulty curve.

Crane starts slow and weak, weapons break with alarming speed, and night is an outright wall — plenty of newcomers bounce off the unfriendly teaching curve in their first few hours. The reward curve sits firmly at the back end: you have to grind through the bitter opening, let Agility climb, let weapon mods open up, let the trees light up, before you taste that giddy freedom of flowing across the city's surface. It is why the community holds both a "why does no one recommend this" camp and a "beat it four times" camp at once.

Lined up against the pure first-person parkour of Mirror's Edge, the difference is that Dying Light never turns traversal into a time trial. It welds movement into a whole survival loop — you run to stay alive, not to chase the clock. That very integration, movement as survival, is what gives the gameplay its singular weight.

On sheer volume, Dying Light is a game that absolutely fills you up. But that fullness mixes solid substance with a measure of filler.

From eighteen hours to a hundred

Start with the clock. By HowLongToBeat's numbers the main campaign runs about eighteen hours on average — a measured, well-paced length, neither short nor bloated.

Eighteen hours is only the doorway, though. Once you dig into side quests, challenges, collectibles and multiplayer, the time balloons fast — players who engage with the side content typically log anywhere from thirty-five to over a hundred hours, and completionists average around fifty-five. Put plainly, the depth here can carry you for a month or two, provided you genuinely love the core loop. That "short spine, long tail" structure is a gift to the smitten and a slog to anyone who just wants to roll credits.

It is worth flagging that the worth of those hours rides heavily on your taste. If you relish parkour exploration for its own sake, every rooftop crossing inside those fifty-five hours is a pleasure. Treat the side content as a checklist to clear and the same span turns into a chore. So you cannot judge the game's scale by the number alone; you have to ask whether the time is immersion or attrition — a question that splits players, and one root of the game's divided reputation.

The Following: an expansion that plays like a sequel

If the base game already runs large, the expansion, The Following, nearly doubles it.

Released in February 2016, it does not simply bolt on a few quests. It hands you a sprawling new rural map — fields, villages and open roads in place of Harran's cramped vertical sprawl — and its headline addition is a drivable, deeply customisable off-road buggy that stretches the game's "movement as core" idea into a whole new register of motion. There is a new crossbow weapon class, fresh skill branches and crafting recipes too, and it inherits your campaign save so you arrive maxed out and fully kitted. Small wonder the community calls it a free-sequel-grade expansion.

The contrast in map design is the fun part. The base Harran is vertical, dense, all about climbing up; The Following's countryside is horizontal, wide open, all about driving across. Two maps with opposite spatial logic carve two rhythms out of one core loop. For anyone who has tired of urban parkour, the open country is a well-timed breath, and it makes the whole content map feel more complete and layered.

Awards, the version to buy, and a contemporary

The expansion's quality is more than word of mouth; it has hardware to show. The Following picked up Best Co-Op and Best Expansion nominations at the Global Game Awards, high recognition for an add-on, and proof its content is no afterthought. For getting in today, the version to buy is the Definitive Edition, which folds in the base game, the expansion and every update — the complete day-night parkour experience in one purchase, carrying years of Techland's polish to visuals and combat.

Set beside a contemporary open-world zombie-survival title like State of Decay 2, the two diverge cleanly. That game is strong on base management and resource strategy — the play is "how do I keep a band of survivors alive," a top-down logistics puzzle of bodies and supplies. Dying Light's edge is the vertical density of its city and the immediacy of first-person exploration — the play is "how do I, personally, stay alive in this place," a ground-level test of nerve and reflex. Same genre, two very different takes, and which one wins depends only on the apocalypse you want to inhabit, the strategist's or the survivor's.

The honest blemish: padded quests and grind

To tell it whole, there is water in this content. That tail stretching from eighteen hours to fifty-five is not all premium. A fair share of side quests and challenges pad the clock by farming materials and re-running the map — the go-to-an-area, clear the infected, collect some supplies, come back structure recurs often enough to fatigue. For efficiency-minded players that filler dilutes the experience and dulls the freshness of the core loop.

So the fairer framing is this: the volume is staggering, but you have to learn to be selective, picking out the content that genuinely serves the day-night parkour core rather than letting an icon-littered map hold you hostage. Treat it as a playground to drop back into, not homework to fully tick off, and the long tail finally pays. The game is at its best when you chase a single rooftop route or one tense night run for the joy of it, not when you methodically scrub every marker off the map.

That "filling but you must filter" trait is an open-world disease, and this game does not escape it either. It is the price of the genre's generosity, and the players who get the most out of Dying Light are the ones who treat its abundance as an invitation rather than an obligation.