Dying Light is an open world, first-person, action-survival game that places you in the midst of a quarantined zombie outbreak in the fictional city of Haran, located somewhere in South America. You play as Kyle Crane, an undercover agent sent to infiltrate the quarantine zone and retrieve a file which could shed some light on the origins of the virus. Crane often has to make difficult moral choices, as orders from his superiors will often contradict his will to help the survivors of the outbreak.

The gameplay of Dying Light is just plain fun, and it had me hooked from the get-go. It strikes a good balance between exploration of the city thanks to the incredibly fluid movement and parkour system, and engaging melee combat against hordes of zombies.

The game features a really fluid first-person parkour system. You’ll find yourself running across rooftops, leaping across large gaps between buildings, shimmying up lamp posts and climbing over rundown apartment buildings. Making full use of the movement system is encouraged, as the streets are literally crawling with zombies, making it very dangerous to traverse on the ground.

The city of Haran is a playground built for this kind of parkour. The buildings in the slums progressively get taller in an almost staircase like fashion, which minimizes the amount of climbing and maximizes the amount of running and jumping you have to do to get on the rooftops. The late-game also lets you explore the Old City, which is a completely different environment of densely packed apartment buildings and historic sights, all much taller than the buildings in the slums. Traversing the open world never got boring and the map size is large enough that it feels like a real city, and small enough that you start to learn the layout after some time with the game. It’s also an open world game, which means you’re free to explore as much as you want outside of story missions.

Dying Light also has you smashing a lot of skulls, and it’s seriously fun. It abandons the traditional focus on gunplay for a mostly melee-oriented experience. In the start, you only have access to low-grade blunt weapons: water pipes, wooden planks, wrenches, and anything else you can find in the zombie-infested slums, the starting area of the game. Not only are these weapons incredibly weak (it often takes 6-12 hits to the head to kill a regular infected), they also have a really low durability. Your weapons will break after four kills or so, and you can only repair them a limited number of times. This means that you can never become reliant on one weapon and you constantly need to be scavenging for crafting supplies and new weapons, really adding to the survival feeling of the game. You’ll start finding better and better weapons as you progress through the game: hammers, machetes, even swords and sledgehammers. Best of all, you can use your crafting supplies to upgrade your weapons and create some really wacky combinations- like a knife with a flamethrower attached to it or a wrench that electrocutes enemies when you hit them. By the time you find your first gun, you’ll be so accustomed to the melee combat that you won’t even need it for anything besides some of the more annoying story missions (more on that later). Besides, guns are loud (and thus attract more zombies), bulky, and they really slow down the flow of combat. I would say the gunplay system is lacking (because it is), but the focus isn’t there in the first place so it isn’t really something to worry about.

The combat is also heavily tied in with the movement system. Zombies are dangerous. Early game, even taking down a single zombie poses a serious challenge, let alone packs of two or three. It’s essential to keep on the rooftops to avoid the serious crowds. But in situations where you’re forced into combat, Dying Light will have you leaping over enemies and weaving through packs of zombies getting hits in where you can and dodging attacks. You can chain together attacks with parkour moves like running up a wall and doing a high damage slam attack. Add in the fact that you won’t ever be using one weapon for too long (though you can carry up to three) and you’ve got a seriously engaging combat experience where it never feels like you stop moving (unless you get swarmed by the infected). The controls on both keyboard and mouse (for PC players) and controllers are intuitive and easy to remember. You’ll be fighting lots of zombies but you won’t ever have to fight the controls.

The game has a day-night cycle that continually runs while you play the game. It isn’t just for looks though, as the game changes entirely once the sun goes down. That’s not to say the night time doesn’t look good... in fact, it’s one of the most beautiful parts of the game. There’s something serene about standing atop a rooftop and watching the falling raindrops be illuminated by the UV lights surrounding the safe zone. This beauty, however, comes at a price. In the darkness of the night, the hunter becomes the hunted, and the game turns into a stealth survival-horror game. Not only do the regular infected become much stronger and more aggressive, but the particularly dangerous Night Crawlers come out to play. These demon-like zombies roam the map in search of prey, and they are not to be trifled with. They’re faster than you, they can climb anything you can climb, and they can tank so much damage you’ll have trouble taking them down even with the best end-game weapons. If you ever find yourself outside of a safe zone after dark, do your best to sneak past them and get to one ASAP. If you get caught, run and pray. This occasional shift in gameplay adds an interesting dynamic to the game, because there’s a real pressure to unlock safe zones as soon as you come across them so you don’t find yourself trapped outside with no safe zone in sight (safe zones are initially infested by zombies and must be cleared out). The horror element may be a turn off for some, but luckily, it’s mostly optional. As long as you play it safe and skip through the night in safe zones, you can avoid interacting with the Night Crawlers entirely (outside of the couple or so mandatory night time story missions, of course).

There’s a great sense of progression to the game. In the start, your gear sucks and your parkour and combat skills suck. Even small numbers of the weakest zombies pose a serious threat to you... but as advance your parkour and combat skills improve, and more and more options will open up to you. Couple this with the fact that you’re learning more about the game as you play, and you’ll feel like an expert survivor once you reach the ending (which can take anywhere from 20 hours to 60 hours depending on how much exploration and side quests you feel like doing).

Oh, and if you want to share the experience with a friend, you can. You can play through the entire game (story mode, open world, side quests, all of it) with up to three other players in co-op mode. Best of all, your progress carries over to your single-player character, so if a particular mission is giving you trouble, you can ask some friends to come help you out. Free-running through the city of Haran together with friends is a completely different experience from going it alone.

The game looks and sounds amazing. The city of Haran is a beautifully rendered, destroyed city. Dust blows through the air and you can see the smoke from distant fires in the skyline. You can hear explosions and the pained screeches of zombies in the distance. There’s a seriously well-crafted sense of atmosphere. Not to mention the synth heavy soundtrack and excellent sound design. The combat is gory; you can bash zombie heads open in slow motion, hearing the wet crunch as brain matter flies everywhere. You can hear bones breaking and you can see blood splattering. The excellent graphics and sound design really enhance the grittiness of the combat experience.

I love this game. It’s not without its flaws, of course. You don’t play this game for the story. The main character is forgettable and a bit of a doormat. The tough moral choices he’s forced to make don’t really carry much impact for you as the player because you have no input in actually making the decisions. You’re just along for the ride. The plot twists are somewhat predictable, and the characters are uninteresting. There are also some serious design flaws in the progression of the main questline. Most of the missions are engaging and fun, but there are some that pose serious road blocks to your progression because they are really hard, and not that fun. Those missions were especially frustrating because it was such a stark contrast to how good the game is the rest of the time.

Dying Light is a game for both the hardcore survival-game fan and the casual gamer. Thanks to a variety of difficulty options, you can tailor the experience to how you want to play it. I have about 63 hours of gameplay clocked on Steam, but you don’t have to play nearly as much in order to have a good time.

Overall, Dying Light is an excellent open world action game, with really fun zombie-bashing combat, even more fun first-person parkour, and an amazing setting. It’s an experience you can’t pass up. It’s rated M for Mature and available in the library for Playstation 4, although if you choose to buy a copy you can pick it up for the Xbox One and on Steam for PC. I give it 4.0 stars out of five. Play this game.