#EGX2014 Preview: Dying Light
Ever since it was announced last year, Dying Light has been a game on my radar and it’s been a title that I’ve been covering religiously. Being a fan of the Dead Island games, I was intrigued to see what developers Techland could do with the financial backing of Warner Bros. So naturally when I heard that Dying Light was going to be at EGX, I made sure that I would not come away from the event without playing the game.
Sadly my experience with the game was not quite as I had hoped. I know it’s got a free running parkour gameplay element about it, so it was always going to take a little getting used to perhaps. I soon discovered that thankfully the gameplay was easier to pick up and play then the likes of the awesome Mirror’s Edge. But what I found was that the jumping (triggered by pressing RB) was very fiddly and would take a few presses before it would respond, despite me pressing what was instructed via the on screen prompt, after a while I soon got use to this.
However, despite me getting use to how it plays, the free camera seemed to be very fiddly also, especially when surround by zombie hordes, which made combat a little difficult. I’m not sure why this was the case in Dying Light, because I can’t remember this being an issue in either of the first two Dead Island games. For the sake of survival, it would also be wiser to stay among the rooftops to keep your distance away from the zombie masses, but be warned as many of them can climb too.
I’d like to think that this is an early build of the game and hopefully come its January release, the gameplay will become more fluid (as it looked in the gameplay trailers) and the camera will become a little less frustrating. And given that I only got around ten minutes to play this game, come the full release when I can dedicate better time to it, I will also get more use to how it plays. So with time in that respect, has an opportunity to improve.
But and this is quite a big but, I know visuals are not the be all and end all, but my time spent with Dying Light, it became apparent that visually it seemed to look a far stretch from what I had seen in the many gameplay videos released and looked very grainy. I’d be surprised if the visuals will be improved by the time it releases this coming January, as few months in games development terms is not a lot of time.
To give the game the benefit of the doubt, this visual gripe could have been down to the TV’s used for the demo, I’m not entirely sure if that’s likely, I guess we’ll find out when Dying Light releases January 27th for the PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.