Game Review · Purchased January 6, 2022 · $55.98 CAD via Amazon.ca
The Setup
With Dying Light 2 on the horizon for early 2022, picking up the Anniversary Edition of the original felt like mandatory homework. It bundles the base game with every expansion, most notably The Following, plus the 4-player co-op and the asymmetric “Be the Zombie” mode, all in one physical package.
The Review
The parkour is what sells this game. Free-running across Harran’s rooftops feels tight and purposeful in a way that makes traversal genuinely fun rather than a means to an end, and it’s woven directly into the melee combat — you’re just as likely to escape a fight by vaulting over a wall as you are to win it outright. The real hook, though, is the day/night cycle: daytime is a fairly standard open-world loot-and-clear game, but at night the fast, aggressive Volatiles turn the exact same map into a stealth-horror gauntlet where being spotted means running for your life back to a safe zone.
The story and cast are forgettable, and the game wears its Far Cry/Assassin’s Creed open-world DNA on its sleeve without doing much to disguise it. But the parkour-horror hybrid was a genuinely novel pitch back in 2015, and playing through the whole thing plus The Following right before the sequel made for a good refresher on why the format worked in the first place.
What I Liked
- Parkour traversal is tightly integrated with combat and still feels great
- Night sequences with the Volatiles create real, sustained tension
- The Following expansion and Be the Zombie mode add a lot of value to one package
- Skill-tree progression gives the moment-to-moment loop a satisfying sense of growth
What I Didn’t
- Generic, forgettable story and characters
- Mid-game pacing sags into grinding
- Open-world structure borrows heavily and obviously from other franchises
The Verdict
Rating: 4/5
A genuinely clever traversal-horror hybrid that still holds up, and good pre-sequel homework with all the expansion content included.
