Recent reviews by Auspexis

gud gaem

Wanted to leave a good review and yet the developers at supermassive games can't release a working product.
Yes, the characters are morons and the story is coincidental and convenient. But overall it is fun if you don't think about the plot too logically.
What I cannot stomach is releasing a game in 2022 and half a year later it is still riddled with bugs.
(Spoiler) When fighting Du'Met on the boat, I initially attacked as Jamie. I can hear the quicktime event yet see nothing.
I tried again to see if it was a one off, but no. There is no visual display for what to do. Guess I'm forced to jump.
Then I have Mark take the axe. But when the quick time struggle for the axe happens, no input registers for me. Another decision made for me or I lose a character.
I have loaded the last chapter FIVE times to watch that moron police officer get butchered over and over again. At this stage, just make it one long cut-scene, because my decisions clearly mean nothing when there is no way to see them through.

Never usually review a purchase, but I feel like Dying Light has forced me to. After seeing that the existing reviews are overwhelming, it was a natural decision that this would be my next story driven game. However, this is the reason that I can't stand this game. The gameplay is... Alright. The zombie killing is the best of any survival game that I've played, and skill trees are always good. Parkour feels clunky, with no fluidity until you have spent skill points into the corresponding skill tree but improves after that. Combat is actually not too bad, being saved by innovative body-based combat, but it takes time to find or invest in any decent weapons. The looting system is unnecessary, I've accumulated a wealth of about $3000 by occasionally holding f in the direction of a pile of corpses. I have, however, never spent any of this money, and it just sits pretty in my inventory. However, the biggest tragedy in this game is the storyline. The character of Rias is an apparent main antagonist but is a generic chaos mongering villain. The character is uninspired, the interactions are boring, and he feels like the washed-out little brother of Vaas from Far Cry 3. Speaking of which, there is a dream sequence that seems to be the amalgamation of FC3 and Uncharted, and it is painfully boring. Narrated by one of the few characters that the player connects with, it is an uninspired speech about struggle in a futile attempt to inspire. The game is yet another that gives an illusion of choice, before forcing a choice upon the player, and then having the villain berate the player about their lack of free will. Spoiler, but almost every character dies, you will only care about 3 of those deaths, and then you will carry on trudging through a storyline based on your own failure to kill someone when you had the chance.

Tl;dr The mechanics are fairly good but require specing into before they become anything spectacular, the zombie killing is amazing however every single type of zombie encountered can be found in Left 4 Dead, and the storyline is a painful exercise in futility that you'll stop caring about 60% of the way in.
If you put 100 monkeys with typewriters in a room long enough, eventually you’ll get Hamlet, but give them 5 minutes and you'll get Dying Light.

Edit: I have at least an additional 30+ hours in this game. That means that something must be very right, and that I must have changed my mind, right? Wrong. The main storyline is still abysmal. There is absolutely no redemption on that front. The side missions actually come close to saving this game, with a huge variety of challenges that rejuvenate the tired execution of a good concept. Ironically, I think more effort went into the writing of side characters like Gazi than the main story line.
The combat gets significantly better, with a fully specced power tree making combat fun, varied, and manages to not fall into the repetitive rut that other fps games do. The agility is... Tragic. In a game that tries to add the unique aspect of levelling a skill by navigating the map, a fully specced agility tree is still clunky. The parkour challenges don't aid you in learning how to use these abilities better, but rather how to rely on luck and muscle memory to do a very specific route. You will find yourself not using half of the abilities you spent so long unlocking, and cursing some of the ones that you did (*ahem springing backwards off of walls*). You end up trying to avoid all parkour by using the grappling hook every five seconds, which is the only good thing to come out of this tree. Survivor is a boring, but admittedly necessary skill tree. Not much to say about it, other than it simply improves quality of life.
I completely change my view of looting. It is necessary, however it is a necessary evil. You need to accumulate wealth to invest in high level weapons crafting. It would be beneficial if all drops within a radius stacked, so that you only have to pick up once.
One of my biggest problems lies with the challenges. If a challenge is failed, first you have to look at the fail notification for 10 seconds with absolutely no way of dismissing it, then you have to listen to the NPC, then you have to reselect the challenge and listen to the same godawful dialog banter before you can reattempt it. I want to listen once. Only once. Then be able to immediately retry the challenge upon any failure.
The community events are amazing, and even better is the addition of the "Be the Zombie" gamemode which tests player skills in a PvP environment.

All in all, I think that the side quests and combat redeems this game, but not enough for me to endorse it. I would give a neutral recommendation if I could, with the main story and
cumbersome agility system being the strongest nails in the coffin. I may update after playing The Hoard DLC if I make it through without wanting to vault off of a building IRL.

I don't know what year it is, where I am, or my name. Time no longer exists. The fluorescent colours has given me the ability to see through the cosmos. I now bleed frequently from my eyes, and have a tendency to breakdown whenever I hear the words "game over" or "begin". I think people miss me, but they are of no concern. All that exists, and all that will ever exist, are me and super hexagon. I have taken to licking the condensation from my window to sustain me, but lifting the black out blinds to show the accursed sun causes great agony so i only feed every few days. I may die soon but at least I have 157 seconds on hexagon, which is nice.

10/10 Would sell soul and develop epilepsy again.

Sceptical at first, thinking it would be like an inferior 2D graphic minecraft, but was pleasantly surprised and now think this is one of the better games on steam.