REVIEW – Techland has had a rocky ride with the zombies for the past few years. The Dead Island series was an okay game that set expectations too high based on a cinematic trailer. Dying Light, however, was a sleeper hit and gathered a large following (HAH!). The developers supported the game for a whole year with patches and DLCs.

Finally, this February we get the ultimate Dying Light experience, The Enhanced Edition which includes the expansion called The Following, plus some fabulous stuff, and two new skill trees. Is it worth trying to keep the light alive? Or should we finally snuff it out? Find out here!

Out of the slums, and into the fields!

The Following takes place after the main game’s storyline, a strange survivor ends up in the Tower, yelling, and shaking that there are people outside Harran that are immune to the zombie virus. As the Tower is running low on Antizin, and not much help is sent to us, our only choice is to venture outside to the wilderness, beyond the city limits to open fields … and farmhouses? With regards to the story, The Following is much better compared to the original game. The mystery is a setup for the player, and the quest system here actively encourages us to complete all side activities. The story feels less clichéd, and the sidequests tenser at times.

A few fan favorite characters return (The loveable idiot twins), but mostly we get to meet new lovely people (also some new zombies, but we’ll get to them later). Still the story seemed more organic here, and the sidequests are a must in this game to unlock the bits from the countryside. The expansion provides a rather bleak outlook for the franchise regarding the story, and I can assure you that for those that were expecting lovely rose filled endings will be disappointed.

Par… I mean park it here

After the a brief introduction to the story, and to a few new characters at a safe zone on a farm. We head to the nearest encampment that is full of bandits. After we clear out their base, we get a hold of a buggy that will allow us to traverse the game world of The Following. In theory, this seems like an excellent idea to expand the ways to travel, but it is there to be a substitute for the parkour mechanic that was so used in the base game. It was fun jumping, running, and sliding all over the place in Harran city, but Harran countryside is not that interesting.

A couple of fields here, a few destroyed bridges there, and a lot of farms. The buggy itself is however rather excellent. It is an easily controllable vehicle, with neat upgrades that let you ram zombies, even some of the heavier enemies with the proper upgrades. Speaking of upgrades, the parts of the buggy break just like your weapons in Dying Light. Though not as much as they usually do, but we do need to repair them every once in a while, but that does not require too much effort. Not even gathering fuel is much of an issue (especially in Normal mode). The effort with the buggy is staying near the damn thing.

Unlike in Mad Max, we do not have a small helper to drive the buggy to us in case we wander away for miles and miles from it. Which is a bit of a problem at the beginning of the game? Sure you can race to the end of the map, and wander away looking for the best loot, but if you have no safe houses near well… good luck walking for ten or more minutes on the map.

Harran countryside does feel a lot more like 28 Days Later, especially when wandering the empty roads, and farm houses. It provides a very creepy atmosphere at times and does not let up from the tension. Still a fast travel mode would have been great, or some way to recall the buggy beside the safe house option.
The buggy feels a bit of waste in my opinion, as the volatiles at night has an enormous field of vision that can detect the buggy easily. So if you do not drive carefully, you’ll be swamped by volatiles, with not much chance of escaping them. Though this is only in the beginning and a fully upgraded buggy can avoid them with ease. In the end, I avoid going on night trips with the damned thing since you have fewer options to fall back on when being discovered by a pack of super zombies. Speaking of super zombies….

ZOMBIE… SMASH!

While Dying Light had one giant health bar zombie monster against us during the mission called The Pit. Here in The Following, we have boss type monsters called Freaks of Nature. These enemies will rip you and your co-op partners apart if you do not have the right gear and the level requirement for them. The first one that I met during my playthrough was the Behemoth, a towering zombie in police riot gear that was too heavily armored actually to be defeated when I faced him. Another one was a poison-spitting Freak of Nature that barely let up, and had to use Molotov and a few other fire based weapons. It was fun, but not worth going against them alone, but all of them have a particular weakness that is figured out they are doable in solo.

The idea is neat. However, it falls apart in the visuals of these bosses. None of them look that special and they’re just bigger versions of little zombies. I really would have liked if they looked different from the hordes of zombies that we slaughter but sadly that was a bit too much to ask from Techland.
We also get to invade the home of Volatiles, which are nests. These are usually located in caves. Heavily guarded by them at day, but left relatively unguarded at night. By destroying these caves we lower their ranks among them, and reduce their numbers when they go out at night. While this concept also sounds neat, it does suffer from the problem that once you enter a cave at night, you only have five or so minutes to clear out everything before the Volatiles show up. At times, I felt it was simpler just to go in at day, and use my shotgun to decimate everything on the site, and just ignore the sneaky way.

To Infinity and beyond

The enhanced edition also provides us with shall we say replayability? Once you max out a skill tree entirely, the Legend skill tree unlocks that allows us to upgrade further our character. It has a lot of skills and requires a tremendous amount of experience points to be gathered. Which is why we got a new difficulty mode that is called „Nightmare.” While I had, no experience as of yet to try out Nightmare mode, all things point towards a rather hellish experience for the experienced players of Dying Light.

Which might be an issue for the new players here? While Dying Light: The Following (The Enhanced Edition) provides a complete package, it may cause trouble for those wishing to start The Following expansion relatively soon after trying out the base game. If you are not leveled up enough or have a relatively good gear, the expansion will slaughter you.
The expansion is only for seasoned players mostly, and I do not recommend it for new players. Still this is a pretty substantial expansion, and the support Techland has provided to the Dying Light franchise is commendable.

-Dante-

Publisher: Warner Brothers

Developer: Techland

Genre: Action RPG

Release date: February 9, 2016