Dying Light: The Following

Sometimes a game's strengths working together so neatly can overcome its failings, and sometimes it strengths can feel so disconnected that all you can see are its faults. The main campaign of Dying Light is a perfect example of the former: the compact city makes the ebb-and-flow of looting, traversing, fighting, escaping and stealth one of the most exciting and rewarding game loops in recent memory. The Following seems almost intentional in its efforts to disrupt the flow of things, only to introduce elements that feel like they fell out of a different game. When everything works together, The Following can be a fantastic addition to the base game, but it so often highlights the flaws I never had time to focus on before because I was always swept up in that aforementioned game loop (which is nowhere to be found here).

A car in Dying Light makes little sense considering how compact the city is and how easy it is to traverse across buildings on foot, so The Following starts from scratch by introducing a new area. Harran, located on the outskirts of the base game's city, is made of open-fields, coastal regions, hills, and dense forest. It's great fun to plow through tall grass, where zombies reside, and make sharp dangerous turns through the woods. It holds a lot of promise at the start and when it's good, it creates a unique feeling that resembles Half-Life 2's vehicle sections. But then again, Half-Life 2 didn't have zombies that attached to your car and kill you in a couple hits, dwindling fuel resources that must be repeatedly scavenged, or the risk of losing your vehicle and being completely lost without it.

The Following feels like the blueprint for a wildly different Dying Light sequel, but instead it's hamfisted into the current world and systems of the original. Making your way on foot -- which is all you did in the base game -- is a mind-numbingly tiresome and often impossible task. There is no higher ground in an open field, after all. Avoiding volatile at night in a vehicle is such a laughably horrible concept, considering they required the player to sneak past them in the base game. Now, the game tells you to outrun them, which is easier said then done when you can barely see where you are going and there is debris every which way. The night time which gave Dying Light it's unique stealth sections in the base game become a dreaded chore the player must slog through in The Following.

Dying Light is a confident game that let players decide when or if to go out at night, outside a couple missions. With the only reward being a minor gain in XP (which you risk losing) and fun stealth gameplay, it was up to the player to explore this part of the game. In The Following, the night is practically forced on you as you may spawn at outlooks with no time fastforward station. Even worse, you may be stranded away with your car, leaving you to stealth your way to a safe house which can be a difficult task since they are often located in narrow confined areas in The Following.

Despite its interesting concept and ambition, The Following is full of these baffling design decisions. To make matters worse, its missions focuses on the things that made the final hours of the main campaign such a drag. Missions focus on guns and big enemies -- the two things I didn't want more of. While I liked the gun sections in the base campaign, since they offered a new type of tension and variety, they are terrible in The Following. Gun enemies are thrown into nearly every human enemy encounter, which makes for awkward fights that require you to use guns, even if you prefer to play melee.

I could go on but you get the point: the driving is great -- lack of GPS and awful map aside -- and almost everything else isn't, even the things that the base game already figured-out. It's rare to play an expansion to a game you love that depresses you so much that you become unsure that you'd ever liked the original to begin with. At the time of this review, another year of dlc for Dying Light is planned. If it's on par with The Following, I'm not quite sure that this is a good thing, even for those of us who loved the original release.