Dying Light: The Following Review | A Must-Play Expansion
If you like Dying Light in any capacity, this expansion is ESSENTIAL. It added upwards of 20 hours of gaming after the base game, and the…
If you like Dying Light in any capacity, this expansion is ESSENTIAL. It added upwards of 20 hours of gaming after the base game, and the new driving mechanics and locations were enough that it made it feel like a sequel. Some of the beefiest DLC I’ve ever played to date, hands down. This is what all expansions should strive to be like.
It’s wild how much driving adds to the Dying Light formula without breaking what makes it so compelling. In Harran, you’re running around a concrete jungle, going from point to point on the rooftops, killing zombies, and completing little objectives in between. The Following and its countryside and buggy are that same traversal system… just wrapped under some really fun paint. You go from point to point in the buggy, kill zombies, and complete little objectives in between. And it works so well. At times, I had more fun here than I did in the base game. How they got driving to feel so good in a first-person game about killing zombies, I have no idea. It’s a mystery for sure.
Some gripes — the map can be confusing. It’s big and it’s not all traversable, with a big mountain in the middle of it all. Driving around that was kind of a pain. Coming from the base game I was hoping for more unique weapon crafting, and while it does add in a few things, they weren’t viable in my endgame, and I just ended up doing the boring, established thing of adding some status effects to an orange single-handed weapon and called it good. Some quests require you to “wait” for things to happen, so sometimes I would turn in a quest, leave, and then they’d call me and say “Hey can you come talk to me about [x],” and I’d have to run back to the same spot. Kind of annoying!
The only other thing I could see people get upset about is that you can tell the quests are designed to keep you in the buggy for a long time. “Fetch [x] on the opposite end of the map and then come back to me”. This is understandable to a degree the buggy is the best addition to the game, of course, they want you to use it. But I just know some people might not like that it feels very much like a compilation of fetch quests running from place to place. But the buggy is just fun to drive. I didn’t mind it.
The story was serviceable enough, more so than I could have imagined honestly. I was really captivated to uncover the mystery that is presented to the player in the beginning and it kept me hooked up to right before the end, and then the finale reeled me back in with a nuclear bomb of reveals and twists. Didn’t see that coming! Was satisfied with everything narrative-wise.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Dying Light 2… but honestly, The Following gave me enough of an extra dose of Dying Light that I’m not interested in its sequel anymore. This is such a good DLC, if you haven’t played it, and you’re looking into getting Dying Light 2, get this first, for SURE.
Originally published at https://backloggd.com.