YMMV / Dying Light

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Rais's actions in the finale. He could have easily escaped with the GRE had he not taunted Crane with his plans over the radio beforehand, resulting in Crane storming the tower and killing him. Was this typical villain stupidity, or was Rais so obsessed with living out his social darwinist philosophy that the GRE rescue was just an excuse to fight the one man in Harran capable of threatening him?
  • I'm not sure what's alternative about this. During the finale Rais explicity says that Crane is the only man who has ever defeated him in combat, and his ego demands a rematch.
• Audience-Alienating Ending: The endings in The Following result in either Crane being turned into a volatile and spreading the infection outside of quarantine, or willingly activating a nuclear warhead to contain the infection by destroying all of Harran and its inhabitants. Suffice to say, the endings hurt many potential players' desire to play the DLC, or even the original game, for that matter.
• Awesome Music: Dying Light has a pretty sweet techno theme track, very reminiscent of the 1980s thriller genre.
  • The trailer makers decided to take a page off of the Assassin's Creed series and utilized a track from Woodkid, the very high-paced and aptly used "Run Boy Run".
• Anticlimax Boss: Despite talking himself up as some kind of ultimate badass (and all the trouble you have to go through to reach him), as well as being the main subject of The Bozak Horde DLC, Bozak himself is no tougher than a regular Rais Thug and goes down in a couple hits from a mid-to-late game weapon. This in spite of the fact the game does have some human enemies with enhanced mini-boss level health (the Fan Zone killer and the Cannibal). Although The Bozak Horde may imply that "Bozak" is either a cult or a Legacy Character, and the Bozak you fight in the main game is just one of many (an interpretation supported by the fact that Bozak in the main game and Bozak in the DLC have entirely different voices).
• Cliché Storm: Most of the critics of this game agree that the game's plot plays most of the expected beats from a zombie game of this sort. If you're inclined to try, you're likely to see most if not all of the main twists coming. On the other hand, the side quests are often clever, and even if the main plot is "tropey," it's executed well.
• Complete Monster:
  • "Where's My Mother?" side quest: Salim is a sexually depraved kidnapper who stalks women and children throughout the city of Harran. Luring the young mother Aida and her daughter Yasmina to his house, Salim captures Aida and attempts the same on Yasmina, chaining up Aida in his basement. When Kyle Crane arrives searching for Aida, Salim sics an army of zombies onto Crane before trying to kill the man himself, noting his plans to track down Yasmina and her young brother and feed them to zombies. Crane defeats Salim and finds an abused Aida in a room that is horrifyingly stained with blood and filled with tally marks that a prisoner makes, revealing that Salim has had other women and children in his basement to use as his "puppets" for his own pleasure.
  • "Fan Zone" side quest: "The Fan Zone killer", broadcasting from the Old Town Radio Station, claims that there are women and children at the station who need food and water, but when Kyle Crane hears this and goes to investigate, he finds the broadcaster, ever since the zombie outbreak first started, used the station to lure people in and kill them himself. The killer brags to Crane he has killed so many people he lost count of how many, even saying he killed women and children, and bodies strewn about the station represent only a small amount of his victims. When Crane faces off with him, the killer plans to torture Crane and savor his screams. It is implied that this is how most of his victims died and that the only reasons for his monstrous crimes are for pure enjoyment.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Gazi (who refers to himself in third-person) in the Mother's Day sidequest. Pre-virus, he bought prescriptions every day from the local clinic for his mother, not realizing that his mother is dead and the 'person' he is giving the medicine to is a bunch of furniture arranged together to look like a person with the word 'MOTHER' written in the middle. When you go visit him to get some medicine, he asks you to find a box of chocolates and a VHS 'Charly' tape for his mother because it's 'Mother's Day'. Despite his condition however, he managed to survive relatively quite well in the apocalypse (which he probably isn't even aware of), seeing as his anti-social tendencies has prevented him from being swarmed by zombies or targeted by Rais' men. He's also a relatively friendly person and doesn't show any hostility whatsoever towards Crane and holds on to his promise to give the medicine to him.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Karim is very liked among the players due to being one of the only members of Rais' army who is not an irredeemable asshole and also for his Friendly Enemy dynamic with Crane. Him succumbing to his wounds in the final mission is also widely seen as Alas, Poor Villain moment, where he also advises Crane to take an alternate path in order to avoid the bomb trap which was laid out by Rais.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: The game took the formula of a Ubisoft open-world game, without actually being made by Ubisoft, and combined it with the developer's own Dead Island gameplay elements perfected with the addition of Le Parkour. The gameplay is considered extremely fun and the developer acknowledged it with continuous support and additional, mostly cosmetic, content for years. Still, the story not only has the main character railroaded into making some really dumb decisions in the beginning before Character Development kicks in, but the overall plot is really dark and depressing, even with attempts of comic relief (such as Those Two Guys asking the protagonist for help for their scheme of escaping Harran, and a sidequest about drinking from a fountain and taking selfie while doing so) didn't help the fact that eventually everyone in Harran is dead with no hope for permanent cure.
• Game-Breaker: The grappling hook makes every maneuver too easy, to the point that several people complained that it rendered the parkour aspect of the game pointless. Thankfully, it is entirely unnecessary to beat the game, and it can be safely dropped or stored with no consequence. In fact, several players have recommended to do this in order not "break" the experience.
  • The Power skill tree gives you a skill fairly early on that lets you curb-stomp any downed or climbing enemy for an insta-kill. Not only does this completely defang Virals as long as you get to an elevated platform once you hear their scream, you can even use it against Rais soldiers if you can knock them down with a kick or heavy attack. It's mitigated a bit by the heavy stamina cost, but it's still fairly easy to keep moving until you've recovered enough to use it again.
• Gameplay Derailment: The sidequest "Ultraviolet" can very much be That One Level if you play it the way that the developers intended for it to be played. Basically, you have to go to a massive bridge at night, dodging Volatiles and possibly other players along the way, make a very dangerous climb to the top of the bridge and grab a bunch of high-power UV lights, descend from the bridge, and get to safety. However, there is a Safehouse at the very top of the bridge, literally right next to where the UV lights are. So you can just go to the bridge during the day, climb up to the Safehouse, wait for it to be night, grab the bulbs (no enemies spawn up there, so you're completely safe), go back to the safehouse and sleep until morning, then go back to the tower during the day. This, as you might imagine, completely de-fangs what would otherwise be a very dangerous and challenging sidequest.
• Goddamn Bats: Virals. They're quicker and more mobile than normal zombies, can pull some limited parkour tricks of their own to make them obnoxiously hard-to-shake, and come running at any loud noise. They get even worse in "The Following," as they attack in larger numbers, and are fast enough to keep up with your car.
  • Gas Masks and Bombers are a double-edged sword. On one hand, the explosions they cause damage anything nearby, making them great for crowd control, but on the other hand the explosions also attract Virals. And of course there's always the risk of them blowing up in your face. That Bombers are guaranteed to explode from the moment they spawn into the game makes it worse, as it's all-but a scripted "and then Virals come at you" moment. Their novelty gets old fast.
  • Toads. Programmed to be omniscient (on easy difficulty, when you can see their node on the minimap, it will ALWAYS be facing directly towards you, even if you sneak around behind cover), check. Terribly designed body language resulting in it being unclear when to close the distance and when to focus on avoidance, check. Spammable ranged attacks that nearly blind you the moment you get hit, check. Annoying noises for everything they do, including idling, check. And they show up EVERYWHERE once they first appear in the story.
  • Human enemies, particularly Rais' endless supply of generic always-evil thugs. Apparently the majority of Harran's population was bloodthirsty raiders just hiding in plain sight waiting for the upheaval of society so they could collectively work for one guy in a dirty business suit. Human enemies with firearms have infinite ammo, natch, but even the guys with basic melee weapons have an infinite supply of throwables which they all have Olympian accuracy with. And when you get them in combat, they don't function even remotely like the player's melee system does; infinite stamina, the ability to automatically dodge attacks, the ability to automatically BLOCK attacks (if the player could do this, it would even the playing field considerably), and an infuriating habit of counter-attacking every time they are successfully struck, which is a flawed mechanic they share with several other enemies in the game. On higher difficulties, they also begin to become nearly bulletproof.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: when Dying Light came out, many reviewers compared Raïs shouting "CRAAAANNE" to Kirk shouting "KHAAAAAN!!!". In The Following, one of the first Non Player Characters you encounter is named Kaan. For bonus points: he turns out to be the Big Bad and you kill him.
• Magnificent Bastard: Karim is a survivor of Harran recruited into Rais' gang after being fired for amputating his boss' leg. Rising up the ranks to become Rais' quartermaster and Mission Control, Karim organizes the gang's runs, finding ways to make sure that they retrieve the airdrops before anyone else does while managing the supplies they obtain. Befriending Kyle Crane, Karim helps him complete missions for Rais while subtly telling him to escape Rais' grasp to avoid his cruelty, returning Crane his equipment after Crane does so, while also letting Crane take the supplies after working together. Getting mortally wounded by Rais, Karim spends his last moments warning Crane about the traps Rais set for him, allowing Crane to avoid Rais' traps and kill him.
• Moment of Awesome: Crane escaping from the Pit after being captured by Rais. He kills three goons and slices off one of Rais hands in the span of about as many seconds.
• Moral Event Horizon: The GRE does this as many as the Big Bad himself. First they order Crane to burn a crate full of Antizin, effectively dooming the people at the Tower, then they essentially order him to give into Rais' demand of surrendering Jade to him. While this seems to be merely an excuse for them to complete their mission of gaining the file Rais stole, it turns out they wanted the file not to create a cure for the virus but to weaponize it, even making a deal with Rais to save him in exchange for Zere's research, not caring about the chaos a man like him will cause, especially since he too has knowledge on how to use the virus.
• Narm: The French dub, where the dubbers clearly weren't given either context or characters for their lines. It leads to things such as the elderly Tobias has the voice of a teenager or almost everyone being surprisingly fine with a zombie apocalypse.
  • The default English merchant voice is this bizarre gravelly accent that sounds like a vague bastardization of cockney British. Merchants have a pretty short speaking loop when you're in proximity, so it often becomes annoying pretty quickly.
  • At one point, Rais screams "CRAAAANE!!!" It doesn't help that more than one reviewer compared this moment to when William Shatner screamed "KHAAAAAN!!!"
  • Kind of down to player preference whether Crane's actions at the end of the arena are this or Moment of Awesome. Crane's held at gunpoint by three bad guys who just need to pull the trigger and, in a case of Cutscene Power to the Max, he suddenly kicks one guy's gun away, picks up a machete and kills another, kills the first guy and then cuts off the hand of the Big Bad. Given that the scene uses 300-style slow-mo-fast-mo editing, Crane seems to pull off all of this in 1.2 seconds, faster than you could even dish out the first kick. And then we have the aforementioned "KHAAAAAN!" moment right after too!
• One-Scene Wonder: The Fan Zone sidequest, despite being fairly short and having only one enemy to kill, manages to be one of the most unsettling, memorable moments of the game.
• Polished Port: Once you turn down the LOD settings (which doesn't really add much when maxed), the PC version's pretty well optimized (in fact, that's the only graphics setting with a really massive impact in performance).
• Scrappy Mechanic: Any loud noise attracts the infected. On the surface, it looks reasonable; noisier methods of dealing with zombies (gunfire, grenades, car bombs, etc. etc.) punish the player by drawing the zombies towards them, in exchange for greater firepower. Except: 1. This applies to ANY noise, not just the ones the player consciously chooses to make. And 2. It instantly spawns in Virals, the most annoying enemy in the entire game, even if there are already Virals. Fire a gun? Virals. Throw grenades and other explosives? Virals. Someone else uses the other two? Virals. Set off a car alarm? Virals. A Bomber or Hazmat explodes? Virals. Any of the above happens while dealing with Virals? Virals. It makes any form of combat other than “hit something with a melee weapon” simply not worth it when it always causes more trouble than it’s worth.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: As part of rebalancing the game for the new "Legends" perk system, the patch that came with The Following has made zombies noticeably tougher, which applies to both the main game as well as The Following. Due to the massively different geography, there are even far smaller opportunity to parkour.
• Spiritual Licensee: To Dead Island of course. So the story goes, this is the game Techland wanted to make, where Deep Silver wanted more goofy elements.
  • It's like a first person Dead Rising in that it's a wide open, zombie survival that involves crafting, RPG elements, and the occasional wrestling move.
• Squick: Bombers, who have their bloated, pulsating organs hanging right out of them and explode into a fine red paste.
  • The camouflage ability has Crane hide himself from zombie detection by covering himself in zombie gore. It's pretty obvious from the sounds he makes that even he's pretty grossed out by it, too.
  • As a meta example, this game was notorious for inducing motion sickness in some players due to its heavy focus on first-person three dimensional movement. Its flawed implementation of chromatic aberration, its enthusiastic use of head bob and sway (especially on high platforms, where Kyle sways like a drunken sailor), and limited default FOV settings did not help. Even some professional reviewers reported nausea and vomiting. This is aggravated if, God help you, you play the game in VR.
• Tear Jerker: The "Refuse" ending of The Following:Kyle just fought the Mother and killed her after she made him drink the virus. Half delirious, he picks up the vials and starts going to the Tower to cure everyone. He starts trying to contact Lena by radio to tell her that everything is going to be okay since he has a cure. The music, the fact that he can barely stand up and is half delirious makes it truly heartbreaking. And when he finally exits the sewers, he ends up in the non-quarantined part of Harran near a mother and her two kids who, when they see him cower in fear. When he tries to wave them and asks them what's wrong, he sees his arm. The one of a Volatile. Fade to Black as the sun goes down.
  • Screamers, being children who were set-upon by zombies and infected, are this. Like Bolters they are one of the few special types that don't actually try to attack you. The only danger Screamers pose is their screaming and crying once they spot you will immediately attract Virals. To make matters worse Screamers like Virals seem to retain some level of awareness and intelligence considering you can find one in The Following laughing and enjoying a children's cartoon show. Notably, Crane's kill animation for Screamers is quite solemn rather than brutal. Kyle, once he gets to a Screamer, will shush and cradle them like a living child before quickly snapping their neck as a sad Mercy Kill.
• That One Attack: Any grab can be annoying to deal with due to the mechanics behind it. When any infected tries grabbing you, your **Character** reacts by slowing down/hesitating whatever action they're doing, even if they don't see the grabber or are in the middle of attacking it. This can lead to grabs more or less overriding your actions, in addition to the "flinch" being the key for a zombie to grab you rather than actual contact meaning the actual grapple starts before they make a visible grab at you.
• That One Level: Jeffry's Zombie Killing Challenges can be frustrating, but his "Leg-Breaker" Challenge is the worst. You have to use a weapon (that isn't long enough) to break 25 legs in a minute and a half. Problem is, whenever you're attacked by a zombies charge attack (which is often) you're forced to stand up and look straight at the zombies head. You'll end up breaking far more skulls than legs.
  • The searchlights mission involves an obnoxiously long and tedious climb up, which can only be done at night, followed by an extended stay on a vertigo-inducing platform.
  • The first part of "Siblings" will be either this or a Breather Level depending on how you've been playing the game. If you've been cautious, avoiding taking Rais's troops head-on in the overworld, and especially if you don't have a gun, you'll be in for a challenge: it's the first time you're forced to fight them up close, and they hit like a tank, have massive health pools, and can block your melee attacks and thrown weapons. Plus, you're inside a building full of narrow hallways and small rooms, so you can't use vertical space to your advantage like you can outside. On the other hand, if you have a gun (especially if you've lucked into an assault rifle), you can mow them down in the narrow hallways without breaking a sweat - and since you're in a separate indoor environment, it won't even spawn virals (though their screams will still play in the background).
  • In The Following, "We Don't Go There Anymore" tasks the player to take out a group of Screamers in a village near the coast. This will likely prove extremely frustrating as the Screamers are scattered throughout a collection of buildings in out-of-the-way locations, the Interface Screw their screaming causes, and the hordes of virals that the screaming will constantly summon until you've taken them all out. The most annoying part is that once you've accepted the mission, you're effectively unable to explore that section of the map (which contains a lot of loot) until you've dealt with them, as the effects of the screaming have a very wide radius.
• Vindicated by History: The game received mixed reviews at launch (with aggregate scores in the mid-70s). However, it sold reasonably well for a new IP, and the developers won over many fans with continued post-launch support. The sequel expansion was very well-received.