Dying Light: Bad Blood
Techland
It’s hard to believe that Techland’s zombie masterpiece has been out for over three years already. It’s highly intuitive parkouring and constant sense of tension are elements that helped to catapult Dying Light’s popularity to epic proportions. It doesn’t hurt that the game’s developers have unleashed free update after free update over that time span, and have had a very non-greedy business model when it comes to DLC (which is increasingly rare these days).
Techland, seeing that the battle royale genre has basically blown up virtually overnight, has seen fit to take their zombie-fest and give it their own spin on BR. They call it called “Brutal Royale” and it’s a much more intimate affair. Instead of the gigantic, chaotic, one-hundred player matches that you find in other BR games, Dying Light: Bad Blood uses a much more condensed formula.
You see, in Dying Light: Bad Blood, you play as one of only six players within each match. All six players are unceremoniously plopped down into a dumpster and have to scramble for weapons and survival gear in order to have a fighting chance against the one another. The only problem is: You’re dealing with AI zombies as well.
If you’re familiar with the main Dying Light game, where you’re constantly on the move, scrambling over ledges, vaulting across chasms, and over ultra-mobile shenanigans, then you’ll be right at home with Bad Blood. Your objective, however, is completely different.
In Bad Blood your main goal is to hunt down five to six boss zombies, kill them, and then extract their DNA using your handy syringe. But it won’t be that easy. That’s because guarding these big, bad, boss zombies are hordes of lesser zombies who just love to nosh and nibble on your face (and innards too).
For example, my first game involved me grabbing whatever I could get my hands on which happened to be a bow and arrows for ranged combat and a large pipe for melee. I also managed to grab a few medkits.
About five minutes in I encountered another player, who was battling it out with one of the boss zombies. So, I waited until he had dispatched the gargantuan flesh-eater and then dashed in to finish the player off since he was wounded from his little encounter. The same thing happened to me shortly thereafter.
In fact, waiting until someone has just finished battling one of the bosses and then diving in to kill the still-wounded rival, seems to be one of the more popular tactics in Bad Blood. Fortunately, because the game is so melee-centric, you can turn tail and run if things get a little too hot and that’s where Dying Light’s ingenious parkouring system comes into play—you dash and vault away.
If you are fortunate enough to extract a few samples of boss zombie DNA, you’ll find that you become faster, stronger, and have access to a truncated version of the main game’s skill tree. Not only that, but when you kill other players you get whatever DNA samples they’ve collected as well as any weapons and other items they had in their possession.
What I most enjoy about Bad Blood are both the sense of verticality that each map contains as well as its overall emphasis on melee combat. There’s simply no other game out there (besides perhaps the Assassin’s Creed series) that allows you to chase your foes down by leaping from building to building, climbing walls, and sliding through traps. Its focus on melee combat is likewise very well done, and reminds me of the early days of BR pioneer, The Culling.
Dying Light: Bad Blood is an excellent entry into the ever-growing battle royale genre. It has enough going for it that sets it apart from its contemporaries to keep things engaging and fun. It’ll soon be free to play (if you already own Dying Light) so try it for yourself.
SCORE: 88%
Dying Light: Bad Blood features great graphics that make its battle royale gameplay truly shine. However, you want to have a pretty beefy gaming PC or gaming laptop in order to play it at a decent framerate. So, you may just want to invest in a decent gaming rig:
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