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S1 Ep29: Dying Light
70 Plays7 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they talk about one of the better multiplayer, survival, crafting, parkour zombie games in this week's episode!
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Transcript
Hosts Reunite and Introduce Game
00:00:44
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? I say I'm into an empty room. I am also here. It is good. That is good. Good. Good. How does it feel to be reunited again with me? Well, in the U.S. I'd say it feels so good.
00:01:10
Speaker
Because that's the song. Actual emotions, I mean, it's good to have you back, you know, emotions, things like that. Alright, fuck you too. It's fine, it's fine. I mean, the people need us. That's the underlying thing, right? That's what binds us together, is the people need us. Yeah, yeah, definitely in need.
00:01:31
Speaker
Uh, hit that like button. Anyways, um, this week talking about a game. Which we've been playing for pretty much the past week or so. Yeah. It was actually longer than I thought it was going to be. It's longer than it should have been, in my opinion. Which is funny for reasons we'll continue to get into, but we didn't like even do all of the content in the game, right? It's just mostly main story. Now we're really lazy actually.
00:01:55
Speaker
Yeah. Well, anyways, you guys can all read the title. So, you know, we're talking about Dying Light, which is a zombie game. Yeah, it's the cash in by Warner Brothers and some other people to do some co-op zombie parkour shenanigans.
00:02:15
Speaker
What's funny is, this is just an aside, Warner Bros, I like a lot of the stuff that they've published. They, I think, helped publish the Shadow of War, which I enjoyed, other people didn't. I feel like they might've helped with some other games.
Gameplay Impressions and Mechanics
00:02:34
Speaker
anyways probably yeah probably statistically yes i i don't actually know i can't remember exactly what they were but i have this positive connotation whenever i see that pop up as a publisher i'm like oh you know this might be a decent game uh it's just probably this game it's it's it's probably decent so anyway zombie game but not just a game that happens to have zombies and that is the content it's a uh first person parkour action ish you know dead rising sort of
00:03:04
Speaker
That is literally the description on the Steam page, too. Open world. Yeah, with ellipsis, actually. As the description comes out.
00:03:13
Speaker
Um, but yeah, just a mishmash of all of those games. Got some, some crafting in there. Got other things. Yeah. Initially going into it, I was hoping, or I guess expecting it was going to be kind of similar to Left 4 Dead, where it's like a Rudy Tutti zombie shooty type game. Right. Which is the genre of Left 4 Dead. Yeah. And that's what I've come to like and know. But we kind of just started out in, uh, like two guys who had like,
00:03:42
Speaker
table legs or various wrenches or just single-handed metallic or bulky items. You just try and beat zombies to death. You got like a wrench or something and it doesn't work that well. It's very ineffective.
00:04:00
Speaker
No, it's like cutting down a redwood with a herring. Yeah. You kind of just slap them and they make noises like, why are you doing this? It's not effective. And just to rub some salt in the wound there, you're playing as a guy who is basically, he paradrops into this area,
Infection Management and Combat
00:04:18
Speaker
right? Parachutes down. Yeah, he's supposed to be some type of badass. Yeah, like some mercenary. Who knows what the fuck they're doing.
00:04:24
Speaker
and you immediately basically get incapacitated. I think as soon as you hit the ground, I'm pretty sure. You just get incapacitated and you wake up and you're like, ah, you're infected, but here's the, not the cure, but the antigen. That's what they call it. Keep you from turning into a zombie.
00:04:42
Speaker
Yeah, it's like not actually fixing the issue. It's just you're popping ibuprofen constantly, which by the way is not a bad strategy. Right. It's ibuprofen a monster is part of my diet. It's actually most of the diet. Shake that now. But I mean, if if you make some correlations to Dead Rising at this point and like zombrex, that's going to keep popping up. There's there's some borrowed influence there, I think. But it's hard to find something that's not played out in the zombie genre.
00:05:12
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of it is, oh, there's zombies. So you kind of have that split between how fast are the zombies and like, how is the virus spread? Because sometimes you have like the rage virus, everyone's like fucking booking it. Yeah. And then other times it's like, well, they're very slow zombies, but there's a lot of them. So be careful.
00:05:33
Speaker
Yeah, so they decided to do both. Yes, you have a lot of I guess what they're typically just called walkers Yes, we're kind of slow and if you get close enough, they're like
00:05:43
Speaker
I want a hug. And then you have runners who you can be on top of a car. The walkers will be like, that's an obstacle and just kind of just wait patiently. But the runners will be like, I'll use my arms to elevate myself and they'll actually chase after you. Yeah, the runners are definitely, definitely more dangerous. We're talking about how like kind of mediocre the starting weapons were and.
00:06:12
Speaker
that continues for the most part like we use weapons some uh melee weapons in particular throughout the game yeah it's like early on you feel like you have to because you have like four weapon slots and you're like these are all shitty wrenches or hamp hammers are actually kind of fun though yeah because if you can actually knock a zombie down because you have your melee weapon
00:06:33
Speaker
or like your left click, but then you have your E button, which is kind of like a kick, to kind of like push them off of you, similar to Left 4 Dead. So if they actually get on the ground, the hammer instead of being like kind of sideswipe-y becomes a very vertical thing, and I will just try and beat the skull in, and that is awkwardly cathartic for me to admit on broadcast, but...
00:06:57
Speaker
As far as melee weapons go, it's one of the better ones, but it's still, they have to be incapacitated for you to get damage in. Yeah. There's, um, like you said, you can knock into the ground. The issue I still have with it is it seems like it should only take a couple like swings with a machete to take a zombie down, but I'm like here whacking on its head seven, eight times trying to kill the thing and failing absolutely miserably.
00:07:21
Speaker
Yeah. And it just doesn't feel great as far as the damage you're dealing, but the impacts feel good. That's true. Like, if you actually get a, if you clip into like the head or like a meteor part of the body, there's a nice tactile feel and sound to it. Like, yeah, I'm hitting a zombie. Yeah.
00:07:39
Speaker
But they're just getting tickled. Yeah. Everything feels like it has the proper amount of weight to it. It's just not the outcome you would expect for that weight. Yeah. And there's like there's some other effects like you can you can do some scavenging either on like zombie corpses, which you can check every single one of basically to get like some minor common loot or houses. Right.
00:08:03
Speaker
Real quick about looting zombies, the animation for that does look like you're kind of tickling them. It's like a little bit of awkward pats or like I'm trying to grope someone who's sleeping type thing. Right. But it's the same animation for everything. It's like you have to check somebody's body in the shortest amount of time possible and you want to just see if they have any cash around their chest for some reason. You're like a really shitty bouncer. It's like, no, they're good. No, they're good. You're not good.
00:08:32
Speaker
I checked his chest for guns. Didn't have any guns. No guns. We're good. She didn't have any guns either. And you don't for most of the game. There's very few firearm opportunities in the early game. I didn't even know it was a thing. I just kind of accepted the melee weapon lifestyle. I'm like, this is me. This is just who I am. Yeah.
00:08:56
Speaker
which is unfortunate to be me and that's our scenario and You say like you said you get used to just using the melee weapons But you're like alright at some point these are gonna do more damage You can put those mods on them things that do like extra bleeding damage or electric which like stun them or impact things like that But it's not a whole lot. Yeah, I don't think we really are
00:09:20
Speaker
We might have crafted one or two, but there's no incentive to.
Skill Trees and Player Strategy
00:09:25
Speaker
It's like putting a tiny extra amount of damage on a weapon that does no damage. That would be my analogy. It's like turning a spoon into a spork and saying, bring it, bitch. It just doesn't do anything. And we know that's not even the path to success, because we don't have sporks at Taco Bell anymore. They went back to actual forks.
00:09:51
Speaker
That's a fun fact I just learned. I've not been to Taco Bell in probably a year. I got a taco salad and got an actual fork and I was like, what is this? Are you guys pretending to be civilized? Get out of here!
00:10:03
Speaker
Thanks for joining us for the Taco Bell podcast. Dude. Or review their products. That'd be a fun analysis. Anyway. Yeah. But yeah, the weapons, mainly weapons are like mediocre kind of and the hope that they get better is possibly unfounded. It's really misguided. So one of the things that was kind of cool about the game is you have these different skill trees. Yes.
00:10:28
Speaker
You have your survivor points, which kind of helps you with crafting and other random shit. It's kind of a nebulous category. Yeah. Miscellaneous unlocks and things. Yeah. I'm like, I guess this is kind of helpful for the world.
00:10:43
Speaker
Then you have your agility tree. Which is the best tree, I think. Totally agreed. And a lot of that is more towards how you interact with free running and moving around the city or through zombies and such. And you have one for combat as well. Right. Which is the best tree.
00:11:03
Speaker
so combat did have some cool ones as far as some of the weapons yeah like if you have a two hand you can kind of like jump from a height and do like this bitchin ground pound yes which looks so cool looks so awesome it has like this thunderous resound as you slam into the earth impact wave
00:11:26
Speaker
Yeah, kind of like stun zombies nearby. But it does fuck all as far as damage. Yes, because you used a melee weapon. And also because you've fallen, like you've now taken fallen damage. Yeah. It's not like you're immune when this happens. It's it's just it's shit. It's pretty bad. But it's really fun to deal. Yes.
00:11:45
Speaker
I felt bad and I never pointed out like while you were using it how much more effective it would be to just like kick the guy down and then use one of the other abilities you can get to just like stomp their head to instantly kill them at the underground.
00:12:00
Speaker
One of the points we have on the talking points list, which you guys can't see, is how fucking overpowered feet are compared to melee weapons. Because if you put points into the agility tree, you can do cool things like if you're running, you can jump over a zombie and use them as a springboard. Later on, you can put a point so jumping over them stuns them.
00:12:22
Speaker
you can do like a slide kick and kind of slide through them and that will knock them down. Or what Jake was saying with their on the ground, you can just trigger like an instant kill animation by their head. And you just crush their head in. Just a dead space stomp, just gone. And there's kind of, so this is a multiplayer kind of co-op game. You could play it single player, but you'd be sad, I guess.
00:12:46
Speaker
I don't think it's interesting enough to just be on its own. Like I like playing it with you in the co-op sense because
00:12:55
Speaker
You have a buddy, you can just go around and kill zombies and it's fun. Yeah. And you have some other objectives, but they'll also scatter out kind of competitions. So maybe like, Hey, who can follow these parkour checkpoints fastest, or who can kill the most zombies in this amount of time or collect the most loot? Yeah. Which would reward you in certain points, whether they be survive or agility or combat.
00:13:18
Speaker
Yeah. Makes it a little bit more arcadey, and they integrate it with the missions and story and stuff. You can have random events that happen that also you can choose to start competitions for. And yeah, it's clearly meant to be played like that. I would say playing this game single player is maybe just slightly better than trying to play left for dead single player and disabling the bots. Yeah. It's like, what are you doing? You can do it, but it's not the point.
00:13:48
Speaker
So you can have up to four players. We obviously played two. But that does change kind of the flow of the game dramatically.
00:14:02
Speaker
Well, I was going to say, this builds off of the head kick thing. There was a bug. I'm pretty sure it was a bug or it was just the way they intended it. If two people go to head smash a guy at the same time, it doesn't kill the zombie. You will just do like normal kicks or something dumb. Yeah. Like Jake would start at the head smash animation and I would just try and do at the same time, but I would just kick the zombie. Yeah. So it'd be a lot of times it'd be like one zombie and we would just kick the shit out of him until he died.
Multiplayer and Environmental Strategy
00:14:42
Speaker
And kicks don't really do much damage on their own. They're kind of meant to be like a crowd control interrupt. Yeah. But there are points where like we would just laugh because we would just keep kicking and not stop. It's it's it is kind of funny. Like we were talking about how like visceral it kind of is.
00:15:00
Speaker
and how you get that impact. And that goes all the way down to kicks. That's fun. There's another ability to do the drop kick, which is the one I picked. So Dave picked the ability to jump over zombies, vault over them. And I picked one where if I'm running, I can like jump in the air and hit the kick button. I'll just two-leg, like, street fighter kick somebody. Knock the air out of their lungs. And just send them flying, which
00:15:27
Speaker
I don't know if I've said it before, but I think the most fun I have in a video game is knocking things off of roofs and buildings and things like that. It's still true. Yeah. You're like a video game cat in a sense. Yeah. It's just like, get them off. I played a Spider-Man, like an old Spider-Man back in the day. Just throw everyone off the roof.
00:15:51
Speaker
Feel like there has to be a name for that. It's like you stand near the edge and you murder the edge and you have like the call of the void Mmm, you have just like hey look over the edge real quick. Yeah but I Really do like the dropkick like I didn't invest it until much later because you were raving about it It's more of like I would be doing a thing trying to like fight a zombie to death with like kicking in the shins and poking him with a toothpick and then
00:16:20
Speaker
Jake wouldn't even load into the screen for me yet. I would see the zombie just fly like 50 feet to the side and then Jake would like teleport in front of me and be horizontal. Yeah, lay him on the ground. How you doing?
00:16:34
Speaker
Yeah, and it does put you in a... It takes a moment to recover after the kick, so you can't just do into a crowd of zombies and expect everything to be fine, but it's fun to send them flying and they ragged all like crazy. Yeah. But I think one of the other benefits of the drop kick is pushing zombies back. Obviously it's good to get them off of you to get some distance.
00:16:58
Speaker
But also there are a lot of traps strewn about the environment. Oh, yeah, I believe it's in the city of Haran. Yeah, which is whatever someplace But like it's not even that it's not even someplace doesn't even exist some made-up place. It seems vaguely Middle Eastern. Yeah
00:17:16
Speaker
I like how we did that. Yeah, that should be your catchphrase ready? Yeah middle Eastern. Yeah No practice on that one. Yeah, but if zombies touch spikes whether they be on the ground or kind of just
00:17:32
Speaker
duct taped to a board on the wall. They die instantly. They cease the will to live. So we would, uh, there was probably like a good two hours that we spent, not consecutively, but in front of this one guy's base and we would just wait there day and night and zombies would just come over to us and we'd like either throw them into the spikes or kick him into the spikes or Jake would drop kick him into the spikes.
00:18:00
Speaker
Or you just wait behind the spikes and they would walk into it and die. The game pathing usually did pretty well in anything that it wasn't super great on. They're zombies, so you can justify it. But sometimes zombies would just brush up against spikes. Crap. Collapse.
00:18:20
Speaker
It's fun if you like if they were on the ground and you kicked them and they slide just a little bit You know from the impact and just like oh, yep, like left pinky made contact with that spike wall So you're completely dead immediately
00:18:34
Speaker
It's like the AI director's like, nope, nope, I saw it touch, you're out. And it's like, ehh. You get like a fine mist on you in paintball or something like that. And you're like, ah, crap. I don't know if I can make paintball references. I don't know if that works for our audience or not. I play paintball ones. Yeah. I've always been too scared because I don't want to get a welts on random parts of my body unless it's from like a badass. I guess being shot's not the
00:19:04
Speaker
worst excuse for welts it could be like i got bullied at school or what else yeah well look forward to the paintball episode um but yeah these these trap areas were amazing to us because we still had these garbage weapons uh we didn't have the ability to really combo to get kills with like
00:19:24
Speaker
Marshall abilities. Yeah, but there were some utility items like firecrackers to draw zombies attentions, right? Molotovs to Draw zombies attention and set them on fire, right? Yeah, like they had that crafting component So if you go out and you gather some like resources from zombies and then check some houses you can just basically raid everyone's possessions and Everyone's possessions are string alcohol cigarettes
00:19:54
Speaker
And blades, inexplicably, just blades. Some little saw blades, by the way, not knives, saw blades. Yeah, not like a razor blade or anything. And yeah, throw that stuff together to make mods and gear. Like you said, Molotovs, and you can make ninja stars. Yeah. Which are pretty legit. I think you actually invested in elemental ninja stars at some point, or did you skip that over?
00:20:23
Speaker
I think it might have given it to me for something. I would occasionally make the exploding throwing stars. Because you throw it in, it would deal damage, but then if it actually hit a target, it would explode. As exploding throwing stars, you'd expect to do. But the downside of having something explode is it would cause a loud noise, which would draw the attention of your by zombies, which if you're trying to farm zombies and be a murder hobo like we were, it was kind of useful in a way.
00:20:54
Speaker
Yeah, we we tended to deplete entire stores of zombies around from like wherever we were farming. Just be like, all right, we've drawn literally everything here within shouting distance. So I guess zombies can be. But it was it was fun. And we got the impression like you get some money off zombies. For some reason, all zombies carry loose cash on their person.
00:21:18
Speaker
or most of them do you never know maybe you're gonna go through a toll jake significant amounts um but uh eventually we had to move on we like started moving the story forward and the the maps so there's probably like three or four maps i'd say in total but most of your time's probably spent in the first one yeah there's a couple
Storyline Critique
00:21:43
Speaker
areas but i'd say like two big open worldy areas yeah and then more smaller ones favela i think is the name of the first map but yeah i didn't
00:21:58
Speaker
You said progressing the story, and I want to nitpick that because... It's full of nits. And picks. It's really kind of strung together. Yes. With scavenged string. Yeah! Good timing! I hate myself so much. So like your character is very...
00:22:25
Speaker
We're gonna do the impression, so. Okay. What am I doing? I need you to say, I don't have answers.
00:22:33
Speaker
I don't have answers. Damn it, Jim. I need answers. And that's your guy throughout like the whole fucking game. Yeah. He's very like, he can't believe anything that's going on. He's very driven by some very, I guess, moral code. He's just driven, I think is the thing. It doesn't seem like he has tremendous morals. And he's also heavily invested in every single character in the game. Yes.
00:22:58
Speaker
who like, everybody dies. I mean, if you were coming into this and you're expecting a great plot prepared to not get a great plot. Prepared to not. You're basically working for this corporation who turns out to be evil, or at least has really poor empathy skills. And so you drop in, you're like, all right, I'll help the people in this tower that some of them need zombie suppressant medicine. The antigen, yeah.
00:23:28
Speaker
Like, all right, get that first crate. Awesome. Chased it down. There's like airdrops periodically over the city, which is cool. I like that. I like the whole recover airdrop thing from like, from rust, right? Yeah. Yeah. Everybody kind of sprints towards like that dot in the sky. You're like, how far away is it? I don't know. Keep sprinting. Yeah.
00:23:47
Speaker
And you get there and you're like, all right, got this antigen. You make a call and be like, all right, I've retrieved the medical thing that will keep these people alive. And your corporation's like, burn it. Please, please hold what? No, yeah, just burn it. Like, destroy it. Throw it all away. And the guy does it because, you know, he's a pawn to the story.
00:24:11
Speaker
yeah and it doesn't really get better from there he eventually does you know turn away from his corporation and kind of help people but it's not really clear why he cares all the
00:24:25
Speaker
motivations of the characters seem kind of either very generic or very contrived and the plot seems very predictable. Like one of the missions I remember, there's this guy we're supposed to meet up with to like set some explosives in a building.
00:24:42
Speaker
And then when we find him, he's bleeding from his leg and he's like, oh my God, are you okay? He's like, no, it's fine. Here, take the explosives and go. And so as soon as we left him there, Jake and I were like, that guy's fucking dead, right? He's like, no, he probably turned into a zombie. He's like, yeah, that would make more sense. And then we go blow up the building and we come back and, oh my God, Rahim has turned. And your main character just... He loses it.
00:25:09
Speaker
didn't you know get that that was gonna happen and like do you know how generic the plot is yeah it's like he basically reacts like rahim is his brother and like all of his childhood dogs rolled up into one person used together but in a non creepy way and then turned into a zombie and it just
00:25:29
Speaker
There's a very slim possibility that some of the side quests we skipped over fill out some of these characters. I doubt it. I doubt it so much. No. You don't even get them from these characters. That wouldn't be possible.
00:25:41
Speaker
No, they're usually kind of like go and collect missions or like go from point A to point B. And there are other people in the tower, so it's not gonna fill out these characters to explain why they like each other. Yeah, it would be like some other generic NPC. Yeah. I never encountered like Christmas caroling side quests where everybody like bonds over some eggnog, right? It's...
00:26:07
Speaker
It's really like absurd how quickly your character just does a 180 on everything. I think basically what happened, because his voice actor is actually not bad. Oh no, I think he's actually one of the...
00:26:19
Speaker
I feel like I should have looked it up beforehand, but he's one of like the few good Vatican voice actors. Like if you hear his voice, you will recognize it. Like, Oh, he's been in some other things and he does a good job. Right. It's just the character was written poorly. Exactly. And I feel like their instruction for him is like, when you record all your lines, make sure that it's always on 10, like never go below 10. If you go below 10, we are going to be fired.
00:26:45
Speaker
Maria. Yeah. Constantly. So that's that's the main character. If you're playing in multiplayer, then you're all the main character, but you can look different. Yeah. Like I went with a stuntman costume because I think we were playing like the fallen expansion or something like that, which added some content to the game. But I don't know. It was still mostly just cosmetics and stuff like that.
00:27:13
Speaker
Maybe some content we didn't even play, but... I mean, I was a ninja. Yeah, there was that. It was pretty cool seeing David as a ninja. Like, just jump out. Legimize my throwing stars. Exactly. You're going for the theming, right? Jumping over them, throwing throwing stars. Definitely wasn't using stealth though. Yeah.
00:27:33
Speaker
But it's kind of like we were talking about how the stories kind of mediocre and predictable and nothing about it's very inspired and that's how a lot of mechanics in this game work.
Crafting and Weapon Progression
00:27:46
Speaker
It's like it's got crafting but not to the degree that it matters really. It's more of like oh crafting's in now. Let's have crafting.
00:27:56
Speaker
And it's like, it's got melee combat, but not to the degree of a game that's good with melee combat like Dark Souls or something. Yeah, it still feels good. Yes. But like we have said multiple times, it just kind of does nothing. Yeah. So there's not really a point to do it.
00:28:15
Speaker
I mean, every time you hit a zombie or attack a zombie or kill a zombie, you will get combat points to help level up that tree. But a lot of times it's just kind of wasted effort. Yeah. When you can like, oh, set them up in a trap or kick them into the spikes down the lane. Yeah. Like we tried to fight some zombies when we started.
00:28:39
Speaker
We'd just head out and find one zombie and the streets at night. We'd be like, this guy. We'd jump out from the alley, pull the zombie in. Kick him to take his lunch money. It's been 20 minutes hitting him with wrenches and pipes and things until he died. But we stopped doing that, past the point. We didn't focus on individual zombies because it's such a waste of time. Also, with nighttime?
00:29:02
Speaker
You do get double points. Yes. So if you're running and doing cool agility things, double points, if you're hitting zombies, double points. Also, when it's nighttime, it is so fucking hard to see. Yes. And these special hunter zombies come out, which will chase you. Yeah.
00:29:21
Speaker
And they can climb buildings very quickly. It's kind of like, I don't know exactly why, but it seems like most zombie games aren't actually that dangerous. Like I think it's part of the intrinsic, just people know what zombies are. And then usually not the 28 days. Yeah. Rage zombies. Usually they're fairly slow and clumped up and you usually have the advantage of a gun to mow them down or something like a chainsaw. It's being like dead rising where you just, you're plowing through zombies. Yeah. And that's the motivation for the player.
00:29:51
Speaker
And there's there's kind of a sensation that this game has because so we play it on hard difficulty to qualify all of our statements and there is It's kind of rare that a game kind of gets me excited at night and afraid of zombies and things like that Yeah, and you could be running like jumping rooftop to rooftop doing your parkour thing and you miss a jump and you fall and it's pitch black and you know, you're being chased a second ago and You're doomed
00:30:18
Speaker
Like, um, and that's, that's pretty cool. Like you up the stakes a bit.
00:30:26
Speaker
I did like that. Also, one of the benefits of multiplayer was because I would fuck up a lot. So I'd be like, hey Jake, because you're down, once you're down, you're there for like 30 seconds. And if you have a teammate there, they can come pick you up. They kind of have to channel like picking you up for like three seconds. But usually you can do that and then just like sprint away again. So like we take turns leapfrogging each other, dying, getting to the objective a lot.
00:30:52
Speaker
and the games it's like some of these night creatures are significantly more dangerous I don't know if we ever like actually beat nightmares or monsters or whatever they were called legitimately at night just using weaponry maybe once
00:31:10
Speaker
We've definitely killed some with like traps and stuff mostly though, right? Yeah Yeah, or sometimes like we'd be in front of like that wall of spikes, which is our farming spot We kind of go out and like slap it and try and entice it into the spikes as best we could
00:31:24
Speaker
They go for the so those zombies are actually pretty responsive. They'll avoid like fluorescent light or What there's probably a better word for that. No, it's not fluorescent UV UV light. There you go. And You know a better word for it in a completely different way, but also a better word. Yes More accurate than it's correct and mine wasn't
00:31:46
Speaker
But they'll run up until they get kind of in the light and then they'll just like panic around and like run back. Kind of like, I think about like wolves almost circling and then like ducking in to see like how you react and jumping back out at night. They act like that, which is cool. But sometimes they'd like mess up and like misjudge their momentum or something and just fall against the spikes and die. Those were always small victories for me. It's like, thank God.
00:32:15
Speaker
It's like if there was that wolf analogy and you had a campfire in the center and the wolves would like be ducking in and out and there's just one wolf that just never really learned how momentum works that just slides into the fire. And then runs away on fire. Damn it Tim. So the game does put you in some situations where you're actually in danger.
00:32:41
Speaker
And at least on hard difficulty It's not difficult to die at all if you get grappled until you have like some upgrades it takes a moment to break free Yeah, and once you're grappled like you've already been bit once which is easily a third of your health Yeah, and then like I feel like everything is like a third Yeah, if you just get like tapped three times by a zombie you're on the ground. Yeah, I
00:33:02
Speaker
Or if you fall and then get tapped by a zombie, you're on the ground. Right. Or if you jump off the top of the tower and land. Like a badass. There is a way to pick you up. So the parkour is actually pretty good. There's not really wall running, but that's the only thing it feels like it's missing. But you can almost jump from ledge to ledge. If there's a brick that's slightly out of place, you can kind of climb that. It's usually very forgiving.
00:33:30
Speaker
Like there are many times I was running and jumping out of windows and then, you know, grabbing the ledge above the window, even though it's not a physically possible momentum. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's pretty great. What's the. Just running through the city, it feels really good and you get agility experience for that at nighttime. Obviously, the risks are up, but double experience. So you're going to go do it. But there was
00:33:57
Speaker
Basically, Assassin's Creed. So another game that they've taken inspiration from is a good, polite way to put it in the form of trash bags, which is less hygienic than, you know, a Hey Bell. But if you're just falling, you can just land in a pile of trash bags and it completely negates your fall damage. And there's a couple places in the game where they'll, like, put these next to a really high location, and you can just jump off and land in these trash bags.
00:34:26
Speaker
Which is really nice because you, I feel like one of the strengths is the momentum of the game. Like the way they've designed these cities and going through where they play zombies, there always seems like an option for routes of, Oh, well, I can always use my momentum, jump up here, grapple up here. Yeah. Kind of do like a hop skip and a jump to like get from point A to point B where you can almost never touch the ground. Yeah.
00:34:50
Speaker
And if you need to get down from a high space, you kind of can pretty quickly. And just wherever you need to go, you can get there pretty quickly. And there's a real incentive to stay up in the air, to stay on those buildings, to be free running essentially everywhere you go. Because in a similar game, if they didn't have the parkour mechanics, and it was just you on the ground like many zombie games are, they would have to tone back the number of zombies they put in the game. It would have been so tedious to just run through all those guys on the ground.
00:35:19
Speaker
But if you're like on top of buildings, you barely have to deal with zombies at all. There's like a couple people who just happen to be like sunbathing when the epidemic broke out or something. They're just waiting up there like going out for a smoke.
00:35:35
Speaker
But for the most part, it's way safer to just traverse everything up on top of buildings and things. Typically the only things that would go after you up there are runners, which are the ones which are willing to climb up buildings and are very out of breath all the time. But if they climb, you can still trigger that head-stop animation. So we were kind of just...
00:35:59
Speaker
playing king of the castle on top of certain apartment buildings and crushing heads or kicking them off. Yeah, it's like a full punt. It's basically a full punt animation if they're climbing up because they'll like climb up, put their arms up, and then raise their head up and push themselves up. And you're just like, and kick. This is vaporize.
00:36:20
Speaker
It's absolutely absurd the amount of force that goes into the... I can only call it a small explosion whenever you actually kill one of these things with a heavy stomp. I don't think you're wrong there. But the game kind of just continues like that. And here's one of my big gripes with it, as far as difficulty is concerned, is how they balanced weapons and melee kill abilities like the stomps, throws into traps.
00:36:46
Speaker
And then later the the big kahuna that is actual firearms It's like all right before we're talking about gunpowder as I'm loosening my shoulders
00:36:58
Speaker
The guns. We got to talk about something else in between. That's fair. Feet, which are pretty amazing. In a game sense. Not weird stuff. And guns, which are obviously effective against zombies. And feet. Is the bow. Yes. So your starter gun. Yeah. It's the first range weapon you get. And I was like, oh, sweet. Because bows in like every game are very cathartic and fun. And you have that response of like the flock and then it lands into somebody. Oh, so good. Yeah.
00:37:28
Speaker
But when you first get it, and you land a headshot and you kill a zombie, you're like, oh, that's awesome. How much does it take to craft arrows? Okay, like nothing. Oh, I can just take the arrow out of the zombie while they're alive. We had opportunities like that. There's these big guys called demolishers, I think.
00:37:47
Speaker
Demolishers were the really big ones really big ones But they're also kind of like mid-range ones who have like these big ass sledgehammers of like concrete Yeah, like rebar and concrete on it. Yeah, and I remember at one point we so we fought the the guys the rebar too We took them down
00:38:03
Speaker
but there was a demolisher where we were fighting in an open area and we just like loaded the guy with 40 plus arrows and I just I ran down and was like taking some like swings at him and stuff I was just pulling arrows out of his body I'm sorry are you using these I need these backpacks I need these so I could shoot this guy with arrows and oh but yeah the bow was like so up until that point I know another thing about the melee weapons they were down over time
00:38:29
Speaker
They have a limited number of repairs. And so if you invest all of your like, you've got this cool mod and you're like, all right, this one is like this leeching poison impact, like toxic, whatever, and you put that on a machete, you can only pair that like three times before it's completely gone. Yeah. And it's not like between repairs you have, oh, this is good for like 100 swings. It might be like 15 to 20. Yeah. It's something embarrassingly low.
00:38:58
Speaker
Yeah, and it kind of killed some of my enthusiasm for melee weapons. Before I even realized there was other options for how to go about combat. It just seemed like they really wanted to emphasize the, hey, you're handicapped. This is a zombie apocalypse. You're just a guy, and that's it. And you don't have the overpowered guns, which they then give you later anyway.
00:39:27
Speaker
Yeah, and that was like one of my big kind of gripes was how they kind of balance that difficulty because it's not a constant or the effectiveness of your character. For your character to feel good in one of these games, you should constantly be getting some progression and feeling more powerful, more capable. So from melee weapons up to bows to guns makes perfect sense in that case. The problem is melee weapons feel like garbage
00:39:51
Speaker
So bows feel amazing and then guns are just guns were just like slightly above bows. Yeah, but I would still use bows a lot of times because Another thing you can do with your character is you can do like a quick side step to the left or right your back So the zombie is chasing me I would just kind of dodge back and then shoot an arrow right in its face Yeah, which is usually a one-hit kill and you would just grab the arrow and repeat
00:40:17
Speaker
Yeah, moving in this game feels really good. We already talked about it some, but it's basically just invert. If you ever played Resident Evil, just go the opposite of that. And that's how this game feels. Resident Evil is kind of like slow walking. This is full speed all the time. It's just like you don't have your trench coat, but you're basically Neo for some of these encounters.
00:40:39
Speaker
But yeah, the bow felt amazing. It's super cheap to make. You get bundles of eight arrows every time you complete one craft that takes one metal and one nail. Which you can just loot trash and just find that. Yeah. It's really easy to find some blizzard point where we kind of stopped looting zombies because you're like, eh. Or worst case, you could buy arrows for like no money. Yeah. And money barely mattered because why would you use
00:41:05
Speaker
I literally stopped carrying melee weapons for like the tail 25% of the game because there was no reason to spend time hitting a zombie at that point maybe four times to kill it when there's all these dangerous like extra special types that the game's unloading at you. I say extra special they are all taken from other
00:41:26
Speaker
zombie game they do have a spitter yes who like just hits you sometimes doesn't feel like there's a projectile and deals a decent amount of damage and poison so it's some damage over time and they can also leave like a little poison bubble yeah which would then explode and also damage you it's like a mine too like it was just attached to something i'm like what's that walk into it and die
00:41:51
Speaker
Oh, speaking of explosions, they do have hazmat's. Oh, yeah, yeah. Who are kind of fun because they have like a little gas tank on their back. But you're uncommon left for dead infected. Yeah.
00:42:02
Speaker
But what was fun is if you hit the tank, it would explode. But if you hit the tank in the right spot, sometimes it would just open like a gas valve and the zombie would kind of just start flying away in the direction. Just kind of ragdoll into other zombies and then blow up. That was really enjoyable for me.
00:42:21
Speaker
and see this is another thing obviously taken from just cause so that one's stretching that one's stretching a little bit explosions just cause and the propane tanks and things like that yeah because attaching like using the the grapple thing to like hook that up to like livestock or whatever then shooting it and just sending the cow airborne it was basically the purpose of that game
00:42:46
Speaker
One thing we actually never unlocked from the agility tree, there is an option for like a grappling hook. Yeah. So I'm not sure if that was supposed to be like a web slinging type thing or I assume just hooked a point and kind of.
00:43:02
Speaker
James Bond agent under fire, I think it was. Yeah, that was the, uh, that would have been like Xbox, the first Xbox, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That, that was some dumb shit. It was pretty silly. I was upset with my, when I played that with my friend and he like knew all of these mechanics and the fact that there was this like grappling hook and thing. It just went up to some high overlook when I had no idea how possibly to reach him and shot me repeatedly until he filled the kill counter.
00:43:30
Speaker
Yeah, that's why you don't play games at friends' houses pretty much. No.
00:43:38
Speaker
I was like, let's go back to GoldenEye, please. So, I think we actually played Perfect Dark instead, but there you go. That was good. But yeah, there's definitely some skills and things we never unlocked. There's a lot of options that felt like, okay, some things that were completely broken, like the ability to instantly kill zombies. There was one where you could sneak up and instantly kill a zombie or a person.
00:44:03
Speaker
Yeah, they're occasionally like next to Raiders or just you know people in the Badlands who just had like some S&M gear and like a machete. Yeah, and they might contest the airdrops, but Those are usually more difficult than zombies. Mm-hmm
00:44:18
Speaker
because they just had health and would hit you for even more and they were very dodgy like zombies were really bad at dodging the drop kick these guys like if they see you coming at like charging them and you go to drop kick they're like I'm gonna sidestep this I don't know why what if you didn't
00:44:38
Speaker
Another ability we kind of unlocked eventually was you can you can do the slide if you're running Yeah, you can go to crouch and then slide and an unlock off of that made it so if you slide into someone it'll like knock them to the ground and Actually, I don't even know if that was just the base ability or not the unlocks that it would break their legs which I like never saw but
00:45:00
Speaker
The humans were terrible at dodging that. If you come at them in the air, they're prepared for that. They have their anti-air in the form of a side dodge. For some reason, we go low. It takes them out. It's like Soul Calibur. If somebody's running at you, they're usually going to slide kick you or grab you. One of two things.
00:45:19
Speaker
But they were terrible at dodging that. So hit the leg, whatever. They just go down. They ragdoll for a couple seconds. But since they're on the ground, they are now eligible. That head's looking pretty tasty. Congratulations, you are the winner of one new head stomp and explosion. Yeah, but it's still that really weird imbalance of
00:45:42
Speaker
You hit them a shit ton with all that health or you kind of have them trip on a banana peel and then instantly murder them. Yes. So it's just the game had a lot of really fun things in it as far as like a co-op sprinting around parkouring and just murdering zombies together.
00:46:03
Speaker
And then it had the rest of the game where like certain things were just kind of mechanically weird for like climbing ladders or other things or forced cinematic. Oh, hold up. My memory was jogged. So we were doing co-op on the campaign. So anytime you go through like, hey, there's this checkpoint.
00:46:25
Speaker
where you have to stay in the location. If both players are not there, it will not start. Now, a lot of these things were unnecessary because it would sometimes take you five feet, or maybe take you to a multi-part cutscene that you'd be skipping through.
00:46:40
Speaker
But there were times that like, let's say Jake was in the elevator and he pushed the elevator to go up and it's like, oh, please wait for other players. Right. I have the option to work to him for the game to continue, which I hold B for a couple of seconds and I teleport to him. Yes. Many times when Jake would do this, I would be three feet away and looking at him like, are you fucking kidding me? Like I had to occupy the same space as Jake. Step into my body. Progress the game.
00:47:07
Speaker
And it's little things like that that heavily detract from it because a key part of the game that I thought was strong was the pacing for how you move around through the city and you balance the running and the killing of zombies.
Co-op Challenges and Arena Battle
00:47:22
Speaker
But then the story always felt like this forced, heavy-handed, hey, this is cinematic, hey, this is intense. Right, it's a movie. Yeah.
00:47:33
Speaker
And it is really unfortunate, because their core gameplay loop, like you said, it just felt so solid. And they interrupt their own game, is really what it feels like. They interrupt it with cutscenes, they interrupt it with all of these prompts of, you need to gather your party before venturing forth. But where other games that have co-op, gather your party before venturing forth in intelligent ways, usually like, this is an area transition, or something like that.
00:47:59
Speaker
Cause I thought about this, I was sitting here, I was like, can they actually cut the cut scenes? Like, can they get rid of that? Could they not have your friends warp to you? I'm like, well, they kind of all need to see the cut scene, things like that. What if they didn't? What if they literally just had it so your friends heard like on the radio, the interaction, like they were communicating with somebody by radio or something. They convey the same thing to me.
00:48:23
Speaker
Yeah. And there's no reason to make people group up all the time to watch some guy like gesture with his hands as he talks in like a like more than vaguely racist accent because he's trying to emulate something. It's like it's rough. It is rough and it was unnecessary.
00:48:47
Speaker
But yeah, yeah, we already talked about the the story the other character is there was nobody else who stands out as particularly strong and the game tries to sell this this drama and suspense and The disappointing thing is there's high points in the game like there's high points where there is an actual cinematic moment or I like the arena. Oh, yeah, like
00:49:14
Speaker
Which is awesome in co-op because you're just like here we're gonna take all your crap because at this point We made the mistake of giving you guns and things so Balance is out the window, right? We have to remove this to make the game challenging And you're like alright death arena go
00:49:31
Speaker
and they kind of like put you in with like some shipping containers and broken up cement and some zombies and you have like some really basic ass supplies but we still had our feet so we'd go and kick zombies in the spikes and they also I think did a pretty good job with the music throughout the game for when you did have those more intense moments where they wanted to convey hey this is like an action sequence yeah the music for it was good so when I was running like yeah we're actually doing something yeah
00:50:00
Speaker
it still seemed a little bit over the top as far as like you're running through an area and bullets are flying by you conveniently missing yeah stormtrooper and then like as you're running like a zombie drops like five feet in front of you but there's no way it can really catch up to you because your full book in it yeah
00:50:19
Speaker
You're mid spin dash right now. They're not getting it. Yeah, there was a couple sections where you had to run away from death, basically, in one way or another. And I enjoyed those. I enjoyed the forced, that's going to sound weird, enjoyed the forced free running, where it's like there is a path, there's an obstacle course for you to traverse. That's what I liked.
00:50:44
Speaker
And there's a couple points they had us race, just like deliver all the bombs or something like that. Race your friends. The one thing that killed me about that though is like sometimes we'd start it and one person would be way the fuck over there. It's like, hey, a challenge is starting. I'm like, I'm not gonna make it. And Jake's like, later, fucker. You're like waiting for the airdrop or something. The airdrop comes off of the plane, starts coming down to the ground.
00:51:11
Speaker
You're like, all right, do you want to start this challenge to race to the airdrop? And I'm standing underneath it, just waiting for it to crush me as you're off in the tower and start challenging. It's pretty funny. But yeah, they have a couple other things you didn't really experience in the game. We didn't really play side quests that much because we were reluctantly going through the main quest. Why would we do side quests?
00:51:38
Speaker
But they also had challenges, which I think we accidentally did one. Was it parkour? Yeah, we talked about it a little bit. Some of the parkour ones were collecting looter, seeing how many zombies you can murder.
00:51:50
Speaker
Yeah, there was the ambient ones and then there were some that like the DLC, the following actually added, which was like, so they had like this fourth wall breaking thing where there was a, like a jug that said dying light on it. And it's just like DLC drink or something like that. And you interact with it to start one of the DLC challenges. I'm just like, what? I think that's kind of cute, a little bit of a tight cheek type. That didn't bother me too much.
00:52:19
Speaker
There was one where one of your allies just died, right? Like in this explosion or whatever, or right before an explosion. And it's supposed to be this deep kind of like dramatic moment for your protagonist because he cares for some reason. And then the frowny face explosion on the far tower. Yeah.
00:52:41
Speaker
And so we were like, that kind of looks like a frowny face, but I thought it was a coincidence. It was just conveniently the way the windows were blown out into flames where, until we got the achievement that said like, you did the frowny face, I was like, okay. All right. So the game doesn't want me to be sad, but it wants me to accept that the protagonist is sad. You're like, I don't get what you're going for here. But yeah, it's...
00:53:08
Speaker
At the end of the day, I think it was actually a pretty fun game, but you have to realize that it's very difficult to get away from zombie campiness and there's so much baggage on that genre.
Final Thoughts and Recommendations
00:53:20
Speaker
I'd say it's a good pick up if you can get on sale for a couple of friends. Maybe do it over a weekend, just stick around. It's got a lot of fun things in it, but in the same way you might watch a B-rated horror movie, you know it's not going to be great going in, but you want to experience it with your friends and make fun of it. I think it's really good for that. And it's probably a different experience if you go in with four people.
00:53:46
Speaker
Three or four people and unless they have some mechanic where it's like Diablo's minions have grown stronger It's got to be much harder to lose if all four people have to go down Yeah But yeah, so that's dying light It's it's the lights not completely out. It is dying though. Yeah And that's our sign that we have to go I'd like to thank everybody for listening and
00:54:14
Speaker
Yeah. Jake, do you want to do the typical outro stuff for the... Sure. So if you guys are listening to this, you've already found us, so good job. That's step one. The other steps you have, or you could send in feedback to soapstonepodcastatgmail.com. We periodically check that for mail. There's never anything there. Your other option is to go to Facebook, where you probably found this, but you might not have, at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. And that is where fans
00:54:42
Speaker
I guess. Yeah. Listeners, listeners periodically get our podcasts and we post them there. And also on Facebook we have the option to post dumb videos from time to time or other just non-strictly audio content. So if you like us that much or you just want to be
00:55:01
Speaker
freaked out for like a minute yeah check that out i guess it is uh it's content that is true this is content yeah all right well i'd like to thank everybody for listening and we will try to release some episodes in the future and uh catch up hopefully on whatever we've missed i'm sure everything's fine have a good night guys
00:57:36
Speaker
I'm