Dying Light: The Following

Dying Light: The Following is a standalone expansion to Techland's open-world zombie survival game, and it makes one bold structural bet: swap the dense urban verticality of Harran for a sprawling countryside map roughly the size of the base game itself. You get farmland, tunnels, villages, and a dune buggy that you will immediately start upgrading and ramming into undead crowds. If the original game was about climbing buildings to escape danger, The Following is about driving through it at speed. It is a tonal shift, not always a comfortable one, but mostly it works. The story follows your survivor deeper into the mystery of why some people seem immune to the virus. A rural cult called the Children of the Sun may hold answers, and the writing here is more focused than the base game's occasionally scatter-shot narrative. The cult's leader is genuinely unsettling, the side characters have texture, and the ending, which branches based on a late moral choice, is the kind of payoff that makes the preceding twenty-plus hours feel intentional rather than incidental. Choices do matter here, in a modest but real way. Do not skip the side quests either: a few of them carry more emotional weight than the critical path deserves credit for. The buggy is the mechanical centerpiece, and it earns its place. You level a separate Driving skill tree by using it, unlocking better handling, UV light upgrades, and weapon slots. It starts fragile and ends as a genuine killing machine. The countryside map is large enough that traversal without it would be punishing, so the game essentially forces you to invest, which turns out to be the right call. Combat on foot still runs on the same agile, first-person melee system from the original: stamina-gated swings, weapon degradation, the satisfying crunch of a maxed-out blueprint hitting a Volatile in the face. The parkour toolkit carries over fully, though the flat terrain gives you fewer obvious reasons to use it. Dedicated parkour fans may find that absence a little hollow. Where The Following stumbles is in mid-expansion pacing. There is a stretch roughly a third of the way through where the game asks you to run fetch errands for cult contacts to raise your trust rating, and it is exactly as repetitive as that sounds. The countryside also has fewer landmark moments than Harran's rooftops did: wide open space can feel empty when there are no interesting vertical playgrounds to reward exploration. Enemy variety does not expand meaningfully from the base game, and if you came in expecting new monster types to test your build, you will be mildly disappointed. For existing Dying Light owners it connects directly to their save file and scales to their level. For newcomers, the Enhanced Edition bundles both the base game and this expansion, which is the smarter entry point since the skill trees from the main campaign carry real weight by the time you arrive in the countryside. At around seventy-five hours of combined content between both, the value density is hard to argue with. The buggy, the cult mystery, and that branching ending are enough to make The Following worth the trip, grind sections and all.

Monika · Scout Team

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