A Better You: Dying Light's Legendary Levels

Dying Light's [official site] mega-expansion, The Following, takes the zombie-killing open world action out of the city and into the surrounding area. That means your parkour and urban scavenging skills might be slightly less useful than they had been while you were clambering across rooftops and digging through the trash. Enter the buggy - a customisable vehicle that has its own equivalent of the base game's skill trees.

Those skills haven't been left behind though. The expansion, and the free update for the base game, will introduce 250 new legendary levels, allowing you to become faster, stronger and smarter.

I reinstalled Dying Light last week. Mostly, I wanted to check if it was as enjoyable as memory suggested but I was also preparing myself for the expansion. It's one of the few open world games that I've wanted to strip clean, finding every secret cache and upgrading every ability.

Occasionally, I'm nostalgic for the early stages, when every stumbling mob of undead rotters posed a threat, but running around the streets like a superhero probably shows the game at its best. The game shifts gears dramatically as the player character levels up - flirting with stealth-horror, tense gang warfare and physical comedy - but it's a system-driven toybox at heart.

These new Legendary Levels should allow every player who puts in the hours to create a master of all trades character, which should make the late-game (or post-game) much more enjoyable.

Techland recently shared some of the expansion's plot specifics, including details of the cult that may hold the key to survival. Gosh. Both expansion and Enhanced Edition will be available Feb 9th. It might take a while longer than that for everyone else to do the right thing and acknowledge that Dying Light is one of the smartest Big Games of recent years, even if it is caught up in a rather dumb zombie-smashin' wrapper.