Analysis: Dying Light – The Following (Enhanced Edition)

Techland surprised everyone in early 2015 with Dying Light — a game that invented nothing and dove headfirst into yet another zombie apocalypse, yet played every card well enough to be a genuinely fun product with personality and plenty to do.

The support that followed was constant: new options, fixes, and a stream of free and paid content — Be the Zombie, Cuisine & Cargo, the Ultimate Survivor Bundle, and The Bozak Horde. The Enhanced Edition gathered all of it into one appealing physical and digital package, topped by the most interesting piece: The Following, an expansion that closes out the story and adds a handful of extra hours. We gave the base game a full analysis of its own at launch; this piece focuses on the new adventure.

The Following

Without spoiling the main quest’s ending: our hero is forced to leave the city to investigate rumors of a sect whose members are completely immune to the virus. The setting is a new, huge map on the outskirts of Harran — comparable in size to everything the original offered — and it becomes the axis everything else turns on.

The Following is an expansion, and it keeps Dying Light’s formula intact: a first-person open-world action adventure with heavy RPG seasoning and parkour that lets you climb nearly anything in sight. The infected classes are the same, weapon handling barely changed, the controls identical, the day/night cycle that turns the undead lethal at sunset still present, the crafting system still central.

But the expansion adds just enough to feel fresh without losing the essence. The headline is the map itself: the dense, high-rise city gives way to long stretches of countryside — which deliberately demotes the parkour. It’s still there, and you’ll still need your climbing skills, but it slides from starring mechanic to supporting act.

In its place: the buggy. Customizable and upgradeable — tougher armor, traps, weapon mounts — it becomes your best friend for the entire adventure, both for crossing the map at speed and for staying alive on it. On foot, without elevated routes to break line of sight, the infected are usually fatal company.

The buggy drives arcade-loose, and it works beautifully. If smashing zombie heads with melee weapons was the original’s signature pleasure, mowing down a field of the undead at full speed is even better. Techland built an entire skill tree around the vehicle — level it up to unlock upgrades — with a survival layer attached: car parts wear out and break, repair materials come only from other vehicles, and fuel has to be scavenged by inspecting every car and truck you pass.

The trade-off, inevitably, is density. A vehicle demands open country, and the result is a scenario with far fewer points of interest than Harran, spaced widely and repeating their designs — villages, small structures, bandit bases, caves — to the point of déjà vu, down to identical room layouts.

Mission design keeps the series’ narrative strength: everything you do is contextualized, main quests and side content alike. The weakness is padding — objectives that wind you through unnecessary detours, as if to stretch the expansion’s length artificially. It’s most visible in the final act, which isn’t a masterpiece but holds the plot together well.

Overall, it’s a lot of fun, especially with friends — the missions are pleasant and reliably spark curiosity about what waits at each waypoint. One structural note: progression is now gated on side quests, because the sect needs to trust you before the story continues. It’s a reasonable fit for the fiction, but it forces the detour.

The new arsenal helps: the long-requested crossbow (perfect for quiet approaches to bandit camps), a devastating semi-automatic shotgun, and a machine gun for clearing horde areas. You’ll want all of it — The Following introduces a new infected type clearly designed for cooperative play, and it’s a genuine challenge.

Completing The Following takes 8–10 hours; a 100% run stretches easily to 12–15. For an expansion priced at €20, that’s a strong exchange rate.

Graphically it’s the same game with modest enhancements — and all of the original’s virtues intact: modeling, lighting, draw distance, effects, textures. The one genuinely important addition: excellent PC optimization. Our biggest complaint about Dying Light at launch was its abysmal performance on PC; that flipped completely, with the Enhanced Edition running smoothly at max settings on the same hardware that had struggled a year earlier — good news for more modest machines too.

The soundtrack suits every situation without ever standing out; the sound design is outstanding throughout.

Conclusions

The Following is a good expansion that delivers exactly what expansions are for: more hours of the same, at the same quality. It isn’t perfect — the repetition and padding hold it back from brilliance — but it entertains without complications while adding small, notable ideas. If you liked Dying Light and want more, there’s no reason not to finish the story. And if you never took the plunge, the Enhanced Edition is the perfect excuse to enter one of the most entertaining zombie apocalypses ever shipped — Dying Light: The Following Enhanced Edition remains one of the genre’s best packages.