When comparing Dying Light vs The Forest, the Slant community recommends The Forest for most people. In the question“What are the best singleplayer games on Steam?” The Forest is ranked 19th while Dying Light is ranked 36th. The most important reason people chose The Forest is:
The graphics really stand out in The Forest, from the realistic looking foliage to the terrifying creatures in the forest. Remarkably the graphics are on par with any AAA game, which is quite a feat for an indie game.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Fluid parkour movement
The main protagonist is capable of scaling buildings, jumping over obstacles and vaulting over zombies with ease making traversing the open world city a lot more enjoyable.
Pro Expansive weapon-crafting system
There are blueprints found throughout the gameworld that can be used to modify existing weapons in a wide variety of ways by adding various elements to them and creating weapons such as enemy seeking grenades, exploding throwing stars, and makeshift bats with nails through them.
Pro Satisfying combat
The combat is impactful, visceral and offers a great deal of variety in terms of available weapons and different enemy types. It presents a reasonable amount of challenge that is rewarding to overcome and offers multiple ways of emerging victorious in each encounter.
Pro Enjoyable co-operative multiplayer
Dying light features up to four player LAN and online co-op.
Pro Rewarding side-missions
There's a wide variety of side-quests and a large chunk of them are multi-part adventures with great storytelling.
Pro Great graphics
The graphics really stand out in The Forest, from the realistic looking foliage to the terrifying creatures in the forest. Remarkably the graphics are on par with any AAA game, which is quite a feat for an indie game.
Pro Awesome AI
The AI is really cool and will hunt around for the player. Also if the player kills or injures one of the tribesmen many times they will try to drag the body away or even cry over it.
Cons
Con Poor VR UI
Things such as subtitles, instructions, menus, prompts, etc are hard to see clearly.
Con VR has a downgraded visual experience
VR version of the game is low fidelity and introduces visual glitches that the standard version doesn't have.
Con Poor plot and characters
The story is nothing new with many elements that are too familiar at this point. A Reluctant hero and a cold government agent mixed with a plot that can bee seen from miles away points to a lack of imagination while trying to create a game for the masses.
Con Poor multithreading
Sadly Dying Light does not do multi-threading very well which results in low framerates. For a modern game that is to be played on consoles with 8 cores or PCs that also have multiple cores, to not take advantage of proper multi-threading is pretty mind boggling. Really it just comes down to laziness, something that is not new to Techland and their poorly optimized ports.
Con Enabling VR support isn't straightforward
Enabling VR support requires editing config files. Instructions can be found here.
Con VR may cause motion sickness
In addition to some minor persistence issues, there are some sensory information mismatch issues created by the in-game characters movements and players stationary position that can easily induce nausea. The issue is a lot more prominent during cut-scenes that take the control away from the player completely.
Con Still early alpha - very glitchy
As the game is still in early alpha, it still contains many glitches, some of which are game-breaking, such as the infinite ammo glitch.