Since it sold well enough to warrant a sequel and you told me it was looking decent I gave DL1 a go. It is a very good looking game, that comparison video that made the point that the sequel lacked punch was right. The first couple of hours were great, zombies were hard to take down and it is a struggle when they start swarming you. Night time is a proper horror show and getting chased is very intense.
After getting to a high enough level though I lost all interest and uninstalled it. It's much better than Dead Island but the gameplay and story suffers from the same plagues that have been with the genre since the 8th gen started. For whatever reason the digital artists are incredibly talented when it comes to game development but nobody else can keep up with them. The gameplay, since it has to be carried for hundreds of hours, puts you on this MMO treadmill that I don't care for one bit. With color coded itemization, scaling enemies, collect-a-ton busywork. All the work that was put into the visuals were wasted since at the end of the day you're playing a first person Ubisoft-Diablo game with parkour. The writers are also as usual the weakest link in the chain with the script being atrocious. The shallow gameplay works in tandem with the plot to make you want to tear your hair out. Because they have these fancy animations and voice acting to give you a mission to collect five zombie asses or crayons, it's not a text box you can easily ignore like in MMOs.
After the scaling put those special zombies all over the place it just wasn't worth playing anymore. If the game was an old-school FPS they could have tuned it and made it something special. All video game writers need to be buried alive in a giant landfill somewhere while the game designers should have needles inserted under their nails until they are cured of the Diablo and Ubisoft influences. The coding and art departments can't carry the rest no matter how talented they are. In the case of Dying Light (and the sequel) it doesn't even look as good as an offering from Ubisoft from 2014 anyway. 500 hour long games that are worth playing for 5 hours max.