If you are anything like me, melee combat in a first person game gives you fits. While I enjoy the visceral combat in games like Dead Island and Dying Light, I always feel more comfortable with myself after I get a gun in my character’s hands. Dancing around with a sword (or pipe as the case may be) just isn’t something I am particularly good at. Still, I enjoy playing melee-heavy games. I just tend to approach things from a run-away-and-hope-I-don’t-actually-have-to-fight point of view.
Sometimes combat is a necessary action, though, and I always seem to burn through my carefully stockpiled medkits at an alarming rate when I have to engage in close encounters. Developer Techland understood my dilemma when they made Dying Light. To help me, and those like me along, they created a companion app for iOS and Android devices. This companion app gives me the opportunity to get in game items, like medkits, that can help me out.
The Dying Light Companion (yes that is the name) sees its users put together squads of scouts and send them on missions. Successfully completed missions result in items that can be sent via the app to the game proper.
The app reminds me a lot of the Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood side game where you’d manage assassins and build up their skill to send them on harder missions. In Dying Light Companion, you select a mission and then assigning scouts to complete it. Missions are split into two groups: power and agility. You’ll want to assign scouts based on their proficiency in either skill area and try to build a squad that comes close to, or matches, the Squad Power recommendation. If successful, the scouts will return, get some experience and drop off any loot they secured for you.
Some of this loot is necessary for future missions and is banked accordingly. The rest of it though is usable in the actual game proper. Things like medkits, crafting materials, and even weapons can be transferred to Dying Light by creating a care package. These packages can only contain 20 items at a time and only one can be sent at a time (sending a second overwrites the first and loses the items previouslysent) but those 20 items, if picked correctly can really help the odds for survival.
I tend to run missions that will give me medkits, metal parts, and cigarettes as these all are quite valuable to me in the game. Medkits for health, metal parts for weapon repairs, and cigarettes for cash to buy more medkits and metal parts. It’s a system that has worked out quite well for me in the game and because of this, I continue to utilize the app.
The more I play the app, the better my scouts become which allows them to go on more dangerous missions. All of this of course means better loot for me to get in-game. The fact that it takes no real effort from me other than to set up the missions and then walk away while they run, is a huge plus. I can play Dying Light while my scouts are out on missions and I make progress in both. And, more importantly, the progress I make in the core game isn’t marred by frustrating encounters where I am under-equipped. Instead, I can focus on what I find fun about the game. To me, that is what a good companion app should do, even if it has a pretty lame name.
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