Dying Light‘s first gameplay video shows that you don’t have to kill every zombie, as long as you can free-run better than they can.
First person platforming is notoriously hard to do well, but Mirror’s Edge may have some serious competition soon in the form of Techland’s Dying Light and its survival-driven free-running. The early cinematic trailer for Dying Light turned a few heads, but if you weren’t interested before you should take a look at the new gameplay video to see the surprising appeal of parkour and zombie survival. Over the course of eleven minutes of gameplay, you’ll get a rundown on life as a runner: nimbly moving around undead hordes in a constant race against time.
The zombies in Dying Light are easy to dispatch during daylight hours, but become much more dangerous at night. This lends a lot of weight to the passage of time: not only are you rushing to reach your objectives (in this case, air-dropped medical supplies) before other survivors beat you there, but every wasted moment brings you closer to the death sentence of being surrounded by super-zombies. Optional side objectives complicate things further, since you’ll have to decide whether or not it’s worth your increasingly valuable time.
Combat isn’t the focus of the game, but the player is far from helpless. Seen in the video are a number of melee weapons ranging from baseball bats to an improvised electric blade. Most of the zombies go down easily, but one special zombie is seen (and promptly avoided) and other varieties of the undead come out to hunt at night.
Dying Light is still pre-alpha, but if this video is any indication then it’s already nailing some very interesting mechanics. The game is scheduled to launch on PC, PS3, PS4, 360, and Xbox One sometime in 2014.
Published: Aug 18, 2013 05:11 am