Dead Island Is Better Than Dying Light

From the makers of Dead Island

Okay, take Expressionless Isle's unabridged concept, subtract the part-playing mechanics, throw in freerunning features alike to Mirror's Edge, and gear up it all in an open world that features a day-and-night cycle where things become manner harder at night like in Minecraft or DayZ.

That'southward Dying Light in a giant nutshell. Warner Bros. is publishing this Techland-developed game, and they showed off a demo for the new zombie survival championship at a recent pre-E3 coming together. While the premise looked cool, I've learned the hard way not to become excited for one of Techland's games until I've gotten bodily hands-on time.

And when I said take Dead Island'southward entire concept, I mean that quite literally. It'due south blatantly the Dead Island engine in use hither, for better or for worse.

Dying Light (PC, PlayStation three, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One)
Programmer: Techland
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive
Release: 2014

The premise of Dying Low-cal is that a group of survivors accept been trapped for 2 months in barricaded safe zones. There's some kind of zombie infection, and your poorly voiced and acted character has to scavenge and loot during the day in this survival activity game set in a vast open world.

The demo begins with your character seeing a plane brand 2 cargo drops filled with supplies. Nosotros immediately become to run across some of the showtime-person freerunning features in action as your grapheme rushes towards the drops before information technology gets night. Your character is quite nimble and can climb nigh anything from buildings to phone poles. This freerunning mechanic extends to combat, allowing y'all to pull off moves and attacks quickly. Your grapheme'south skills and abilities can exist customized as well.

There are over 1,000 weapon possibilities, from plain melee objects to weapon crafting. One crafted weapon we saw was a machete combined with a taser then yous can shock zombies as you piece them. Where have nosotros seen that earlier? And yup, you'll even have to repair weapons equally they can get damaged.

The expanse you'll exist exploring is filled with zombies, and they're identical to those found in Dead Isle. They're slow, lumbering, and can be cut up into pieces depending on whatever melee weapon y'all're using. The one difference is that there'south this X-ray effect in place, and then you get to come across where y'all've broken bones on your enemies. Kind of similar in Mortal Kombat, except it seems out of identify here. I mean, does information technology really matter if yous break a zombie's bone?

Zombies volition besides come in multiple flavors, such as 1 we encountered afterwards that pretty much was the Tank from Left 4 Dead. It was huge and able to throw cars and other large objects at the player. Nothing original there, simply I do dear that you will be encountering some people who are in the process of turning into zombies. Information technology'due south fresh if a little jarring. They'll act similar a normal zombie, simply in one case you inflict damage on them they'll scream out in hurting similar a normal human being would.

Oh, and guess what? You're infected with the zombie virus as well — this is a big role of the game. Somehow the virus has given you 1 ability that lets you discover enemies by sending out a pulse wave — substantially echo location.

On the manner to the drop, you'll hear a little girl screaming, and you're free to investigate the source or simply keeping going with your mission. Side missions will exist randomly generated for you to seamlessly take on, and in this example y'all'll inspect a edifice to find a petty girl hiding from her father who just turned into a zombie.

After this distraction, the role player makes their fashion to the get-go driblet, but a group of opposing heavily armed humans get to it first. You tin't take them on, so y'all head towards the second driblet instead. There's going to be a lot of liberty in how you approach battles, and in an instance like this you could lead a group of zombies towards enemy humans to give you lot an upper hand.

It's nightfall past this point, and that'southward when the more dangerous monsters come to play. After recovering some medicine, you'll have to brand your fashion dorsum to your camp; y'all should exist able to get back without always encountering a fight or getting spotted. For the demo though, the player does become spotted and some kind of behemothic canis familiaris-like beast chases later on you. This sequence shows off the best of the freerunning mechanics equally you hop over obstacles and vault over zombies while fleeing from the animal.

Dying Calorie-free has a lot of potential. The visuals look swell, and what I saw looked highly detailed and pretty realistic, from the globe to the zombies. The demo was shown off on a PC on par with what nosotros can expect from next-gen consoles.

The freerunning stuff looks like it could be better than what we got out of Mirror's Border too, as there seems to exist more freedom with what you tin climb. That all said, I tin't get excited for this ane until I have a controller in my easily and encounter for myself just how much liberty will exist given to players.