The day and night cycle of the living dead
In 2011, Polish developer Techland served up Dead Island – a bold but buggy amalgamation of melee combat, RPG skill trees, and Left 4 Dead-style co-operative thrills. Now, the Dr Frankenstein of developers is at it again, only this time they’re tossing Minecraft and Mirror’s Edge into the mix for good measure.
The result is Dying Light, an open-world zombie apocalypse that can be tackled by up to four free-running, XP-gathering players simultaneously. It’s all capped off with a dynamic day and night cycle that’ll see you scavenging for supplies, arming traps and crafting weapons by day, then running for your life by night.
Thankfully, our demonstration began in the daylight hours, so our sun-dazzled undead adversaries didn’t put up too much of a fight. In fact, we were able to vault over obstacles, scrabble up ledges
and bound across rooftops as the zombies hordes below us simply shuffled and groaned.
Complacency can still leave you overwhelmed by sheer numbers, of course, and one particularly cackhanded leap sent us careening into a gaggle of hungry undead. A few swings of our fireaxe soon got us out of that little scrape though.
Day walker
Our daytime objective was to arm a number of traps, such as car bombs and electrified surfaces. These nifty environmental weapons can be triggered remotely, and prove invaluable when you find yourself in a tight spot. That’s fortunate, because as soon as the sun set, we found ourselves in plenty.
When darkness falls, the walking dead become faster, more agile, and much more aggressive, and as such, you’ll have to rethink all the strategies that served you so well while the sun was shining. The free-running acrobatics that allowed you to effortlessly outmanoeuvre enemies during the day aren’t such an advantage once zombies gain the ability to climb and jump as well.
Dead end
What’s more, taking on a horde with melee weapons is simply not a viable option at night, so your best bet is either to sneak your way back to a safe house, or simply to peg it from place to place, making full use of rooftops and traps to evade your decaying pursuers. It’s at these moments – running flat out from a bloodthirsty horde towards a safe haven – that Dying Light is at its
most tense and exciting.
The night time sections already seem tough enough to please survivalists, and Techland assure us that the demo it’s currently showcasing represents only a fraction of the final difficulty level. Given that the studio still has months of polish and tweak time to spare, they’re looking like Techland’s magpie-eye for game design might just produce something a little bit special this time.
