Dead Island developers Techland wowed gamers earlier this year with the reveal of Dying Light, their new co-op first-person survival horror game. After spending much time describing how zombies would act in the upcoming title Techland and Warner Bros. Entertainment just decided to go and release gameplay footage and they have, over nine minutes that shows how the day-and-night cycle works in the game.
The gameplay trailer starts off showing how easy it is to traverse the world. It does look a whole lot like Techland's previous games but the way the you move is straight out of Mirror's Edge. The first person freerunning looks remarkably smooth, allowing you to scale buildings, tiptoe on ledges and leap right over zombies at will. It looks simple enough to avoid the zombies and admire the view during the day, especially when you utilize the environment to set up traps. Electricty and firecrackers are your friends here, allowing you to distract or straight up killl the undead hordes. You'll still want to stay away from packs of them but they're easy to outmaneuver and flee from in worst-case scenarios.
When night falls, however, it's time to run. Much like in the Dead Rising series the zombies get all blood-crazy when the sun sets, allowing them to move faster and amass in greater numbers. At night it's also of course harder to see where they are, which makes things that much more dangerous, especially when you have to go inside dark buildings. Thankfully you've got a bunch of different weapons to lop zombie heads off in satsifying ways if things get too close but at night though they're much, much stronger, and they can now jump and climb to places where you were previously safe. There are also rumors of other creatures lurking in the shadows...
But what about the missions in the game? That was the part of the Dead Island series that was such a slog, and the little bit of character interaction shown here looks remarkably similar. Hopefully they've learned from their mistakes, because the game certainly looks like Techland could have a winner on their hands otherwise.
Dying Light will launch for Xbox One, PS4, Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in 2014. Put aside ten minutes and watch the whole gameplay trailer below.
