Preview: Dying Light

Just like the polar opposites of Dying Light's light and dark mechanics, I feel like the game will be a love it or hate it experience for most gamers.

Taking a look at the title during a hands-off presentation at this year's E3, we were treated to the game's flavour in both daylight and moonlight scenarios, which transform the game into two very different beasts.

In the daytime, Dying Light is like Dead Island on steroids; that makes absolute sense too, since developer Techland is being the wheel of both franchises. During the day, Dying Light is a like a cross between Dead Island and Dead Rising; you walk around the ruins of a city in the throws of a zombie apocalypse, scavenging weapons, ammunitions, medicine and food in order to stay alive. In the demo, our goal was to make it to a recently dropped supply crate before a man named Razor — and his highly militarised crew — did.

As you progress through parts of the city, you'll encounter zombies who'll be roaming in singles and in hordes; neither are overly dangerous providing you have a weapon or two. Crafting allows you to get creative, mashing multiple weapons together to create dismembering tools that will surely earn the title an R18+ rating.

Dying Light creates randomly generated side-quests as you progress through ransacked buildings. As we headed to those supply crates, we heard a little girl's scream and upon further investigation, found the girl hiding from her “angry daddy, who'd hurt anyone in the house” in a closet. That daddy? You guessed it: a zombified man we'd taken down moments before so we could actually get to the closet and open it. The idea of the side-quest was cool, but honestly had little emotional impact. We simply left the now-orphaned girl for a colleague NPC to pick up later. How heroic.

The game plays exactly like Dead Island, but with additions like survival packets that can be thrown to distract hordes of zombies (ala Dead Rising, see?). The game also adds in Mirror's Edge first-person parkour elements that allow you to zip up sides of buildings and light poles with ease.

The addition of Mirror's Edge-like fast-paced, hectic world travel is incredibly important, because the game transitions from scavenging into pure survival at night. During the day, you'll encounter normal zombies and virals zombies the latter being humans who haven't quite fully transitioned; they're faster and howl in pain as you fit back against their attempts to eat you. At night, super zombies called the volatile infected (see below, left) come out at night; looking very much like Tyrants from Resident Evil, you need to avoid them at all costs.

The developer playing the game began to ping the area around him, looking for volatile infected in the dark purely so he could steer clear of them. Once detected, tension ramped up as the volitile zombies in the area gave chase, howling and throwing themselves down the street in one powerful leap, all while snapping their bottom mandibles at our character. The developer lasted about three minutes, bounding off buildings, throwing himself around light poles and the like before a volitile infected took off his head. It was brutal, and terrifying in a way that zombies have never been in a Techland game before.

All up, Dying Light has promise. The daylight sections of the game are a bit too shallow and gratuitously violent for my liking, especially when games like the recently announced Dead Rising 3 have established that they do the whole open world zombie fighting thing so much better. During the night, Dying Light truly shines — ironic pun intended — and I hope that Techland and WB recognise and focus on that when the title is released.