It’s zombies meets parkour meets sledghammers
Look, it may seem derisive to describe Dying Light as just “Dead Island + parkour” but dang if that ain’t what it looks like. In this six-minute video you’ll see some light traversal and some heavy-duty zombie bashing using either an axe and sledgehammer. I had never noticed these x-ray melee attacks before and they definitely underline the physicality of the melee system.
The melee combat does seem really familiar but that’s unsurprising as developer Techland was the studio behind Dead Island Riptide. The free running itself looks functional and a good way to get round the seemingly large playing area. I’ve yet to see a character go full on Mirror’s Edge and just run and keep running but that might not be the type of game Techland is going for. We’ll see Dying Light sometime in 2014 and I have the feeling I’ll really need to get hands-on time with it to see how the traversal feels in practice.
