Dead Island and its sequel, Riptide, are – despite being quite a bit of fun as a co-op diversion – fundamentally flawed games. It’s what made my hands-on time with developer Techland’s similarly themed follow-up Dying Light such a pleasant surprise. They’re promising it’ll be a proper. AAA experience this time around.

“You have to consider that Dead Island was our first open-world game so we had to learn some lessons the hard way,” producer Tymon Smektala told Eurogamer. “But our level design team has grown three-fold [since then], and the same can be said of our quality assurance team.

“We’ve really put a lot of resources into playtesting so we make sure this game is a AAA project. We really feel we need to prove to people that we have made a AAA game and we’re confident we’re doing it.”

Dying Light, they say, will be a much faster paced experience. aided by that Mirror’s Edge-like parkour level traversal. and it certainly is a better experience from what I’ve played. I honestly left my play session shaking from how intense it all was.

“Dying Light is a game that’s quite different to Dead Island,” Smektala said. . “It’s more mature and more serious. I think people will be surprised by our story to some extent, by our gameplay and how complex it is.

“When you put Dead Island’s gameplay mechanics on paper, it is a hack and slash game. Put Dying Light’s mechanics on a piece of paper and you’ll have to use all of that page to describe what the game’s all about and how it plays.”

The game has no real release date yet; it’s still listed for some time next year, though one of the developers told me it might only see light in 2015. Plus, it made me excited to play a zombie game again; and I’d sworn off the things.

Read  Dying Light: Bad Blood is now available in Steam: Early Access

Last Updated: September 30, 2013

12 players enter, only 1 can leave. Scavenge for weapons, harvest zombie hives to level up… Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 was a bit of a gamble for Activision …
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