Dying Light is a game that I have been very curious about since last E3. The trailer looked dark and visceral with moral ambiguity and an emphasis on movement. That being said,we have been misled by trailers in the past and given that this comes from some of the people responsible for the ultimately disappointing Dead Island, I have been managing my expectations. I got hands on at E3 with a personal walkthrough of game mechanics and if the two different scenarios I played through are any indication, my expectations are back up again.

Like Dead Island Dying Light is a first person zombie game that pits the player against hordes of the undead as well as gangs of opportunistic humans looking to take what they can by whatever force necessary. The overreaching story was not made clear but I got to play in some of the beginning areas of the game and then fast forwarded to a bit later when the character has leveled up quite a bit more.

Understandably. when you start out your character will have a pretty difficult time staying alive in open combat so an increased emphasis has been placed on free running and vertical movement. Despite advice by my guide I went ahead and charged into a small group of three zombies confident that I have played enough zombie games in my day that I could handle it. I could not. My ass was handed to me in very short order despite the multiple options for taking the zombies out. The next time I tried to make it to my check point by staying out of harm’s way as much as possible. This panned out a lot better but was still not super easy.

The running and climbing mechanics in the game take a bit of timing and dexterity with the controller but once you get the hang of it begin to feel very easy and intuitive. There is definitely a learning curve involved but it doesn’t take long for the controls to feel natural. Once the controls are grasped it becomes much easier to survive being a meal and it manages to avoid a lot of the pitfalls (sorry) often present in FPS platforming.

The combat is not slouchy either. Even at lower levels the combat offers a few different options from whatever main weapon you are carrying to grenades and a kick move that is very helpful for crowd control and keeping zombies off of you. These weapons start out being found melee objects and fire arms to custom made and modified weapons that amp up the creativity and effectiveness.

Dying Light also has a robust leveling system in which you level skills up by doing them and allows you to significantly your performance in those areas. This makes things a lot easier on you and dispatching zombies gets a lot easier once you have upped your skills and upgraded weapons. This leads to a lot of incredible gore and dismemberment but I am getting ahead of myself.

When I got to my checkpoint, which was a transmitter I needed to turn the power on to, I found a bit of a dilemma waiting for me. The area was in use by some human marauders who were in the process of executing some poor bastard. I could try to bust in and kill them and finish the mission or I could wait until night time and come back after dark when they weren’t there. I took the ‘no time like the present’ tack and went in there like an avenging angel and much like earlier with the zombies I was quickly dispatched and probably used into meat for cannibals.

Upon revival I went for the night time option and found that, while there is the benefit of no marauders, night time is way more dangerous that daytime. The zombies become stronger and more aggressive at night and some unique sorts of enemies pop up that you want to avoid. Luckily you are provided with a sort of zombie radar you can activate to see where they are located so you can avoid them. This is a skill that you can level up and from my experience it is a good idea to do this right away. I managed to make it to my checkpoint without much trouble but it was much slower going as I had to be extra careful not to run into the really bad enemies.

We popped forward a bit to a later spot in the game where I was more leveled up and had some awesome weapons and I found that the joys of zombie killing here are pretty great and there is a lot of gore to be had. The new weapons are creative and give you a lot of options in terms of how you want to kill zombies including some area of effect sorts of melee attacks that kill a bunch of zombies at once. I don’t think I can put into words how awesome it is to kill a gaggle of zombies surrounding you with spin move while holding a suped up stun rod but it is pretty fantastic.

According to my guide, the single player is only part of the experience and a robust multiplayer mode is going to be included for 4-player co-op that mixes with competitive multiplayer as you can invade other players’ games as a special zombie type that levels up and gains skills during play. This isn’t necessarily a new concept but it sounds like a lot of fun to me.

The game was running on PC but I was told that the high graphic fidelity should be carried over to XB1 and PS4. The game look fantastic so this is a very good thing.

I came away really digging Dying Light and I am very excited for it’s February 2015 release. Obviously at E3 you want to put your best foot forward and the game can end up being terrible upon release but I will say that I played another demo of Dying Light at Razer’s booth and ran through the same scenario as my first play through and not only was it just as fun but things played out differently which leads me to believe that there should be some decent replay value. We will have to wait and see but at this point I am looking forward to Dying Light and I think it seems pretty solid. It will be available on PC, XBox One, PS4, XBox 360, and PS3.