Dying Light

Out of the horde of shambling zombie games that hit consoles this generation, it’s Techland’s excellent Dying Light that deftly skids out ahead of the undead crowd.

- Robert Zak

As we scamper into the final stretch of this generation, and reflect on the games that made the biggest impact on our gaming hivemind, it may be easy to overlook one of the best zombie apocalypse games ever created.

Techland’s Dying Light is one of the better-rated and better-selling games of this generation. Nearly five years on from release, it remains among the very best co-op games out there, too, and yet it’s just not an IP that’s inspired a lot of hype or conversation.

Scrambling across the rooftops and sickly sun-scarred streets of Harran offers an absolute panoply of parkour activities. Many of the missions that pop up around the city are busywork – grab an airdrop, deliver supplies from A to B - but they’re made exhilarating thanks to the fact that your sprints between them always feel dangerous.

It’s like a grisly game of ‘avoid the lava’, as you seek to navigate the city without getting overwhelmed by the shuffling hordes in the streets below. On the other hand, a robust repertoire of combat mechanics means there’s also plenty of fun in dropping down and getting your feet wet.

Just behind the likes of Doom and Dishonored, Dying Light knows how to make first-person movement and combat feel impactful. A well-timed run across the rooftops can feel as weightless as gliding atop bamboo trees in a Chinese martial arts film, but one small misstep and you crash into a wall, desperately clinging to a ledge with bleeding fingertips.

The other thing that prevents Dying Light’s no-nonsense open world from slipping into tedium is the co-op mode, which is so good that it deserves to be the true centrepiece of the game (oddly, it was always something of a secondary feature in the marketing, with the box and digital store pages of the game barely acknowledging its existence).