The 'Z' Word Is Zipline: Dying Light
Jumping, chopping, running, lopping
Dying Light is an impatient game, which might explain all of the running around and jumping and firing of grappling hooks. My personal response to a zombie uprising would most likely involve barricading myself into a Waitrose store and attempting to live on toasted almonds, feta dirigibles and the Duchy's pink fizz. The characters in Techland's latest have a very different reaction to the end times - they run around, leaping off buildings, severing rotten limbs as they go. They're indulging in 'Creative Brutality', the new trailer below reckons, and I have to admit it looks like they're making the best of a bad situation.
Left 4 Dead crossing paths with Mirror's Edge or Assassin's Creed infected with the fevered bite of Dead Island? It's probably somewhere between all four. The co-op mode makes the game at least 37% more appealing simply because it should be amusing watching friends plunging from buildings toward concrete doom, or riding a zipline into a pile of angry corpses.
If the sense of motion is as impressive as in the video, Dying Light might even have solo appeal. Movement and bone-crunching seem convincingly kinetic, and the shift to stealth when the terrors of night arrive could be an effective ploy. Clearly I'm rolling my eyes at yet another ultraviolent zombie game but I also very much want to charge through a sheet of glass to shoulder barge a zombie into an electrified pool of water. I'm not even sure if the water in the trailer is electrified but if it isn't, all the more reason to play the game and put that right.