2015, what a year. It’s been a year where I spent many an hour retreating old games with shiny new visuals, but also one where I experienced gameplay and graphical fidelity unlike anything I’d seen in the thirty-five years that I’ve been playing video games. Here are some of the highlights of my gaming year.

PlayStation 4 exclusive The Order: 1886 broke new ground in interactive storytelling. A visual feast depicting characters and Victorian London with almost photo-real clarity, sadly it didn’t get the acclaim I thought it deserved.

Press coverage for The Order, instead of lauding the interesting story and beautiful visuals, decided to slaughter the game, deriding it for is brevity, excessive quick time events and lengthy cut-scenes. I think they missed the point, myself, but it meant that the game was practically stillborn. Such a shame.

Despite my misgivings based on playing a preview build, Techland’s Dying Light managed to reinvent the open-world zombie game that the developer practically invented with their Dead Island series. Intelligent, interesting and above all pretty frightening, Dying Light immediately took my top spot when it comes to surviving a virtual zombie apocalypse.

EA’s Battlefield Hardline didn’t quite do it for me. Whilst I salute Visceral Studios for trying something different with DICE’s Battlefield series, Hardline was perhaps too much of a departure. In swapping huge battlegrounds for urban cops and robbers, the game lacked the scale and excitement of it’s military-themed predecessors. By all accounts, still a good game, but not a good Battlefield game.

Cities: Skylines on PC was a pleasant surprise. The city building game manages to take everything that was wrong with SimCity (a game that I personally still enjoyed) and create a nigh-on perfect example of the sometimes embittered genre.

Easy to get to grips with, beautiful to look at and relatively bug-free, Cities: Skylines has become my go-to city building game. With the introduction of a day/night cycle later in the year, the game became even more beautiful to look at.

Ori and the Blind Forest provided a charming break from the AAA action-fests that dominated 2015. Taking more than a little inspiration from the visual style of Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli animated movies, Ori and the Blind Forest follows the trials of the orphaned guardian spirit, Ori.

It sends players on a magical journey and is full of emotion. At its heart, though, Ori and the Blind Forest is no more than an old-school platformer which with repeated plays felt more and more derivative. A great game if you are looking for something short and sweet.

As a gamer that likes a bit of story with my action, 2K’s multiplayer squad shooter, Evolve didn’t really do it for me. It’s nice idea, being a member of a group of mercenaries charged with hunting and killing a gigantic player-controlled monster, but it lacked that Left 4 Dead feeling of comradery.

I’ve returned to the game many times over the year and enjoyed my time with it, but there are plenty of other games that I’d sooner be playing. To all intents and purposes, Evolve is still a great game, but not necessarily my sort of game.

The classic fighting franchise, Mortal Kombat made it’s new-gen debut in 2015 with Mortal Kombat X. With new-gen visuals, the series gruesome finishing mores were too much for Australian censors which slapped it with an R rating.

With a great story featuring character both old and new, beautiful graphics and some fantastic gameplay, Mortal Kombat X is the best fighting game I’ve played in a long time.

In real life I’d say that two wheels are better than four when it comes to having fun on the road. I’ve never really found a game that has managed to capture the excitement of motorcycling. Milestone S.r.l.’s Ride comes close.

Building on their successful Moto GP franchise, the Italian developers have, with Ride, created a game that celebrates the motorcyclist, their machine and racing on the open road.

Whilst it was released in 2014, Dragon Age: Inquisition dominated my playing schedule throughout 2015 due to the great DLC release during the year that bought the amazing story to its conclusion. The game received seven expansions during 2015, from the beautiful and varied terrain in the Jaws of Hakken to the conclusion of Trespasser. The Black Emporium gave players opportunity to change their character’s face (something that my unfortunate-looking Inquisitor was in dire need of).

The crowd funded / developed Project CARS really upped the ante when it comes to racing games. It the tradition of Gran Turismo, Forza Motorsport and GRID AutoSport, Project CARS is a driving simulator rather than an arcade racer.

Project CARS copped a lot of flak for being virtually unplayable on a gamepad. With a decent steering wheel and shifter, however, the game is in a league of its own. Add a couple more monitors for a panoramic view of the track and it’s just like being there, sitting in a race car.

May 2015 finally saw the release of one of the year’s most anticipated games, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. This is the game that I still return to when I game in my own time. CD Projekt RED polished up the gameplay that they had been developing over the last two games and dropped players in a gorgeous open-world.

The vast world of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt offers player hours and hours of adventure, which the developers augmented with 12 free DLC packs and an expansion called Hearts of Stone.

Warner’s Batman: Arkham Knight managed to polarise the fans. Not a game that I had to review, but one that I purchased myself, on PC. Whilst the console version was, for the most part, celebrated, the PC version was not. PC gamers reported performance issues and missing effects indicated a badly-ported console to PC game.

Running Batman: Arkham Knight on a PC-rig bordering on the un-natural, my 32 gigs and 2xSLI GTX980 machine never really had any problems running the game, much to the ire of my peers. Still the PC version was a massive fail for both Warner Interactive and nVIDIA, whose Gameworks code seems to be a root cause of many of the problems. To this day, Batman: Arkham Knight still doesn’t run as intended on PC.

Rory McIlroy PGA Tour kicked of EA Sports’ annual barrage of sports sims. The franchises two-year break allowed the developers to rebuild the game using Battlefield’s Frostbite engine and even including the Battlefield 4-themed Paracel Islands course.

I found the fantasy courses in Rory McIlroy PGA Tour more interesting than the real-life course which is probably because I don’t follow the game on TV. Still, PGA Tour is a good game and a was a great start to the 2015 EA Sports season.

I feel that I’d played every game that’ll ever be made. Most games wear their inspiration on their sleeve to such an extent that they seem like no more than derivative rehashes. Original gaming experiences are few and far between. Sony’s Everyone’s Gone to the Rapture is one of the most original games that I’ve played in a long time.

Derided as being no more than a walking simulator by those that fail to be engaged by the game’s subtle storytelling, Everyone’s Gone to the Rapture is an apocalyptic game with a difference. Set in a deserted English village, the game reveals the tragic events that befall on the people at the end of the world. It’s a very British horror story in the vein of Nigel Kneale’sQuatermass and one that keeps you thinking about it long after you’ve switched it off.

The PlayStation 4 exclusive Until Dawn was a bit of a surprise. Perfectly capturing the teen slasher movie look and feel, the game put the lives of a group of friends trapped in a mountain lodge in the hands of the player. Everyone that I spoke to about the game had a different experience with it. Not the longest game out there, but certainly nigh-on perfectly formed.

2015 saw the release of a game that seemed to have taken forever to arrive. Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain arrived in a storm of controversy that, for a change, had nothing to do with the game’s female lead wearing next to nothing. The launch was overshadowed by the seemingly very public, and rather unprofessional, spat between the game’s publishers, Konami, and the Metal Gear series’ creator, Hideo Kojima.

Regardless of the politics surrounding the game, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a superb effort, with the open-world gameplay taking the series’ tried and tested mechanics to a new level.

As accomplished as it is, I thought that Microsoft’s Forza Motosport 6 failed to live up to the excitement of 2014’s Forza Horizons 2.

Still a beautiful game, possibly the best-looking racing game ever, Forza 6 felt held back by the real-life locations that we’ve seen countless times before. The end result is a very accomplished game, but one that still feels a bit sterile.

Destiny: The Taken King proved to be more than just an expansion for Activision’s acclaimed shooter. Destiny’s second year of adventure kicked off by wiping Game of Thrones actor, Peter Dinklage’s much-maligned voice-over work from the game and replacing it with that of Uncharted’s Nolan North.

The inclusion of a revised leveling system, more akin to traditional role-playing games in Destiny: The Taken King as well as new missions, locations and a sinister new foe makes the game feel fresh again.

In a seemingly desperate move to shake their alleged misogynistic reputation, EA’s FIFA 16 includes, for the very first time, a selection of Women’s international teams. I found it to be a rather welcome move, making the 2016 entry more than just a roster update with a few token gameplay changes.

EA Sports’FIFA 16 is also the best looking entry in the series, the developers really starting to embrace the new-gen console’s graphics abilities.

Rock Band 4 re-introduced a new-generation of gamers to the rhythm music game. As I said in my review, Rock Band 4 was likely borne out of necessity over anything else as the die-hard Rock Band fans replaced their PS3s and Xbox 360s with new-gen consoles.

Rock Band 4 really doesn’t bring anything new to the table, apart from freestyle solos, which allow you to basically go mad with your instrument and still make a sound that seems like real music. Despite the lack of innovation for this fourth outing, Rock Band 4 is still an excellent game. The fact that you can still use your old instruments and previously purchased music make the game an essential purchase for fans.

I wasn’t particularly happy when I found out that Rise of the Tomb Raider was being release, initially anyway, as an Xbox exclusive. I’d been playing the Tomb Raider reboot on PC, with all its exquisite graphics cranked up to the max. I just could help but think that the Xbox One version’s visuals could be anything other than a disappointment.

Of course, I was wrong. The Rise of the Tomb Raider development team had been working closely with the guys at Microsoft to ensure that the latest adventure of Lara Croft looked nothing short of fabulous on the Xbox One. Whilst lacking a bit in the story department, the inclusion of more tombs to raider was welcome, even if the puzzles are still a lot easier that they were back in the day.

Likely in response to Harmonix and their rebooting of the Rock Band franchise, Activision countered with their Guitar Hero Live. Whereas Rock Band was essentially the same as before, it was all change for Guitar Hero.

With an almost retro feel, Guitar Hero Live uses real-life video from the point of view of the guitar player to put you right into the performance. The Guitar Hero TV experience allows players to stream official music videos and play them on the redesigned Guitar Hero guitar.

Fans of post-apocalyptic role-playing games got everything they could wish for with the release of Fallout 4. Not only does the game offer players a vast world to explore and a superb story, but you can also spend literally hours building things.

In previous games I’ve often wondered why the developers littler the world with useless objects. In Fallout 4 I could break items down to material and create all sorts of things from essential water purification systems to rather extravagant outdoor lighting.

In the build-up for the release of the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, the release of EA Games’ Star Wars Battlefront was perfectly timed. The free DLC, The Battle of Jakku, offered players their first peek at a key new location from the film.

With visuals plucked straight from the movies, Star Wars Battlefront, pressed all the right buttons for me and many of us that had been waiting nearly forty years to step into the movies. Many, however, were a bit upset with the lack of content included in the retail package and the price tag that EA put on the game’s season pass.

When it comes to over-the-top action, the Just Cause series turns it up to eleven. With Just Cause 3 Avalanche Studios took what was best about the other games- blowing shit up, and basically made the game all about that. The result is a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but offers players a crazy amount of fun.

You can spend hours in Just Cause 3 just designing mayhem. Be it tying stuff together and watching what happens or putting rocket mines on cows’ butts and having them fly about before exploding in a red mist. Naughty, but nice.

I’m still putting the finishing touches together for my Call of Duty: Black Ops III review. A far cry from last year’s Advance Warfare, Black Ops III has, in my mind, finally pushed the series too far away from its original premise and turned Call of Duty into a sci-fi shooter.

With an enjoyable if incomprehensible single-player campaign and a multiplayer experience that feels borrowed from Titanfall (but without the big robots), Call of Duty: Black Ops III really jumps the shark, giving us a fun, if totally brain-dead entry in to the series.

After last year’s critically panned game, I was surprised to find that the Victorian London-based Assassin’s Creed Syndicate shared most of its gameplay with the very similarly styled Assassin’s Creed Unity. It was interesting to find that whilst one game was derided regarding awkward controls, this new, much-lauded entry seemed to share most of the same mechanics.

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate did, however, work right out of the box on both console and PC. Personally I found the brother / sister team of Jacob and Evie Frye not as interesting as previous protagonists (notably Edward Kenway, who they will forever have trouble following) and the setting, Victorian London a bit too familiar and not as exotic as, say, the pirate-ridden Caribbean.

Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six: Siege, for me, suffers in a similar way that many found with Star Wars Battlefront. In leaving out the traditional single-player experience, the game just did sit well with me. Here was a full-priced game to all intents and purposes missing half of its content.

Don’t get me wrong, the multiplayer experience in Rainbow Six: Siege is very well honed, but with only a handful of maps, I’d hardly have called it complete. Add the real need for online co-operation into the mix and you’ve got a game that can really only be played within your circle of friends.

It was the year of the remaster and resurrecting games that were originally released in previous years I’ve deliberately left them out of the list above. I took a look at Saints Row IV: Re-Elected, DMC Devil May Cry: Definitive Edition, Borderlands: The Handsome Jack Collection, Journey, God of War III Remastered, Rare Replay and Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection. With the exception of Journey and Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, none of the others really did it for me. Rare Replay was an interesting trip down memory lane, but there was no way I was playing a thirty-five-year-old game for hours. Borderlands: The Handsome Jack Collection was good, but these where game that were still fresh in my mind and, quite frankly, looked just as good on the last-gen consoles.

2015 has been an epic gaming year, with the release of many games that we had been waiting quite some time for. There was very little to be disappointed with, either, with most games living up to the hype, the notable exceptions being Star Wars Battlefront (which could never have lived up to that sort of hype) and the disappointing PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight.

I’m going to close this feature with a list of my top games for 2015:

Best Story –Everyone’s Gone to the Rapture

Best Graphics – Star Wars Battlefront

Best Shooter/Combat Game – Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Best RPG – The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Best Sports Game – FIFA 16

Best Music Game – Guitar Hero Live

Best Racing Game – Project CARS

Best Action Game – Just Cause 3

Best Sci-Fi Game – Fallout 4

Best DLC – Dragon Age Inquisition: The Jaws of Hakkon

Best Remaster – Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection

Game of the Year – The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Here’s to a great 2016!

The post 2015 – A Gaming Year in Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Suffering delay after delay, it seemed that Dying Light was causing the veteran Polish developer a bit of a headache.

I’m a great fan of Techland, going all the way back to Chrome in 2003, but it was their 2006’s western shooter, Call of Juarez that really blew me away. Unfortunately Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood wasn’t quite as good as its predecessor and the third game in the series, the modern-day Call of Juarez: The Cartel absolutely sucked.

Techland switched genres for their next series with zombie survival-horror game, Dead Island and its follow-up Dead Island: Riptide. Despite some glitches, the games’ unique blend of open-world mission-based objectives and a rather inspired crafting mechanics, along with a beautiful Pacific setting, made them a favourite with fans.

The Dead Island franchise is owned by publishers Deep Silver who are, with the help of Spec Ops: The Line developers Yeager Developments, currently working on their own sequel. This has freed up Techland to take their ideas for a zombie game in a new direction.

Whilst the Dead Island games are not the madcap affairs that Capcom’s Dead Rising games are, there is a certain tongue-in-cheek manner about them, especially with some of the weapons that you can build.

Dying Light is by comparison a much darker and more serious affair.

You play Kyle Crane who, in pretty much the first scene in the game, ends up getting bitten by one of the infected – Dying Light’s word for zombies. Crane’s mission in the zombie-infested city of Harran is to make contact with the self-styled leader of the bandit faction, Reis, and recover an incriminating file.

Crane is directed in this task via a radio link with his agency, the Global Relief Effort, who are supposed to be helping the stricken city.

Whilst Cranes task is clear, his allegiance is not, as he must choose between his mission, which also seems to entail disregarding the welfare of the people and helping the group of survivors holed up in one of the city’s towers.

The game’s atmosphere takes a lot of inspiration from the zombie movies from the seventies and eighties, complete with the very foreboding electronic soundtrack that sounds straight out of Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters.

Visually, Dying Light is pretty awesome. The developers have chosen a more muted colour palette that give the environment a more realistic look.

Whilst the zombies do look a tad generic, especially compared to the clever way Capcom created the unique undead in Dead Rising, the city looks fantastic. Packed full of detail, zombie infestation or not, Harran is a place crying out to be explored.

Unlike in the Dead Island games, Dying Light does not have driveable vehicles, at least at the moment. Rumour has it that these may be added at a later date.

The only way to get about in the game is on foot, which is actually better than it sounds.

The game’s locomotion system is inspired. Think Assassin’s Creed in first-person. Crane is a very athletic type and an expert in parkour. The game’s free-running mechanic is pretty exhilarating and works very well. Running, leaping and climbing to get over and around shuffling zombies never gets old. But you still have to pace yourself as too much running without a rest will tire you out leaving you open for an ambush.

The game never breaks from the first-person view, even in cut scenes.

The camera motion as you jump, climb and slide is very organic, totally immersing the player in the experience. Every jump, every grab and every fall feels so real, like you are right there, trying to outrun the undead.

And the more you run around and increase your agility skills the better it gets.

Dying Light has three skill trees, each with over twenty skills to acquire.

Survivor points, which unlock crafting abilities, are earned by, basically, not dying. Every time you expire you lose your survivor points. Jumping about gains agility points unlocking movement-based skills results in making you faster and able to better engage the enemy in a physical tussle.

Power points are gained by entering into combat, which in turn allows you to unlock more combat skills.

The game’s skill trees are very powerful and can totally change the way you play the game as you increase your abilities. Situations that would have had you cowering at the beginning of the game become a minor distraction as you learn how to handle yourself in this hostile environment.

And it is a very hostile environment.

Whilst the world of Dying Light is not as jam packed with undead as the likes of Dead Rising 3, the game’s infected offer more than enough of a challenge. The zombies come in a few varieties, with the following being the most common.

The Biters are your usual George A. Romero shambling type. Virals are the recently turned and are a fast 28 Days Later type of infected. The Hazmat wearing Gastanks are unfortunate members of a clean-up crew that are slow moving with explosive tanks on their backs.

Huge goons carry a lump of concrete on the end of a bit of rebar that’ll knock you flying if you are in its reach. Toads spit a debilitating green goo. Bombers explode if they get too close taking you with them. There are a few more which I’ll leave for you to discover.

This is a bleak simulation of a proper zombie apocalypse. As such, there’s no sense in running headlong into a horde of undead; if anything the game wants you to avoid confronting zombies.

You can wander around the huge open world for hours scavenging and beating the up odd undead. But mainly you will find yourself dodging them and jumping over them, the generic zombie horde becoming as much a part of the landscape as the boarded up buildings. Apart from the odd viral, it is encounters with other people, after the same drops as you, which are likely to cause the most problem.

The GRE continuously airdrop supplies into the city, creating the optional task of recovering their contents taking it to the quartermaster in the tower. If you are lucky you’ll get to the supplies first.

If you are not quick enough you may need to dispatch some of Reis’s men first. These guys are armed and fast, and need to be taken out with care.

The key to your survival is to explore and scavenge for parts. The city is littered with boxes, some of which have locks that need picking.

Inside are items that can be either sold or used to fashion equipment or craft, upgrade or repair weapons. The game’s crafting mechanic is similar to the Dead Island games, with the discovery of blueprints unlocking some very cool weapon upgrades.

Of course, fallen zombies can also be looted for items, but that’s not always a good idea. Zombies can appear from nowhere and an easy situation can go fubar really quickly.

The only places safe from zombies are inside the fenced off safe zones that are scattered about the city, and this is doubly so at night time. Apart from the tower, which is a safe zone available from the start, other safe zones need to be cleared of zombies, powered up and sometimes secured as well, before they can be used.

An activated safe zone will keep the infected out. Some zone will also have other NPCs with side missions or items for sale. There’s also a bag for storing stuff and a bed which can be used to forward time to night or to morning.

When night falls the already bad situation gets worse. The more generic zombie types are joined by the relentless and impossible to beat Volatiles. At night the game becomes less about parkour and more about stealth. If a Volatile spots you it will chase you down until it either loses you or kills you.

My first moonlit adventure filled me with such pant-wetting terror, the like of which I’ve not experienced since Alien: Isolation’s bloody xenomorph found me holed up in a locker.

But, night-time excursions are also a good way of gaining those all-important skill points.

Not only is the amount of damage you can inflict increased, you also gain experience quicker at night. Survive until morning and you are rewarded with a huge survival point boost.

The game can be played co-operatively, in a similar way to Dead Island, either by advertising your game as joinable and having other players drop in, or by joining other players.

Available as DLC and a pre-order incentive, the “Be a Zombie” mode pits a group of players against another player who is… you guessed correctly, a zombie. The lone player is a super-zombie capable of leaping and clawing other players. It’s good fun, offering some Evolve-like action to an already jumbo-sized experience.

If you’ve got an Android tablet, there’s a Dying Light companion app available from the Google store. It’s a pretty simplistic affair, very similar to what Ubisoft did with Assassin’s Creed. It’s pretty useful as it rewards you with items that can be used in the main game.

So even when you are away from your console or computer you can still progress your game, of a fashion.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised with Dying Light.

Techland have crafted the ultimate zombie apocalypse simulator. I’m struggling to find anything that bugged me about the game. It is such a vast improvement over the flawed genius that was Dead Island, it seems that they’ve ironed out all the faults from their previous games and given us a perfectly refined version of their original vision.

I do miss running over zombies from behind the wheel of a truck, but the Parkour is so sublime and the city of Harran so well laid out it’s just a fun place to run around in. The night-time gameplay offers some genuine scares, and even in daylight the game can still catch you out; offering some genuinely pant-wetting gameplay.

I had such a great time playing Dying Light and I can’t recommend the game enough. Fans of the genre should be falling over themselves to check this game out, as should any gamer that wants to experience a truly inspired zombie apocalypse game.

The post Dying Light – Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Recently I’ve started to be bothered by zombies for an entirely different reason, namely Techland’s Dying Light.

I first played Dying Light at Sydney’s EB Expo back in 2013. Being mindful that this was a few months before the release of the Xbox One, so I’d yet to really see what the “next-gen” was capable of. Dying Light looked good, even in this alpha stage.

I’m a great fan of Techland’s Dead Island games, and Dying Light looked like a natural progression for the studio. At the time I was told, during my one-on-one with the game’s producer, Tymon Smektal that they were still working on many elements of the game- such as the shove mechanic.

But the game looked good. The parkour was working and I even got to run through the town at night. Very tense, but great fun.

Dying Light looked good and played very well, even at this early stage.

It was shortly after this hands-on and interview that the game was delayed for a year. Deadline pressures meant that it wasn’t worth my time transcribing an interview for a game that had suddenly been placed in development hell.

Fast forward a year.

Since the EB show in early September 2013, I had seen the launch of both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4.

For the Xbox (and later PC), Dead Rising 3 had shown me that you can never have too many zombies on the screen at once and The Last of Us Remastered had shown PlayStation 4 fans just what the apocalypse should look like in 1080p and 60 frames per second.

This last year has, as the new generation of consoles have matured, given us some jaw-dropping visuals and some truly amazing gaming experiences.

The bar has never been so high and the gaming public have never been so fickle. With the likes of the technically incredible, but poorly launched, Assassin’s Creed: Unity facing such vitriol from the gaming public, every developer much currently be quaking in their boots.

Each and every one of them praying that their game is met by a positive reaction from the fans.

In September last year, almost a year to the day from when I first played the game, I got another go on Dying Light.

What I played wasn’t that much different to what I could remember from my experience the year before. It was good, but the Xbox One and PS4 had spoilt me.

A huge town with only a handful of zombies attacking at once didn’t really cut it for me anymore. Even the visuals, which I’d had considered fine a year before were not up to the visual fidelity I now expected.

The game seemed OK for a work-in-progress, but whatever had been going on for the last year wasn’t really evident on the screen. And with the visceral feast of Dead Rising 3 on the PC still fresh in my mind, the idea of playing a game where I have to run away from zombies didn’t have quite the same appeal.

Right now, with only hours to the release of the game, I’ve still not seen finished code of the game. Even my recent attempts and getting review code locally have been passed directly to Techland’s PR people in Poland.

I may just be paranoid, but something seems amiss.

Stepping back a minute to look at the big picture. Techland enjoyed success with its Chrome engine, I was blown away when I first played the engine’s namesake, the sci-fi FPS, Chrome. Techland did it again with their hard-boiled western, Call of Juarez. My eyes bled when they updated the visuals some more for DX10.

The sequel, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, was good but was a bit of a step backwards.

The third game, Call of Juarez: The Cartel, with its modern-day setting, was a train-wreak- and that’s putting it nicely. Not a good game at all, and one of the few PC games I’ve never got to work properly.

Techland’s Dead Island, released in 2011, the same year as The Cartel, and was a much better effort.

A great premise, a decent plot, some good missions and hordes of ZOMBIES made for a good game. I, along with many other PC players, had some issues getting the engine to run properly, but a few tweaks and it was fine.

Strange that third party developers seem to have less trouble with the Chrome engine than the technology’s developers, Techland.

Dead Island: Riptide, the sequel/standalone expansion was, again, a good effort. It didn’t really add anything to Techland’s first zombie outing, but I still had a lot of fun with it.

Infuriatingly, however, the game still needed tweaking- the same tweaks as it’s predecessor two years before.

Whilst there’s no doubt in my mind that Techland are a very skilled development studio, you only have to look at the sublime Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, they do seem to suffer from resourcing issues or something.

As a developer, they had been known to drop the ball.

This, coupled with the fact that Deep Silver own the Dead Island IP, forcing the the developer to reinvent Dying Light as a very different type of zombie game, means there’s plenty of rope for Techland to hang themselves with.

Unless Techland have spent the last few month feverishly improving the game from what I saw in September we may well be horrified by Dying Light for all the wrong reasons.

The post Why Dying Light Might Be Horrifying (For All the Wrong Reasons) – Feature appeared first on Shane the Gamer.