Much like Dead Island, you'll be spending most of your time swinging melee weapons such as cricket bats and machetes, but you will eventually happen upon woolly firearms. Harran is infested with lifeless lurchers, and you'll need to dispatch of these should the situation arise.

Of course, you won't be entirely unobstructed while going about your business. As already alluded, this only gets better with time, too, as you increase your energy levels and even unlock grappling hooks. The studio does break the momentum that this enables in places вЂ“ pixel hunting for an entrance into a blocked out building is the ultimate mood killer вЂ“ but when you get a real run going, the satisfaction is immense. Unlike in DICE's seminal release вЂ“ where there was only ever one true path that you could take вЂ“ Techland has managed to infuse its free-running outing with dozens of different routes, allowing you to pick and choose exactly where you want to go. The thing that really makes the system shine, though, is just how tightly designed the sandbox is. This isn't as fun as it should be at first, purely because the progression system limits your stamina to an almost obstructive degree, but as you start to level up and acquire skill points, you're afforded an impressive sense of freedom. Building upon many of the abilities teased in Mirror's Edge, you'll be sprinting across favela rooftops and through winding sewers, performing all manner of slick manoeuvres. Locomotion is crucial in any sandbox game, and this adventure succeeds by giving you a tremendous sense of speed. Naturally, you'll all play as the same person. Within about five hours of starting the release, you'll have a mission log longer than your chew bitten arm, and all of these can be solved individually or co-operatively with a party of up to four players. At its infected heart, this is an open world quest-a-thon in a similar vein to Far Cry or even Fallout, in which it's fun to simply get out in the field and be the problem solver that everyone expects of you. This wouldn't be so bad if the title didn't attempt to tug at the heart strings at times, but it does, and any attempts at poignancy subsequently fall laughably flat.ДЇortunately, this clearly isn't an affair that's coveting some kind of story-telling award, and it makes it easy to skip through the dismal dialogue in order to get to the title's meaty core. Most characters can't seem to decide which country they're supposed to be from, so what you're left with is a rabble of expatriates performed by Eastern European actors. The ex- Call of Juarez maker is renowned for its questionable use of accents, but its latest endeavour borders on self-parody at points. It doesn't help that the voice acting across the board is beyond bad. It's an ambitious premise, but one that's packed with pantomime personalities and dodgy double-crosses, and it ends up offering little more than context for the release's corpse culling sandbox. You've been dropped into the infected South American-inspired city of Harran by a shady organisation, and it's there that you're tasked with rendezvousing with the natives in order to recover a mysterious file currently in the possession of a tyrannous war lord. The plot is as predictable as they come, plopping you into the running shoes of the ever-dependable everyman, Kyle Crane. This is essentially Dead Island with the budget required to do it justice вЂ“ and while it's not exactly the most original outing ever made, it will get its claw into you if you allow it.

You'll feel a little underpowered during the undead-'em-up's opening exchanges, but as you gradually cross quests off your multiplying mission log and sink your teeth into the title's story, Polish developer Techland's parkour-inspired escapade really comes into its own. Unlike a zombie bite, Dying Light gets better with time.

Dying light switch review