Dying Light

With a bit more narrative care, Dying Light could’ve been a classic of a zombie game. Instead, it’s merely a few steps in the right direction.

Beginning as a furtive, desperate survival-horror experience, Dying Light gradually and gratifyingly evolves into a fast, hyper-violent celebration of vertical freedom and zombie destruction. Its main story is unspectacular, but the memorable side quests and sheer fun of exploring its world do a fantastic job of offsetting that, making Dying Light one of the most engrossing open-world games – zombie-infested or otherwise – I've played in a while.

Don’t get too excited about the plot, either. You’re the agent for some shifty global aid organisation, parachuted into Harran, a Turkish city in the grip of a zombie pandemic. Your job is to retrieve mysterious files, and you soon find yourself under cover with an organised group of survivors, working together to maintain some kind of order and keep the few remaining citizens alive. However, you’re also forced get involved with a brutal gang of thugs, led by a psychotic warlord. From its railroaded, no-choice moral choices to its philosophy-spouting nutjobs, Dying Light takes its characterisation and plot twists direct from the Far Cry playbook, and you’ll spend a large chunk of the early game wondering how long your hero will keep taking orders from people who are clearly up to no good. Still, at least we’re spared the downright woeful plotting and slapstick gore of the Dead Island games.