Racing Through The Countryside In Dying Light: The Following

Having spent dozens of hours running across the rooftops of Harran, using parkour skills to leap from one ledge to the next, scrambling up walls and over fences to get away from the infected, The Following suddenly feels quite unfamiliar. After a short dash through a cave in the preview build, I squint in the blazing sunlight as Kyle Crane emerges onto the side of a cliff face. Instead of buildings, there’s fields, trees and mountains as far as the eye can see.

It’s a huge new setting that doesn’t suit getting around on foot, not just because of the distances you’ll have to travel and the time that would take, but also because there can be an awful lot of zombies in the way and nowhere near as many obstacles.

So it’s a good thing that, after a grumpily dismissive reception from a small settlement of country folk, a trader named Kaan takes pity on you and points you in the direction of a dirt buggy that you might use. Of course, he neglects to tell you that it’s in the middle of a bandit camp, but once you liberate it from them – by whatever means you deem necessary – you’ll be hooning around the countryside in no time.

Put simply, the buggy is fantastic. Even in its initial form, it’s just a lot of fun to drive. When a mission tasked me with following a pipeline, did I just keep my eye on it from the small country roads? Not a chance, I was ducking between the support structures, crashing through fences and ploughing into zombies.

In some ways, you could consider it to be a new character to play as. All the experience and skills that you earnt in Harran remains, and Crane doesn’t have any new skills, other than those which directly feed into the new Driver skill tree, which lets you upgrade and better your buggy, and a separate loadout system as well. You’ll be kitting it out with mines that you can drop behind you, a turbo, a grill at the front to help you smash through zombies easier, or simply improve the fuel efficiency – you have to check the fuel caps on cars or from a rare filling station in order to fill up the tank.

But there’s only so much fun you can have out in the countryside before the sun starts to dip below the horizon. It’s not that you need to turn the headlights on, but that, just as in the city, the Volatiles come out to play. Instead of just having to avoid their cones of vision, you’ll have to avoid a circle of hearing, and it excellently maintains that shift in style of gameplay that was such an integral part of the original game. Get things wrong, and they’re fast enough that losing them will be a stern test, while a bit of the turbo will do to shake them off if they manage to catch you.

There is something you can do to make the fields a little more hospitable at night, though, and that is to search out and destroy the Volatile Hives which dot the countryside. It’s something best done at night, funnily enough, because that’s when they’re on the prowl on the outside, but that doesn’t mean the eerily lit cave is unoccupied, and the pressure is ratcheted higher by a timer that tells you how long you have left until dawn.

Clearing these Hives, tracking down the missing persons on the bulletin boards, and just playing through the story missions will all work to improve your Follower rank. The country folk are naturally distrustful of outsiders, but little by little, you want to work your way in until you can meet the Mother, and maybe find some kind of cure to the zombie virus. Along the way, there’s a new cast of characters to meet, like Jasir and his petulant daughter Ezgi, or the talented engineer Bilal, who sets up time trial races for you to try and beat around the open world. Not much has changed in terms of performance capture, so they still look quite awkward, but Dying Light did a good job of creating characters and that looks set to continue.

With two hours of play time under my belt, I know that I’m barely scratching the surface of what the countryside has to offer. I’ve butted into artificial limits within the demo area for one thing, but I’ve also stumbled across moments of environmental storytelling, where a military convoy has found itself trapped and overrun by zombies on a raised motorway. Thankfully, there are just enough gaps between cars and stretches of open road that you can race down this in the buggy at full tilt…

Keep an eye out for later this week, where we’ll have a video of The Following in action. Sadly it wasn’t ready in time to go alongside this article.