Escape To The Country With Dying Light: The Following

One of the first big success stories of the year, Techland built Dying Light on the foundations of weighty parkour, chunky melee combat and a day-night cycle that saw the game transform once the sun dipped beneath the horizon. It would be easy to give players more of the same, but with The Following, they’re looking to turn it on its head.

For one thing, there’s nowhere near as many rooftops to run and leap across once you break out of the built-up areas of Harran and out into the countryside, and getting around on foot is not the best way to go about things when faced with wide open fields. For a game that’s focussed so heavily on parkour thus far – don’t worry, parkour will still be a major part of the game – adding driveable vehicles in the form of the buggy makes it quite easy to legitimately label this a game changer.

In a story that lives alongside that of the main game, rumours of a group of Sun God worshipping cultists – the eponymous The Following – out in the countryside having a form of immunity to the zombie virus have brought Kyle Crane out to investigate. It draws you into a very different environment that goes hand in hand with the buggy, which simply wouldn’t be suitable for the streets of Harran, strewn with derelict vehicles and blockades as they are.

The arcade-like handling is nice and easy to pick up, with wide open spaces to rampage through. Being able to move so fast is certainly a boon when the fields are filled with so many zombies and patches of tall grass or crops in which they can easily hide, but the demo area started off without affording you such four-wheeled luxury, forcing you to go on foot to a scavenger outpost where they’d taken your buggy to.

Of course, one of the major hooks to Dying Light was the co-op play, and that’s no different here. You can ride shotgun on another player’s buggy, should you so wish, but Techland aren’t being stingy with the vehicles, and the two of us playing together got a set of wheels to call our own.

These are eminently customisable and upgradeable as well, with a special skill tree for the buggy, with everything from more armour and spikes to skewer zombies on, to the more outlandish with the electric cage. The final few seconds of the demo shows you’ll likely need every little advantage you can get, as I drove off a cliff into a truly ludicrous horde of zombies.

That’s true of the firearms in the game as well, with Techland hoping to make gunplay a much more viable option in the heat of the moment. They’re set to be beefed up a little, which will make going up against human enemies a little more interesting, but there’s also new guns being added to the mix. So there’s things like the SMG, and a few other conventional guns, but it’s going to be the much requested crossbow that will be a fan favourite.

The crossbow made taking on the handful of scavengers that had nicked our buggies nice and easy to do silently, as we split up and took them out without being detected. However you do it, defeating bands of scavengers will ingratiate you to the cultists, so that you might be able to gain their trust and uncover their secret. There’s a less linear quest chain as you do this, giving you the freedom to tackle the various missions and objectives that pop up in the order of your choosing.

Perhaps the best part for the many fans that bought the DLC season pass – and it’s partly because of the sheer volume of people to do so, explained Lead Game Designer Maciej Binkowski – is that this will be free for those with the season pass. It’s a way of Techland saying thank you to those that supported them and is the latest in a long string of such moves that have generated a lot of good will. On top of that, this is far from a token addition, but a major expansion that looks to substantially change the way you play the game.