14 DAY TRIAL // Techland's current big project is Dying Light, as while the Polish studio is working on Hellraid, most of its team is focusing on the open world action adventure zombie game.
After showing off the title multiple times, at Gamescom 2014 the Polish developer brought forth a new build of the experience designed to demonstrate the cooperative mode.
Besides delivering a story campaign that can be completed in single-player mode, all missions can also support up to four players via the cooperative mode.
While the core mission structure isn't altered when playing cooperatively, Techland did add extra things to make going through the game with friends more fun. During certain moments special challenges can be triggered. These range from who kills the most zombies in the following hours, to who can reach an exit the fastest. The challenges are optional but they're quite fun and add another layer to the whole zombie killing experience.
Besides completing missions, the cooperative mode can also feature a competitive side, as another player can enter the game and control a special zombie called the Night Hunter.
This very powerful undead is reminiscent of the Hunter from the Left 4 Dead franchise, as he can jump around the environment and can use a deadly pounce move to automatically kill human players. Besides this, a ground pound move can also be employed to stagger multiple humans.
Luckily, however, the other players can fight him in different ways, primarily by shining the UV flashlight onto the Hunter. This can stop the deadly pounces in mid air and, when shined sufficiently, can allow the zombie to be killed using conventional attacks.
However, the main goal of the humans is to find groups of zombie hives and to destroy them before the Night Hunter eliminates all their respawns. In order to make sure that they know where the Night Hunter is, they can also deploy their Survivor Sense, which emanates a radar-like pulse that shows the zombie on the mini-map for a limited time.
The whole experience is quite intense and seamlessly moves from the actual story campaign into the cooperative/competitive encounter.
In terms of general gameplay, Dying Light is still quite fun, although the parkour elements take some time to get used and, in some cases, are still a bit uncertain, depending on the collision detection with ledges and objects you can stand on.
The visuals are even better than in previous demonstrations and Techland promises to make even more improvements until it's ready to release Dying Light in early 2015 for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One platforms.