Dying Light trailer proves that every game should feature grappling hooks

News
By published

I can't think of a single game that wouldn't be improved with a grappling hook. Football Manager, Euro Truck Simulator—oh God the possibilities are endless. Even if your game already features a grappling hook, you can always add more . And you should. This hot-button grapple opinion is sponsored by the news that Dying Light is going to feature a grappling hook. This will let you quickly get up buildings like some kind of...Man-Spider, without having to suffer the deep humiliation of using a ladder. In less exciting news, Techland's parkour zombie game will also include four-player co-op and swimming sections, as shown off in this new Gamescom trailer.

Grappling hook! Swimming! Exclamation marks! Admittedly, quite a lot of that trailer is spent gleefully showcasing the game's head-splattering killing moves and gory dismemberment, things I find less and less palatable as time goes on. While Dying Light's four-player co-op is sort of shown off here, it's not clear what it involves exactly—the free-running aspects tell me that it might play quite differently to Techland's less ambulatory Dead Island. One neat difference is that you can now change a character's clothes, at least in co-op, although it's not clear whether that pair of FBI shades will come with any special bonuses.

I suspect we'll see more of Dying Light at Gamescom next week—the video's title was a bit of a giveaway.

A reminder: Dying Light has been delayed to February next year.

Tom Sykes
Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.