10 "Assumed To Fail" Video Games That DESTROYED Expectations
4. Dying Light
Techland earned massive appeal through the company's unique take on the overused Zombie game design in 2011's hit Dead Island. However, almost immediately after Dead Island, Techland lost all their goodwill when they released Dead Island Riptide, a really buggy DLC for Dead Island.
So when Techland announced that they would be trying AGAIN to make a AAA first-person zombie survival game, fans were pretty much zombied out. Even as more of the game was shown, people just wanted Dead Island 2, not Dead Island meets Mirrors Edge set in some made-up country in the Middle East.
Zombie games can be often super fresh and also perhaps the most overused trope in video game development history. How many games that aren't zombie games do you know of that have zombie modes tacked onto them?
But nonetheless, Dying Light was released in 2015 and was actually well received. The parkour was something unique, the crafting was very much Dead Island, but the weapons were still fun to use.
The zombies themselves were often challenging to fight against, and the introduction of a super zombie monster called Volatiles, who were actually scary near impossible to fight against when you start Dying Light.
Dying Light may not have revitalized the zombie genre, but it was such an entertaining game to play by yourself or with friends, that it earned itself a slow crawl to the top of game charts for a while.