10 Brilliant Video Games That Surprised Everyone - Commenter Edition

Despite Dying Light's impressive trailers and marketing material, players were understandably skeptical.

After all, they had been burned before by the profound and mysterious trailer for Techland's previous Zombie RPG Dead Island, and what did they end up with?

Well... they ended up with Dead Island - a shallow grind plagued by uninspired, repetitive combat and AI so poor it wore a sack with holes cut in it. The thought of another zombie RPG with a suspiciously pre-rendered cinematic trailer hardly boded well.

Concerns were unfounded, however, when Dying Light turned out to be absolutely excellent. The fictional Middle Eastern city of Haran was a joy to traverse, offering limitless climbing potential and elegant travelling through use of the game's central parkour mechanics. The combat was also vastly improved, with protagonist Kyle Crane able to cut through waves of shambling undead, and confrontations with human enemies that were contrastingly challenging and tactical.

Of course, the game's biggest draw was its day to night transition: once the sun had set, out came the Volatiles. These near-invincible infected enemies, faster, stronger, smarter and more aggressive than regular zombies, reduced the player from predator to prey in an instant.

Scrambling for relative safety to wait out the sunrise was both exhilarating and terrifying.