This game is unfathomably good. I am not normally a huge fan of zombie apocalypse games, or zombie survival games, or zombie games at all, but this is one of my favorite, if not my favorite game of all.

The gameplay is smooth as silk, the parkour is effortless (unlike say, Mirror's Edge, whose glitches can make it too infuriating to play) - they are fast and fluid, even before you invest points to improve them. The melee combat is near perfect, whether you're bashing a zombie's brains in with a nail hammer, or dismembering it with a katana or longsword, it feels great. The ways to fight or avoid the hordes are vast and varied, and the city is riddled with traps to utilize and other hazardous obstacles (to you and zombies) to use to get the job done. It all adds up to a very coherent and natural experience.

The zombies are not weak, either. Even later in the game, when you slice through mobs of them with sharp edged weapons, you will still come across some who just refuse to go down until they have no blood left in their walking corpse. There's good challenge to be had in this game - it gets just comfortable enough to make you complacent, and then you're jumped by Virals or Volatiles and -dead-. I've died a lot, I even die in New Game+ mode, which is unusual, especially for a game like this. That said, I definitely recommend playing on the hardest difficulty, because it gets too easy too fast once you level up on anything else (in my humble opinion). A game like this, is supposed to be dangerous. Harran is supposed to be a hellhole, not a crap shoot, after all.

The graphics are gorgeous - the city may not be, but it still has a haunting beauty. It's common to stumble out of a pile of trash bags and onto a concrete ledge overlooking some shanties and thinking "wow, that's the most beautiful slum I've ever seen" (no, the game doesn't all take place in a slum, just the first part) The amount of detail in the environment is staggering, with a polish you'll find in very few games since the beginning of video gaming. Nothing is half-assed, everything appears to be a labor of love.

The sound design is beautiful as well - it can be "peaceful" (as peaceful as being trapped in a city full of zombies can be) and downright terrifying a short while later. The contrast between these moments create the perfect tension at all times. Those moments of quiet, where the only sounds you hear are distant screams and wails and moans and groans of the undead, the wind in the grass and the occasional sound of a chain link fence or falling rocks and pebbles will have you looking over your shoulder over and over... and finally when you hear the obvious threats, when you know a viral sees you or night falls and the sounds change to crickets and the heavy breathing of monstrous volatiles (and several other monstrosities..) ends up making you long for that "tension" from earlier in the day. The sound manages to convey all of this expertly.

The voice acting is fantastic as well. Most of the characters, even the less believable ones, manage to give their lines without making you pass out from cringe. The main character is very believable and many of his lines are entertaining.

And the plot / writing. Great. There are some very unique and entertaining side quests, all fully voiced and varied in their objectives, they are very fun. The main plot is releatively short, and I suggest not rushing through all of it first - that would disrupt the otherwise near perfect flow of the game. Play it organically. Take a break when things aren't urgent and help some survivors - I found myself going back and forth between main quest and side quests constantly. Every time there was a reasonable place to stop, I would end up doing a handful of side quests. I've seen people call Kyle Crane, the player character, generic - but I don't think he is. He's got some great and unconventional lines, often saying what I'm thinking about the situations he's in. I think a lot of the people I've read saying that just don't like that he's a "white guy" in a presumably middle eastern country - but that is all in the plot. I for one am sickend by the amount of offense people take at things like this. I can't help but think anything but "maybe gaming ... or life, just isn't for you" ...but that is a rant for some other place.

Harran is a pleasure to navigate, a terrifying one, and remains entertaining even after you've navigated it for hours and hours, and been through an area several times. Anything can happen, and you can die anywhere. When you play it, wear headphones and have the lights off - that's my advice. You don't want to miss a detail of this game. Go buy it, now; as an added bonus, Techland has consitently released new and updated content for this game since release, some of these content expansions are very recent. I don't utilize all of them, but it's nice that they're there and the developer loves their game so much to do things like that for free.

...just go buy the game.