Out in the sticks, hitting things with sticks
You’d be forgiven for thinking The Following was a sequel as opposed to a simple expansion. Taking place in the countryside around Harran, it presents rolling cornfields, forests and craggy cliffs over an area equal to the size of the city’s two regions combined. It’s this scale that our demo is keen to emphasise, as a claustrophobic cave network opens into a panoramic mountaintop view of the new playground. That we’re then invited to dive into a distant lake below suggests this is a slightly more fantastical trip than the gruelling struggle faced in Harran’s zombie-plagued streets.
The fear is that, well, there would be no fear. How do you create tension when you have the run of the great outdoors? Despite a lack of buildings, the infected population is still high, with revamped AI that quickly draws crowds towards any minor fracas, snowballing it into something much more substantial. On foot the smart situation is to dart along ditches or fenced off lanes, or use the returning parkour moves to vault onto oil pipelines and dart over the swarms of gnashing teeth below. You’re freer to navigate, yes, but there’s less high ground for you to safely retreat to.
Our mission is to retrieve a stolen car from a group of bandits, in doing so earning the trust of a new cult – it’s these weirdos, and their apparent immunity to the infection, that drives The Following’s story. Having more human foes justifies an enlarged focus on ranged weapons, including a meaty crossbow that gets introduced with some wanton pumpkin destruction. The first casualty of war is innocence, but the second is always gourds. Still, the farmer’s loss is our gain and, indeed, the infected’s loss, as bolts spear into their brains to drop them on the spot.
The crossbow also opens a stealthier approach to a bandit-controlled farm. Sniping out their scouts lets you zipline to the barn roof and pick off stragglers below. Or it does in theory: our noisy co-op partner unloads an SMG, triggering both a firefight with the bandits and coaxing the undead horde into busting down the gate.
The same SMG makes standing your ground a little easier, although the smart route out is in the now liberated buggy. Steering the vehicle feels very similar to Far Cry – a bouncy, arcade-y point-and-steer setup, as opposed to anything too serious.
Tearing up the open terrain, splatting zombies on the bonnet, feels really far removed from our nervous days in Harran, but then shouldn’t that be the point of DLC? Our favourite expansions – The Ballad of Gay Tony; Blood Dragon – don’t just grow the core game, but rip them in totally different directions. Here, in the seat of the buggy, you finally feel empowered against the horde. The shoe’s on the other foot and is stamping the gas pedal to the ground as heads pop and squelch under the wheel. At least, it is until an epic ramp jump sends us plummeting into a swarm of one hundred or more.
This 15 minute rush is cleverly constructed to deliver all of The Following’s big ideas at once, but it works. If Techland is able to fill its world with a similar concentration of fun, this expansion could easily surpass the source material. Matthew Castle