In a show that's been very light on surprises so far, it's amusing that a zombie game, of all things, should be one of the biggest. In the absence of the big-hitter Nintendo launch games that we expected to see at E3, ZombiU is the standout title on Wii U at the moment. It's tense, innovative and genuinely scary, using the touchscreen controller to build tension and force you to think differently as well as expedite control. And - at the moment, anyway - it's got permanent death, which really makes things interesting, especially when one bite is enough to kill you. No recharging health bar here.

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“ You're constantly flicking your gaze upwards fearfully whilst rifling through a corpse's pockets.

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The E3 demo for ZombiU has you hunting through a nursery near Buckingham Palace, sent out from a safehouse into the zombie-riddled streets of London. You're guided by a voice in your head, the Leader, whom we didn't get to see - but evidently he directs a group of survivors after this zombie apocalypse, sending them out for supplies and keeping in touch over radio whilst you furtively rummage through dead people's pockets and hope that a zombie doesn't burst out of the nearest cupboard.You control yourself in first-person on the screen as you would in any other game; left trigger zooms, right trigger fires, the analogue sticks let you move and aim. But things get more interesting when the touch screen comes into play. The left button lets you scan your surroundings on the Wii U controller, Metroid Prime-style, panning the controller around to identify threats and potential resources like discarded items or un-reanimated dead people. When you're looting, your inventory pops up on the Wii U controller, letting you rearrange items by tapping and dragging. You can't carry much, so it's important to prioritise.When using a long-range weapon like a crossbow, you can aim and zoom on the Wii U pad as if you're looking through the sights - which isn't an option with a pistol, shotgun or baseball bat. In classic survival horror style, ammo is limited and zombies take more than a few bullets to go down, so you have to try to keep calm and aim carefully, or you'll end up frantically pulling the trigger on an empty gun as a slavering undead lurches towards you. In that situation, you can push zombies away from you with a desperate shove, but it won't keep them away for long.At the entrance to Buckingham Palace, I cautiously take out three or four feeding zombies from afar, then scan the area. The scan pulls up no threats, but there's an ammo stash that looks promising. Whilst I'm examining what's there, though, five zombies burst out from the darkness behind me, nearly giving me a heart attack. I fumble pathetically with the controls, trying to equip the shotgun I just found, before one of them bears down upon me and eats my face. It's here that I discover that death is permanent in ZombiU - and I lose all the stuff that I've managed to pick up.Restarting from the safehouse as another survivor, I encounter my former self in the same spot that I died, in zombified form. After blowing my head off, I discover that all the items I'd found were on the body. This is a cool mechanic, letting you recover what you've lost whilst keeping the sense of danger high. At E3, floating names indicated which of the zombies I encountered were once survivors themselves, hinting at some kind of online integration that lets you see where other players met their demise.ZombiU is effective because it doesn't overdo the scares. You don't actually come across zombies all that often, so when you do it's bloody terrifying. You're constantly stopping, scanning, checking your inventory, reloading, holding your breath when you walk into a new room. The nursery near the palace is covered in bloody, child-sized handprints, hinting at the awful things that must have happened there. As you make your way through it, you have to keep an eye on every dark corner or unexplored corridor for fear that something might be lurking there, ready to stumble towards you as soon as you crouch down to examine something or pick a lock on the bottom screen.My objective is to grab some medicine and get out, but predictably it isn't that simple. As soon as I find the keycard to the nursery's medical bay, I run straight in to snatch the meds, but as soon as I do, the floor falls through and I find myself in a horrendous basement graveyard full of fetid water and corpses. The screen on the Wii U controller goes fuzzy, disabling my scanner and my map, and I'm forced to wade through this filth blind. I won't spoil what happens, but it's one hell of a good scare.

Graphically, Zombi U isn’t enormously impressive – this is early code, obviously, but it’s currently a far cry from the target-render concept imagery shown off in the debut trailer at Ubisoft’s conference yesterday (you can look at that above). In motion it's like a polished-up Wii game. If there's one thing that can change before release, though, it's this, so I'm not concerned about it at the moment. The underlying concepts and the usage of the touchscreen controller are both impressive enough to shine through regardless.

It's no exaggeration to say that ZombiU is a potential system-seller at the moment. It's classic survival horror, but with modern tools. (I also didn't know until five minutes ago that it's actually a reboot: Ubisoft's first ever published game was

, and was released for the Spectrum and Amstrad in 1986.) We can assume it's a launch game, so it'll be with us sometime before the end of the year. There's work to do before then, but this is promising stuff.

Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games team in the UK. For updates from E3, you can follow her on Twitter and IGN