Let’s get it out of the way up front: Days Gone is another zombie game. They’re called Freakers and they’re technically still alive, but the end result is the same: they want to kill you.

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The thing that separates Freakers from the zombies in The Walking Dead or Resident Evil is the sheer volume of them. Even if you had infinite ammo, you’d never be able to wipe out the horde that surrounds you at every turn. Instead, you need to outrun them. You need to use the environment around you to slow them down and buy every second you can. Your life depends on it.In a demo shown at E3 , Deacon (the bounty hunter and ex-biker gang member you play as) is searching an abandoned sawmill for a man named Two Dog. Unfortunately, Two Dog gets taken down pretty quickly (R.I.P. Two Dog), leaving Deacon to fend off the horde.This is where Days Gone shined. The game is gorgeous to begin with, but seeing literally hundreds of Freakers on screen running toward you is overwhelming and terrifying. We saw Deacon crafting Molotov cocktails à la The Last of Us, blowing up oil drums, knocking down obstacles and doing generally anything else he could to obstruct the terrifying horde on his tail.At one point, Deacon runs through the upper level of a workshop, eventually coming to a bridge. After he runs across, he turns and shoots the bridge just as the horde begins to cross it, sending dozens of Freakers careening toward the ground. It’s a perfect example of using the environment against your attackers, but it wasn’t immediately clear how Days Gone will indicate which parts of the environment are destructible and which are fixed. Sony Bend said it's still working on indicators to communicate exactly that.Days Gone certainly has my attention, and it’s great to see Sony Bend doing something so ambitious after years of silence, but it remains to be seen if Deacon’s story will be enough to make it stand out from the other zombie games out there.

Andrew is IGN’s executive editor of news and is out of shape enough that he’d probably be caught by zombies very quickly. You can find him rambling about Persona and cute animals on Twitter