China and its video games are a strange beast; their titles are a mixed bag of weird and quirky homebrew games, and the much larger market known to take more than a few liberties with other IPs. At any given moment in time, you can go to any app store on mobile, or Steam on PC, and find various Chinese clones of the top-selling and most popular games. While the actual legality of this is very dubious, to say the least, quality has often varied from game to game, sometimes ranging from shameless knock-off that runs worse than its ‘inspiration,’ to a mechanically commendable effort, and sometimes even handling better than the original.
While we can expect titles like this to pop up for battle royale or MOBA games, it would seem that China has found a new flavor to play with: zombie games. Tencent, one of the biggest gaming companies in China, looks to capitalize on this with their latest mobile game endeavor called 代号：生机 , which roughly translates to Code: Live. Check out the trailer below and look for properties which you may recognize.
Just got round to watching the trailer for one of Tencent's upcoming games. Currently under a codename: 代号：生机.
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) May 26, 2019
It's basically an open world survival type game with zombies. Has online Co-Op gameplay. Kind of reminds me of Days Gone tbh. https://t.co/mXp4YFOO9w
The trailer starts off with a fairly familiar sight if you’ve played Days Gone recently. This is because it’s an almost 1:1 recreation of Days Gone’s own trailer, which I don’t know how they got away with to be honest. It then switches to a base being fortified by four players, which would suggest that the game will have mechanics similar to Metal Gear Survive and State of Decay 2. Likewise, the four-player component is a staple for co-op zombie shooters like Left 4 Dead and the recent World War Z. A callback to the latter can also be seen in the game, with zombie piling up on top of each other to scale some of the fortifications made by players, which looks incredibly similar to the Swarms’ behavior in World War Z.
While I’m usually skeptical of the Chinese ‘slap everything together and hope it works’ video game model, it could potentially work in this case. It looks like it took the best out of everything from various successful zombie games made in the past, and put it together in a mobile package. It still remains to be seen how Code: Live will look in terms of gameplay, as the trailer is only cinematic in nature.
All of this said, I still don’t get what they were going for with the Days Gone addition. Perhaps motorcycles? Either way, we’ll find out soon enough once proper gameplay footage surfaces.
