Fans of "The Walking Dead" will likely relish "Days Gone," the new video game thriller out Friday for Sony PlayStation 4. The post-apocalyptic premise is similar: Your character has survived a global pandemic, while millions have died or turned into ferocious predatory humanoids. If you've only seen the game depicted in TV commercials, at first glance you might be excused for considering these creatures as cousins of those "Walking Dead" zombies. But no, these beasts are transformed humans called "Freakers." "Days Gone" creative director and writer John Garvin explains: "What we have done here is actually create something that is new. They are not really mutants, they are certainly not demons or aliens or robots. They are not zombies either. They are their own thing."

I needed some explosive chemicals from the old sawmill on the edge of town, but hundreds of freakers were gathered there, feasting on a mass grave. So I set explosive traps around the building's edges, planned a course through its twists and turns, then tossed a napalm-filled molotov cocktail into the building. They were on me in an instant -- hundreds of hungry monsters ready to rip me limb from limb. I ran for it, hoping not to blow myself up with my own bombs or become the freakers' next meal. After an hour of fighting, dying, and trying again, I was finally victorious. I was out of ammo, explosives and medical supplies, but the horde was dead.

After only 10 minutes, you realise something about Days Gone that will come to mind throughout the next 20 hours or so: it is as if Far Cry was set in a B-movie version of The Last of Us universe. If you're okay with that, you're going to have a heck of a ride. The latest title from Sony's SIE Bend Studio (responsible for the Syphon Filter series) is set in the beautiful, rural Pacific Northwest, after the spread of a virus that turns victims into the kind of absolutely-not-zombies we saw in Danny Boyle's film 28 Days Later. Survivors either hole up together in paranoid communities or drift from one compound to the next, killing the infected for bounties. Lead protagonist Deacon St John is a rootless biker who takes on tasks for these fragile clans, blasting monsters and thieves while grieving his lost wife, Sarah, a botanist who arrived in the area to study plant life before the pandemic and ended up falling for our sullen hero.