Dying Light and State of Decay have a rival as new zombie game surges on Steam

The power of the zombie is in its relentlessness. Whether you're playing Dying Light, Project Zomboid, No More Room in Hell 2, or any of the other major undead-killing sims making moves today, every time you dispatch one shambling corpse it's immediately replaced by two others. You're never safe. You've got to stay mobile. Unless you're prepared to abandon all your supplies and make a dash for it at any moment, you probably won't survive. The Midnight Walkers is founded on this spirit. A hybrid zombie game and extraction FPS, it's set entirely inside a single building, and constantly pushes you to up sticks, keep running, and fight a fresh path to safety. The first playtest is live now, and it's already pulled in thousands of players.

Liberty Grand Center is divided into 15 floors, including a casino, luxury apartments, and a shopping mall. Naturally, each story is stocked with precious, diverse gear, and your goal is to acquire as much food, armor, and materiel as possible, and make it to the exit. But there are two complications.

First, the entire complex is teeming with zombies, and they can only be eradicated via smacks to the head from your arsenal of improvised weapons. Second, at sporadic intervals, random floors of Liberty Grand Center will be flooded with poison gas, and if you don't make it to the emergency staircase, elevator, or some other point of egress in time, you're dinner. The best zombie games try to pile the pressure on you. The Midnight Walkers wants to squash you flat.

Combat is weighty and bloody, individual zombies are strong enough to spoil your day, and you play either individually or in a team of three. Putting aside the Dying Light and Dead Island comparisons, The Midnight Walkers' festering urban ruins and tied-together melee weapons remind me of Condemned Criminal Origins.

If you want to try it yourself, The Midnight Walkers playtest runs from Friday July 4 until the end of Monday July 7. Already, it's pulled in more than 4,000 concurrent players on Steam. You have to apply to get in, but based on our own research here at PCGamesN, you should get a response and an invite pretty quick. Just head here.

Otherwise, you might want to try some of the best survival games, or maybe push your PC's performance to the top with the best graphics cards available right now.

You can follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides. We've also got a vibrant community Discord server, where you can chat about this story with members of the team and fellow readers.