I had the opportunity to get behind the curtain for Techland’s newest offering–a standalone battle royale game using mechanics and weaponry from Dying Light, subtitled Bad Blood. I wasn’t sure what to expect going in, since I hadn’t heard too much about the project before attending GDC.

I’m generally not into these types of games, despite playing quite a few of them occasionally with friends. With that being said, I wasn’t hating my time with Dying Light, even if I got positively destroyed in the multiplayer matches I participated in.

If you played Dying Light in 2015, you’ll probably feel right at home.

It has a lot in common with its predecessor, including: parkour, loot, weapon upgrades, and killing zombies being the main focal points. Of course, being a battle royale game, Bad Blood also adds PVP to the mix, pitting you against other players in a battle for survival.

It’s intrinsically different than most other games in the genre, since there is actually a fairly important PVE aspect to the game, and you’re not just shanking other players the whole time.

There’s a helicopter picking you up at the end of the match, and only one player with a certain amount of blood samples can escape in the chopper. You gain blood samples via killing zombies, with special infected netting you more than regular ol’ zombos.

In addition to collecting blood through killing zambinos, you can also gank other players and steal all the vials they’ve collected so far. However, you level up from collecting blood, which makes you quite a bit harder to kill.

I played two matches of Dying Light: Bad Blood at the event, and got completely Baja-Blasted in both sessions.

It didn’t help that there were people from the actual game crew playing against we poor media plebs, none of us stood a chance. I still managed to get a good feel of the mechanics at play, though, and even took down a big honkin’ zooble with a hammer.

It was only seconds after I collected his blood that one of the other players ganked me, easily killing my level 1 ass and taking all my stuff. I came to realize it was one of the game developers who did me like that, though we shook hands afterward and my sodium levels returned to normal.

Dying Light: Bad Blood will be coming out sometime in 2018 as a standalone release, meaning you don’t need the original Dying Light in order to play. You can sign up for the global test server here, though it doesn’t have an official start date yet.