Parkoury zombie bludgeoner Dying Light: The Beast has, literally just this minute, gone on sale, which means the review embargo curtain has lifted on RPS to reveal… an empty chair with an IOU stuck to it.
This one is my bad, rather than because of any cheeky code withholding. I’d simply underestimated how many trillions of PC games were also out this week, and had to abandon my charge through The Beast to help keep the undermanned Treehouse on top of things elsewhere. Still, we’ll shortly be bringing you a full, likely much better appraisal from RPS veteran Dominic Tarason (thaaaaaanks Dominic), and in penance, I offer some initial impressions from my couple of hours with the game’s opening.
Firstly, Techland weren’t kidding about the nighttime. In response to complaints that the nocturnally inclined zombs of Dying Light 2: Stay Human weren’t sufficiently scary after the sun goes down, The Beast looks to put more horror back in the darkness. Successfully, in the mind of this wimp. Between the night’s pitch blackness, the keyring LED you call a torch, and the sprinting, lethally hench super-zeds that aren’t at all keen on sharing the game’s rooftops, any sort of freerunning you were flexing with during the daylight hours is effectively reduced to nervous shimmying through the void.
Yet it still feels like you’re supposed to be chased back to the safehouse by these burly Volatile bois now and then, in which case panic and near-blindness become enemies in themselves. Several attempts to survive my first night ended with my shinbones shooting up into my lungs, the stress of a pursuit having overwhelmed my ability to consider whether a roof-to-roof jump was actually doable before I hurled myself into the cobbles below. It’s not always “fun”, strictly speaking. But it is decent horror.
If anything, The Beast’s brighter hours could do with more of this urgency. The bread-and-butter meleeing benefits from some nicely heavy hittin’ sticks, but the actual swinging sensation is on the wrong side of sluggish, at least in these early stages. The first two bosses aren’t that exhilarating either: they require little in the way of sharp timing or last-gasp dodging, outside of a few repeating, heavily telegraphed attacks.
Visually and practically, they’re also just minor variations on the same ‘What if a ghoul was taller and shredded’ concept, which somewhat saps the excitement out of your stated mission of hunting and killing as many of these souped- up zeds as possible. Fleeting thrills can be had in the moments when you transform into a berzerking monsterman yourself, ripping off limbs and punching through chest cavities, but the time limit on this literal beast mode seems disappointingly stingy, considering how many regular shovel hits it takes to build up the gauge.
Again, mind, I’d only got two hours into what is supposedly a 20-hour-plus campaign. And I was similarly insta-fatigued by Borderlands 4, which apparently ain’t half bad once it gets rolling. Maybe I really should stick to hardware, in which case, I’ll note that Dying Light: The Beast has also been granted Verified status for the Steam Deck – justifiably so, as it repeatedly breached 60fps on my Steam Deck OLED when running in Performance mode. There is the slight hitch of an Epic Game Store pop-up asking on launch if you want to sync accounts, but it doesn’t throw up any serious non-Steam-app compatibility woes, and can be banished with a tap of the B button on subsequent boots.
