I didn’t much like the original Dying Light, which came as a bit of a surprise given how entertaining the whole thing sounded on paper. Extreme violence and undead slaughter? Check! Ludicrous gravity defying parkour action? Here! Spooky night-time bits against powerful foes designed to properly ramp up the tension? You got it! A winning formula by any measure; it’s just a shame it was all buried in a package that felt so joyless.
My hope, then, was Techland might have lightened up a bit and learned to have some fun with its drearily self-serious zombie franchise since then. But Dying Light: The Beast – a Dying Light 2 expansion turned full, standalone game – does not get off to an encouraging start.
This time, we’re back with original series protagonist Kyle Crane; a dour man with large muscles and no personality, who’s been strapped to an operating table and forced to endure various indignities in the name of science for the last 13 years. And, as the lengthy opening sequence reminds us many times over, he’s not best pleased about the whole thing. Eventually, thankfully, calamity strikes, and Crane is finally set free, kickstarting an uninspired opening so full of samey research facility corridors and air ducts, it’s like we never escaped the 90s. And disappointingly, in the couple of hours I’ve played at least, Dying Light: The Beast’s flaccid storytelling does not improve from there, content to drag itself drearily along from one unimaginative objective and gravely earnest NPC encounter to the next.
I start with all this, because there’s a lot about Dying Light: The Beast’s approach I do not like. For a game about smashing zombies in the face so hard their chins fly off, Techland’s Very Serious Apocalypse seems determined to slap the joy out of proceedings as often as possible. But! From the moment I bashed open the research facility’s improbably located side entrance and emerged blinking into the sunlight, The Beast had my attention. Instead of filth and urban squalor, this latest Dying Light goes fully rural, giving us the spruce forest sprawls and gleaming mountain vistas of the Swiss Alps. It’s beautiful!
Slinking down through the mountains, following winding tracks through gently swaying trees and teetering across rickety bridges beneath perfectly poised waterfalls, it’s an almost literal breath of fresh air; even more so as you reach a clearing and get your first glimpse of Castor Woods proper – the region’s vast, picturesque expanse stretching out before you. This is a world of stone monasteries festooned with pretty pink wildflowers, quaint towns of densely packed buildings crowding cobbled streets, and even the kind of impossibly ornate mountaintop castle, perched high in the distance, that would make King Ludwig II of Bavaria blush. It’d be a lovely place to visit if it wasn’t for the zombies.
Thankfully, their presence is easier to tolerate when walloping them proves to be so endlessly satisfying. The Beast remains a game of ad-hoc weaponry, where a spade can be as useful as a machete in a pinch. You’ll scour the world in search of bludgeoning tools and firearms, gather resources to craft into upgrades, then just pulverise and smash your way from one objective to the next – sending zombies rag-dolling off rooftops, or giggling as a suddenly detached limb takes flight. And this time, for reasons lost amid the glassy eyed exposition, Crane has a super-strength Beast gauge (and associated ability upgrades) you can trigger intermittently in order to unleash fist-flying carnage, squishing heads and ripping off arms in a blood-soaked frenzy.
With the spotlight firmly on the action, it’s genuinely, enormously entertaining. That’s particularly true when the gore-strewn mayhem is working in tandem with Dying Light: The Beast’s deft parkour system, and events conspire to send you into traversal overdrive; when, say, you’re careening violently through cramped streets, springing heroically up onto overhanging ledges, then lunging – little legs flailing – across wonky rooftops and gaping alleyways, smashing zombie heads as you go. And there’s a different kind of thrill to be had as the dark night falls, when your spring-heeled adventures take a considerably more tense turn against creatures powerful enough that evasion is your only hope. It’s good stuff!
I’ve been enjoying Dying Light: The Beast immensely between the bits when my zombie-maiming high isn’t immediately being deflated by another insipid bit of narrative intervention. But with the fresh Alpine air in my nostrils, and that gorgeous rural landscape to explore, it feels like The Beast might just have tipped the balance enough to win me over.
