It’s hard to talk about Dying Light: The Beast—the latest in Techland’s open-world zombie parkour action series—without talking about its origins. While now living life as a full-priced retail game with a respectable ~20 hour campaign (and one that I enjoyed for the most part), The Beast started out as a planned expansion for Dying Light 2, itself a game that has grown, adapted and reshaped itself over the past few years, much like its genetically feisty mutant monsters.
Already a lengthy game (though nowhere near as massive as Techland claimed before release), Dying Light 2 has grown into something resembling a live-service sandbox, with daily quests, faction reputation grinds, microtransactions, endlessly escalating New Game Plus loops and even an optional roguelike mode. Dying Light 2’s gore has also grown grislier, its parkour more streamlined (no longer limited by your character’s stamina gauge), and there’s even a handful of firearms that you can unlock and collect, flying in the face of the game’s quirky pseudo-medieval post apocalyptic conceit.
Depending on who you ask and what direction the wind is blowing that day, these changes have either redeemed or forever ruined the game, but however you slice it, the Dying Light 2 of today is a different creature to the one Matthew Castle (RPS in peace) bounced off back in 2022. The Beast, therefore, represents a clean break: a chance to establish a new baseline, taking what Techland most wanted from DL2’s teetering jenga-tower of features and concepts, while chucking some of the original game’s weightier baggage overboard.
And so we’re off to the alps, and the scenic nature reserve of Castor Woods, with a dense, old touristy town flanked by small industrial and residential zones, and a mixture of forests and mountain trails surrounding those. Were it not for the hordes of undead, it’d be good place for a relaxing stroll.
Thanks to some impressive lighting, it’s a treat to look at from dawn til’ dusk, although since nighttimes tend to be nearly pitch black and patrolled by nigh-invulnerable ‘Volatile’ super-zombies, they’re best just slept through once you hoof it back to a sealed safe-room. For all the talk about making the night scary again in The Beast’s marketing, I generally just didn’t bother with it, outside a couple of mandatory stealth and chase sequences.
To help navigate the mountain trail are cars, not seen since Dying Light 1’s beefy expansion The Following. Easily found, easily refueled, and able to get you relatively safely from A to B when there aren’t rooftops to run across. But gone is DL2’s glider (great for moving between high rooftops), along with fast travel, which helped in navigating the sequel’s enormous cityscape.
Oddly, I don’t think it’s a particular success or failure (a refrain you’ll hear a lot from me today). Getting around on foot and always having to be aware of enemies is interesting, but the forests and fields outside of the central town here aren’t nearly as demanding to navigate as Villedor’s streets and skyscrapers. The cars let you bypass this less interesting travel, but in so doing, feel like a fix for a problem that needn’t exist.
Another shift I remain largely ambivalent on is the move to more power-fantasy options in combat. The melee brawling is almost identical to where Dying Light 2 stands today, with your stamina gauge used solely for combat actions, where previously it was drained by any kind of rapid or high-exertion movement. I found it satisfying as ever, full of weighty impacts and squelchy audio feedback, and enhanced by some absolutely gruesome locational damage on the undead.
Constant combat is further encouraged by the new option to repair damaged melee weapons in the field, practically for free and nigh-instantaneously. While you can only repair any given melee weapon 4-5 times, it means that by the time you fully expend it, you’ll have found several replacements, effectively making it one more system that you don’t need to particularly care about.
The big gimmick introduced here is the option to go Beast Mode. By fighting in melee, you fill up an anger gauge on your HUD. When filled, you activate Hulk Hands (automatically at first, but manually later, once you’ve killed a few bosses) and gain a few seconds of nigh-invulnerability, tearing zombies in half with your bare, veiny mitts.
It’s gratifying and incredibly gory, but also basically just a room-clearing smart bomb, or a way to tear off a third of a boss’s health bar without reprisal. An ‘I don’t want to deal with zombies today’ button in a game where dealing with zombies IS the game. Fast travel may be gone, but fast combat is its replacement, and further upgraded by killing bosses.
Still, as an enjoyer of Dying Light 2 in its current incarnation, I also enjoyed my time with The Beast, mainly because it’s more of DL2’s main loop – but leaner. Gone are the multiple factions, reputation grinds and daily quests, along with any other live-service fluff that its parent game picked up over the years. The only number to really care about is your level (determining your basic combat stats), and even then, there were only a couple of occasions when I was told I was probably too weak to continue the main plot, prompting me to go bulk up through a sidequest.
Even Dark Zones, the oft-extensive urban dungeons in Dying Light 2, have been trimmed down to slightly larger-than-average interiors that you can clear of zombies and scour for crafting resources. You don’t need to wait for nighttime to sweep through them here, either. This game just does not want you hanging around any location longer than necessary, and while I do miss the longer, more involved dungeon-delves through the city, I can’t deny that trimming the fat does allow the story, however cornball it is, to flow better.
Speaking of narrative, let’s start with our protagonist, Kyle Crane, returning from the original Dying Light. Originally a blandly cheerful can-do FPS man-voice, he’s spent thirteen years being tortured/experimented on by The Baron, a gleefully mad scientist. After escaping and accepting his new role as a gruffly-voiced pair of veiny forearms, Crane grimly swears revenge, and that he’ll stop at nothing – NOTHING – to achieve it.
And then he decides that the best way to get revenge is to make a lot of friends by helping out the locals, levelling up (to restore his lost strength, obviously), and extracting some mutagenic powerup-juice from any boss monsters he kills along the way, enhancing his Rage Bar powers.
He might look like a PS360-era generic grimdark Revengeanceman, but Kyle’s got the personality of a golden retriever. Other than plaintively calling some women ‘bossy’ and asking others to get to the point, there is little to no indication in dialogue that this man has spent about a third of his life in a super-science torture dungeon. It’s indicative of the kind of problems the series has always had, reaching for both gritty personal drama (usually in the quieter side-quests) and comic book excess at the same time, yet achieving neither. Thankfully, the villain here drags The Beast fully into the realm of camp action-horror schlock.
The Baron is gloriously over-the-top, and Techland knows it, regularly deploying him to liven up cutscenes. An aristocratic evil genius with access to seemingly endless resources, a mountaintop villa, and a vast complex of laboratories. Smugly chewing on the scenery in every scene he appears in, his sole goal in life appears to be creating new and increasingly deadly mutants, almost all of which seem to break containment at some point, slaughtering dozens of his (seemingly endless) horde of gun-toting soldiers, who in turn seemingly exist solely to die and deliver ammo to you.
He’s like Albert Wesker with the brakes cut. Unflappable in the face of all his self-made disasters. Even among zombie horror villains, he seems to harbor a special disdain for the concept of workplace safety. Taking each escaped creature in stride, always bragging that each failure is just a fresh opportunity to field-test a new monster. Even Umbrella Corp would be considering calling in OSHA inspectors after watching this man at work.
It’s that kind of daft energy that carries The Beast. There are a few moments where it tries to deliver some resonant personal drama through side-quest dialogues, but it never quite lands. The Baron is always happy to ham it up, though, and deliver another monster-of-the-week encounter to punctuate the campaign.
Those boss fights tend to be against powered-up versions of the various ‘special’ zombies that you’ll encounter in the open world, and a were dramatic, enjoyable excuse to spend some of those consumable explosives and ammo packs I’d been hoarding. Sadly they’re also slightly let down by a lack of imagination, especially in the late-game, with the downright brolic Behemoth (a very large skinless muscle-monster with Hulk-style ground pounds) being brought back multiple times.
Combat against Behemoths boils down to dodging around a well-telegraphed rotation of attacks until you can hack, slash or punch at its surprisingly rounded, eye-level, musclebound arse cheeks. In the final stretch, you even have to fight several of them at once. A reasonable enough limitation for an expansion, but I’d have loved to see some really freaky, Resident Evil-inspired mutants with far too many limbs and maybe some weak points to shoot, but I guess that’d be getting away from Dying Light’s brawler foundations.
The problem with The Beast is that while its fully ripped, protein-packed, and dehydrated new design is great on paper, I think that some of that fat and padding served a purpose. While not without its flaws (daily quests and weekly grinds were tiresome), Dying Light 2 was a weirdly cozy game, with a world that you could get into the mindset of living in. Were it not for the dozens of other titles demanding my attention, it could have become a go-to comfort game for me, whereas The Beast is all business.
Also, that lush lighting and dense greenery does come at a cost. Even my heavyweight PC (an RTX 4090 is still a brute of a GPU) needed a little help from DLSS and frame generation to hit a consistently smooth framerate at 3440×1440 ultrawide. While the launch-day patch improved the situation somewhat (bringing it closer in line with Dying Light 2), you’re still going to need a hefty machine to see this one at its absolute best, and unlike Kyle, extracting the thermal paste from other people’s PC’s probably isn’t an option if yours is underpowered.
The Beast’s odd position as an escaped, heavily mutated expansion makes it a difficult value proposition, although a much simpler one if you happened to get the Ultimate version of Dying Light 2, in which case you’ve already paid for it at a steep discount. If you got the game this way, why are you even reading this review? Go and play it.
But for those looking at that £50/$60 price tag and hesitating, yes, this is a good Dying Light game, and a fine open-world zombie game in general, full of crunchy combat and simple but satisfying number-go-up loops. Is it the best in the series? Depends how much you disliked Dying Light 2’s slightly overstuffed design, and whether the same mechanics minus the padding sounds like your jam. As for newcomers, I’m not sure if I can really recommend that at full price when its larger and mechanically very similar parent often goes on sale for under £15.
While The Beast was fun to binge through in a few days (around 21 hours, with plenty more side-quests still left to do), I feel like I’ve had my fill of Techland’s specific brand of open-world design for now. But if the zombie parkour itch hits again, I think it says something that I’ll probably return to Dying Light 2’s sprawling cityscape over another scenic alpine excursion.
