Rage

It wouldn’t seem to make sense to call Dying Light: The Beast a more grounded game than its predecessors. It’s a game in which you routinely shift into something like X-Men’s Wolverine, slashing at the undead with the ferocity of a preying mountain lion and carving them to shreds with what is basically an instant win button. But beyond the feature that informs the game’s title, this expansion turned standalone sequel actually leans further into horror and survival than anything in the series, making it the most fun I’ve had with Dying Light to date.

Dying Light: The Beast returns the game’s original protagonist, Kyle Crane, to the starring role, moving him to Castor Woods, a brand-new location for the series, and a lush nature reserve decorated with once-gorgeous villages that manage to feel both ornate and rustic at the same time. Like before, the game is an open-world first-person zombie game with a significant emphasis on death-defying parkour and brutal melee combat. But The Beast adds (or returns) a few other wrinkles, too.

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Now Playing: Dying Light The Beast Review

For one, guns are more prevalent than ever this time, though ammo isn’t as common. Using guns feels reliable enough but doesn’t fill your Beast Mode meter, so I frequently rejected this quasi-new toy in favor of the series’ long-held favorites: baseball bats, machetes, and loose pipes fitted with elemental add-ons that light the zombies on fire, send electric shocks through the hordes, or cause them to bleed out between my crunchy swings to their squishy heads.

Melee combat is once again a highlight of the game, with heft behind every attempt to take out a zombie, and so many different weapons and modifiers to choose from. Zombies charge at you even as you take chunks out of their abdomens, chop off their legs, or leave their jaws hanging off their faces. This damage model isn’t new to the series–Dying Light 2 added this in a patch years ago–but it remains a gruesome, eye-catching display that further illustrates the team’s dedication to making every combat encounter memorable.

In The Beast, stamina is harder to manage than I ever recall, and that’s a change I adored. It made every fight feel like one for my life. Enemies did well to scale with my character and weapons, and demanded that I frequently make stops at various safehouses to upgrade my weapons. Even my favorites wouldn’t last forever either, with each of them having a finite number of repairs before they’d break permanently. This differs from the series’ past way of letting you carry and upgrade your preferred skull-bashing or leg-slicing items with you at all times.

I distinctly recall having an easier go of things in Dying Light 2 than I did in The Beast, thanks to hero Aiden Caldwell’s expansive list of parkour and combat abilities. Kyle isn’t depicted as a lesser freerunner or fighter, but his skill tree is nonetheless smaller, causing him to feel more vulnerable in a way I hope the series sticks with going forward. There were many times when I’d have to retreat in a minor panic from a small horde of basic zombies just to catch my breath. The Beast isn’t a game where you can usually just hack up the crowd without careful consideration and stamina management.

Parkouring over, around, and even onto zombies remains fun in Dying Light’s third outing.

Of course, there’s an exception to that rule: When you build up your Beast Mode bar, you earn a few seconds of near-invulnerability, as well as the ability to tear apart zombies with your bare hands and a very cool, very high leap that collectively makes you feel like a superhero. From a narrative sense, Beast Mode leans into the stuff I still don’t enjoy about Dying Light: over-the-top action meant to fulfill a power fantasy of being the one-man killing machine in a world overrun by the undead. I love zombie fiction, but my taste in that subgenre is firmly planted in slower, spookier worlds where despair rules the day. Dying Light has never been that before, at least not consistently. Thankfully, in a gameplay sense, Beast Mode functionally serves less like a pure power fantasy and more like a get-out-of-jail-free card.

So many times in my 30ish hours with this game, I’d activate Beast Mode not to further pile on a crowd of enemies I was already dispatching with ease, but as a last-ditch effort to stay alive. Techland seems to have planned for this use case, given how receiving damage, not just doling it out, fills that bar. Beast Mode isn’t Kyle going Super Saiyan; it’s the emergency fire extinguisher, and breaking that figurative glass amid a fight for my life is a much more enjoyable gameplay loop than some of Dying Light 2’s absurdities.

Even while the story goes to some places that feel like B-horror fare–the type of thing I would fully ignore if it were a movie instead–the game remains at odds with that plot by being so tense and only giving Kyle the powers to survive, but not thrive like Aiden did. This is never clearer, nor more enjoyable, than at nighttime. One of the key pillars of this series is how the day-night cycle essentially presents two different games. When the sun is up, Kyle is empowered and capable of scraping by at the very least. But when night falls, the game’s super-fast, super-strong Volatiles take over and shift the game into a full-blown stealth horror.

Movement and combat are both totally rewritten depending on the time of day. In sunlight, you’ll scale buildings, leap across gaps, and swing on tree branches like an Assassin’s Creed hero. But at night, every step must be carefully considered, so you’ll end up crouching and spamming the “survivor sense” to briefly ping nearby Volatiles. When they give chase, the results are intense. They’ll claw at your heels as the music spikes your heart rate. The chase will inevitably invite more Volatiles to join in, and they’ll flank you, spew gunk to knock you off walls, and almost never relent until you finally–if you’re so lucky–cross the threshold of a safe haven, where UV lights keep the monsters at bay.

Nighttime is harder in The Beast than ever before, and yet that’s also where I had the most fun.

The series’ night sequences have never been this scary before, partly because of the ample wooded areas that make up the map. I love it. Night remains an XP booster too, doubling any gains you make. In past games, I’d use that boon to fulfill some side missions overnight. But in Dying Light: The Beast, I rarely tried to do more than make it to my nearest safe zone so I could skip time until the protective sun returned.

When the first game’s expansion, The Following, set the story in a mostly-flat locale, I found it an odd choice given the game is so focused on parkour and verticality. In Dying Light: The Beast, the world designers have more wisely found ways to bring verticality to those places outside of villages, with plenty of rock walls, trees, and electricity towers to scale. One of the simple, repeatable joys I have in all of the zombie games I love is approaching a building and not knowing what I’ll find inside. It’s so simple that it hardly registers as a feature at all, but to me it’s vital that a zombie game capture this specific feeling of discovery and tension. Castor Woods makes for an excellent landscape to host this repeating moment, due to its creepy cabins found all over the world. Pairing the nighttime-specific gameplay elements with a setting so unnerving gave me a sense of survival-horror unease in a way I’ve been waiting for this series to do for a decade.

This leaning into horror is capped off by an incredible reinvention of the series’ theme song by Olivier Derivere. I consider Derivere to be among the very best composers in games, and the original music he poured into this game gives it so much life. The first game’s theme always reminded me of Dawn of the Dead, with a certain layer of ’70s filth to it. Here, Derivere rethinks it with an air of 28 Days Later, getting its more modern, more haunting version stuck in my head for the past week in a way I’ve very much invited. It sounds less like an action score and more like a horror soundtrack to my ears, matching the game’s overall shift into something more up my particular alley.

Guns are emphasized more in The Beast than ever before, but I still preferred a good, old-fashioned spiked bat.

It feels like this game’s origins as a Dying Light 2 expansion helped its focus, even as it grew into a standalone semi-sequel–it’s not yet Dying Light 3, but it’s much more than a typical DLC. The open-world activities trim the fat from Dying Light 2’s more Ubisoftian world. Here, you’ll raid stores where zombies sleep, trying not to stir them. You’ll assault broken-down military convoys for their high-tier loot locked in the back of trucks, and you can hunt down rare weapons and armor with vague treasure maps. These fun, unitedly tense activities all return from past games, but for the most part, they’re not joined by the countless other things that have been on the map before.

This left me feeling like anything I did was worth my time, with the exception of some late-game racing side quests, which I didn’t care for despite how good the trucks feel to drive. Dying Light 2 adopted some live-service elements eventually, growing into yet another game trying to be at the center of players’ solar systems, hoping to bring fans back all the time for new highlights. The Beast is a tighter, leaner 20-hour story with enough side attractions to fill in the world and your time, but doesn’t waste it.

This is emblematic of Dying Light: The Beast’s strongest quality: taking the series from an arms race against itself, constantly trying to give the player extravagant new tools, to something that is a bit dialed back, leaning into horror and tough-as-nails combat. It gives The Beast a stronger identity. There’s no glider this time, Kyle’s jump is a bit nerfed compared to Aiden’s, and his parkour abilities, while many of them come already unlocked to start now, don’t top off at the same heights as Aiden’s. It may sound strange for a series to improve when it suddenly became withholding. Dying Light has always been a series that does a few things very well, but would get distracted trying to be a lot more at the same time. Finally, The Beast leans into Dying Light’s best parts, giving you a scarier, tougher, more immersive world to explore than anything in the series before.

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