Dying Light: The Beast Hands-On Preview: Unleash the Beast! Preview
Mixing parkour, zombies, and plenty of gore, Dying Light is a series that really hit the ground running in its first entry. Unlike other franchises of today, it didn’t take a sequel or major update for fans to fall in love with the Dying Light formula. It must make it quite difficult at the developer Techland, then, when time comes for a new entry. To evolve on what fans love without changing too much.
Enter Dying Light: The Beast. What was once a DLC turned into a full game. Kyle Crane – the protagonist of the first game – makes his return as a revenge-fuelled badass having spent a decade being experimented on by the mysterious villain known as The Baron. These experiments have granted him strength beyond a regular human, and when he enters the brilliantly titled Beast Mode, he can rip apart zombies with his bare hands.
Other than the Beast Mode, which comes with its own skill tree and abilities, and the new setting of Castor Woods Nature Reserve, Dying Light: The Beast largely returns to old haunts in its overall experience. That’s not a knock in any way. This was my first experience with Dying Light, and after a few hours with Kyle Crane’s beastly self I feel like I’ve been missing out for not playing past entries. The rewarding parkour, gory combat, and story with enough grit to clear a snowy road all blend into a mixture that – while not revolutionary – is easily addictive and satisfying to play.
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Parkour especially felt very fun to figure out in Dying Light: The Beast. In this third entry, sweeping cityscapes have largely been swapped for natural areas like thick woodlands, stagnant swamps, and open fields. There is still a major town for you to navigate from rooftop to rooftop, but largely this setting revolves around more rural environments. Rock formations and hanging branches give you plenty of places to run across, and the care put in from Techland in hand-designing these open areas is clear from your first couple of runs, as you spot the routes franchise director Tymon Smektala lovingly referred to as “parkour heaven.” Parkour feels at its best when you find yourself roaming the map at night, where the zombies get a serious power boost and are best avoided rather than tackled. When you can feel your heart pounding as the horde is never far behind is both when you feel at your most immersed dashing from rooftop to rooftop, and when your life is in the most danger, especially if you find yourself surrounded in the woods by zombies hidden amongst the trees.
Techland wants combat to be a big selling point of Dying Light: The Beast, especially in its brutality. Purely from a gore standpoint they’ve succeeded in that. Hacking at a zombie’s limbs can take them off, and if you beat in its chest or head enough you’ll see the flesh come clean off, leaving yellow, rotting bone underneath. Guns do make a proper return in Dying Light: The Beast, but in our time with the game we only really got access to a pretty basic and unimpressive pistol. Largely, it still seems the aim of combat is to have you nimbly dodge around while hacking at zombies without getting overwhelmed. A big game-changer is the arrival of the Chimeras, though, which are supercharged zombies created by The Baron. Each have their own unique abilities and boss arenas for you to take them down in. Some are lumbering brutes while others can leap from the heads of their fellow infected and dive at you for big damage.
Combat in Dying Light: The Beast is largely simplistic but consistently fun. The visuals combined with skills you get later on mean that the combat doesn’t feel like it’s overstaying its welcome, and is a nice action break between story moments. Stamina usage feels a bit too oppressive early on, but as you level up Kyle realises he can swing his sword more than twice without being out of breath. The Chimeras so far have been engaging in their designs and cinematics, but fighting them does feel a bit simplistic. The aforementioned leaping zombie was quickly dealt with once I realised I could follow her around her arena, beating her with a blunt object before she could jump to a safe point.
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While it doesn’t exactly count as combat, I will throw in a special mention of the cars here, too, as they were an absolute blast to drive. Perhaps they slightly took away from the serious feel of Dying Light: The Beast, as they seemed like they were perhaps better suited to a Dead Rising style of game, but hey, fun is fun. Each zombie you hit with a car goes flying over the hood, and mowing them down in groups while trying to make my commute was a good dose of levity in an otherwise quite grim world.
Elsewhere in the game, the tone is certainly set in a darker space, as Kyle tries to get his revenge against the men who kept him locked up in a lab for so many years. Techland has made some cinematic jumps with the story. Dialogue scenes feel fleshed out, and it feels like the narrative is a very tight core in the overall experience. Much is done to serve the narrative over anything else, which is a nice focus to have for this shorter experience. I noticed a strong level of detail in the dialogue, too. Particularly in one scene where after a character kills himself in front of a group of survivors, those left are complaining at having to clean up the mess. It’s a little thing, but one that matters.
Even the Beast Mode itself feels as much a story device as it is a gameplay one. Kyle’s beastly powers come from killing the Chimeras, and the skill tree of Beast Mode then expands when you take the Chimeras’ blood samples to his ally Olivia. Skills are also gained when you complete quests, allowing you to build up both Kyle as a man and a beast. Weirdly, Beast Mode is a state that automatically activates until you get a skill that means it doesn’t. So, if you’re beating up zombies and the last one in a group triggers Beast Mode, you’re stuck in a state of extra damage without anything to use that damage on. Going Beast Mode at any time is a blast, though, as you get to rip apart normal enemies and deal immense damage to stronger ones.
My only gripe with Beast Mode and Dying Light: The Beast as a whole is that its structure seems to be battling against itself. The stamina, the nights, the hordes, all tell you that Kyle is quite a delicate flower. He’s no action hero, until Beast Mode arrives, and then he is. It’s a Dying Light formula battling against itself for the sake of this new mechanic, and only with a full playthrough under my belt will I be able to decide whether it succeeds or doesn’t.
Otherwise, Dying Light: The Beast feels like a great addition into the Dying Light space. A tight, parkour-fuelled game which doesn’t want to waste your time and makes every moment count. A game that feels as if it has stepped out of the confines of a DLC and into a fully fledged experience, and a great bit of zombie-killing fun. Unleash the Beast!
