When the original Dying Light exploded onto the gaming scene back in 2015, it brought a much-needed breath of fresh air to the stagnating zombie survival genre. Its signature open-world parkour and tense nighttime horror created a formula that, while not entirely new, was executed with such precision and a keen understanding of gaming hype that it captivated millions of players around the world.
The sequel, Dying Light 2: Stay Human, expanded the scope, adding a branching storyline and even more frantic parkour to enjoy. Now comes a new installment, Dying Light: The Beast, a game that seems to be striving to return to its roots while adding something grandiose to its formula.
Alas, after dozens of hours spent in its world, I am forced to conclude: the developers’ ambitions have run up against a harsh wall of creative exhaustion and gameplay conservatism. The Beast is a competent, technically sound, yet surprisingly faceless successor to its great ancestors, inspiring not so much fear or delight as a tired apathy.
The plot of Dying Light: The Beast takes us to a new, isolated region that consists of a rocky coastline strewn with the remains of cruise ships and fishing villages. The protagonist this time is the one and only Kyle Crane, a mercenary from the first game. He was captured by the organization and experimented on for 13 years by the new main antagonist, known as the Baron.
The developers at Techland opted for a more personal story, moving away from the global salvation of humanity in favor of… well, it’s not even clear what, exactly. Crane is tortured, and his mutations are studied, which the Baron uses to create new weapons. In theory, this is commendable. In practice, the script is filled with soap opera-level clichés: Crane is “released” for controlled exploration in a confined area. Who is releasing him and why becomes clear even to a child after five minutes of play.
The dialogue lacks vibrancy and the characters lack depth. Kyle’s motivations boil down to endless repetitions of “I must find him,” and the antagonists are cardboard villains whose monologues are predictable to the point of yawning, and whose aspirations are dull and uninteresting.
While in Dying Light 2, the branching dialogue and choices that influenced the fate of the city’s districts were at least somewhat engaging, here we see a rigidly linear narrative. A return to the structure of the first game might have been justified if Kyle’s aspirations had been at least somewhat original or emotionally charged. Alas, he lacks the charm and rugged charm of Crane from the original.
The missions follow the following template: “run there,” “talk to that guy,” “find this trinket.” The climax, revealing the “shocking” truth about the Baron and his research, is so predictable that it evokes no catharsis, only a sigh of relief that it’s all over. It feels like the plot is simply a formality, necessary to justify another dash across rooftops.
Gameplay is the heart of every Dying Light game, and here The Beast delivers the most mixed results.
Parkour: movement is polished to a tee. Kyle runs, climbs, and glides with the same fluidity and satisfying physicality as his predecessors. New animations for rope sliding and pole-vaulting have been added, and they look spectacular. However, this is an evolution, not a revolution. After a few hours, you realize you’re doing exactly the same things you did seven years ago. The new environment—cliffs, piers, ship decks—doesn’t introduce any radically new parkour challenges. It’s all the same ledges, overhangs, and beams, just in a different palette. A sense of déjà vu never leaves you.
Castor Woods is a small European town nestled among mountains and forests. Consequently, the town itself, as well as the surrounding area, is practically empty except for three-story apartment buildings. The entire world is a gray-green mess, with virtually nothing to catch your eye during missions. Where in Harran, high-rise buildings, schools, hangars, and other structures visible from higher elevations rose up among the shacks here and there, in Castor Woods you are met with brown roofs, overgrown roofs, and flat roofs. And then there’s the large city hall, towering over the entire city, a hospital, and a monastery.
Personally, exploring such a world was simply uninteresting for me, and the car you gain access to after the third story mission forces you to completely abandon exploration and rely solely on it for travel, as there’s no shortage of gas or new cars.
The car meets you at the exit of practically every story point, and it only has enough fuel to get you to the next one and a few meters. The zombies, who are incredibly hard to kill from the very beginning of the game and are incredibly numerous for a town of this size, also take the fun out of getting out of the car.
The most notable new feature added in DL: TB is the “Beast Rage” system. By performing certain actions (killing common and special infected, completing quests, and so on), Kyle earns mutation points. These can be spent on new abilities and talents that enhance existing ones.
There’s also a temporary transformation into a powerful Beast, which helps him push back hordes of zombies and kill Chimera bosses. In this form, he can tear zombies apart with his bare hands and throw heavy objects. Spectacular? Certainly. Strategic? Not so much.
This feature quickly degenerates into a “win the fight” button you press in particularly busy areas. Regular combat with humans and zombies, however, has carried over virtually unchanged from previous games. The feeling of striking and swinging homemade weapons is still satisfying, but the crafting lists and skill tree are almost identical to Dying Light 2.
The impact sounds are disappointing; hitting a zombie with a wooden stick and hearing the clash of metal on metal is just plain bad form. And the game’s sound in general… is far inferior to previous installments in every way.
The combat feels incredibly dull until about halfway through the game, where it improves slightly. Weapons break extremely quickly, zombies react poorly to anything other than stuns (which allow you to finish off a zombie with one hit, which is why stun weapons are always prioritized over other weapons), and the effects you add to guns feel incredibly weak.
For example, I have a machete that sets enemies on fire. A normal zombie needs six hits to the head to die completely. The weapon breaks in eight hits, but the zombie ignites on the fifth. How many zombies in the closest crowd will I be able to mow down, and why would I even care? That said, there’s still impact from hits to the carcasses – zombies stagger from headshots, fall over from the third kick, and hit others nearby. But it still feels like chopping a log.
Also, landing a dropkick on an enemy doesn’t always have the intended effect – 70% of the time, the thrown zombie flies right through other zombies, who stagger onward. The so-called X-Ray (from Mortal Kombat), when you deal critical damage, everything slows down, and the enemy, illuminated like an X-ray, falls apart, now also happens much less frequently and doesn’t evoke the same emotions as before.
I specifically went back to the first game for testing – hits on enemies are juicy, zombies feel like walking corpses, not logs, weapons feel different in your hands, and encounters with zombies are generally intense at any stage of the game, and you always risk dying from your mistakes.
In The Beast, the zombies are simply infuriating. They’re cling to you, have messy hitboxes and are simply uninteresting. But fighting people is still just as fun as in the first game; they’ve gotten a little smarter and are capable of putting up a decent fight. Perhaps leveling up improves this? Well, partly yes, like the grappling hook, but it’s still purely a time-saver, not a great addition to combat variety.
Over the years, Crane has forgotten a lot of his combat moves (though thankfully not parkour), so he’ll have to relearn them. But overall, some of the skills feel very odd, as if they were added to create the illusion of variety. How about reloading while running? It’s practically at the very end of the skill tree, too! The Survival tree is the same story—a bunch of garbage perks that could have been included from the start, but then the player would probably have too much fun playing the game.
Beast Mode, the game’s main feature, has proven to be a highly controversial system. By taking damage, Crane builds up a Beast meter, which, once full, allows him to enter the berserk mode, where he begins tearing apart zombies with his bare hands, jumping high, running fast, and using special moves.
Beast Mode is leveled up by killing Chimeras—creatures bred by the game’s main antagonist in his laboratory. At first, it feels like you’ll have to think carefully about how to invest in this branch, but by the end of the game, it’ll be fully developed, as each chimera is a storyline boss the player can’t avoid.
In practice, Beast Mode is simply a way to restore HP and quickly dispatch the horde of zombies that constantly gather nearby. It is almost useless for damaging bosses, as it doesn’t deal significant damage, and special moves drain their stored charge incredibly quickly. Ultimately, I only used this mode if I didn’t want to parkour somewhere, quickly kill a ton of zombies I accidentally fell into, or heal up during yet another boss fight when I ran out of consumables.
Boss fights with chimeras, by the way, are incredibly boring. Despite the variety of mechanics they showcase, they all boil down to them summoning a horde of regular zombies and charging at you. Therefore, simply running around them and dodging their charges is enough to win. And given that the weapon deals little damage, it turns into an extremely boring and long run around a closed arena until the boss falls.
Nighttime raids, once the series’ signature, have degenerated into routine in The Beast. The new Jumpers have improved AI, but their behavior is reduced to more aggressive patrols. Jumpers themselves are now extremely difficult to kill; they can take up to 60 rounds from a submachine gun or assault rifle before they die, while they themselves can kill in 2-3 hits, but… The expected terror, the soul-crushing fear of being caught, is gone. You’ve learned all their tricks. You know how to evade them. Night has transformed from a source of adrenaline into a minor inconvenience, a slight experience boost, but nothing more.
A specific example of boredom: Story quests are so bland and dull that it’s hard to even remember them. Repairing equipment at the Power Plant is an example of both all sorts of clichés and a dull narrative. Once there, you first need to navigate through parkour elements to enter, then continue parkour to reach the second building. Then kill zombies, find a repair tool while swimming, kill more zombies, more parkour, and then… the expected cliché. Meanwhile, your weapons get dulled, consumables are lost, and there’s no wow factor. It’s a routine quest, and you can predict all its twists and turns long before they happen.
Even the appearance of Aiden Caldwell, the hero of part 2, does not add any interest to the plot.
Dying Light: The Beast runs on the latest version of the C-Engine. Technically, the game is flawless.. but soulless. 4K resolution, a stable 60 frames per second, stunning lighting and reflections on wet surfaces after rain. The natural locations look majestic.
However, this is where the main problem lies: artistic monotony. After the gray-brown Harran and dusty Villedor, we are met with… a blue-gray rocky gorge surrounded by mountains. The palette is dreary and monotonous. Architectural diversity is minimal: the same low houses, the same rusty ruins. The world is beautifully crafted, but you don’t want to linger in it because it offers no visual surprises. It’s a step back from the vertical, multi-layered, and architecturally diverse Villedor.
The soundtrack is high-quality, but not memorable. Tense strings in night scenes, a somber ambient during exploration—everything is in place, but the piercing, melancholy theme of the first game is missing. The sound effects—the clatter of weapons, the roars of zombies—are average, but then again, we’ve heard them hundreds of times, and there are some flaws. The audio design works like a clock, but it lacks soul; it simply ticks away the seconds until the end of the game.
Innovation? Did we expect anything new from this game? Yes, did we get what we expected? The city structure has deteriorated, large buildings have shrunk, the city is completely abandoned except for a few story-related buildings, and houses are completely identical to each other…
The “Beast’s Rage” system, as already mentioned, is too straightforward to be considered a full-fledged innovation. It doesn’t change the approach to the game, but merely serves as a temporary buff. Compared to the fundamental choice between the Bazaar and the Military in the second game, or the revolutionary parkour in the first, The Beast offers nothing that could redefine the genre or even its own franchise.
Even the “survivors” you can “rescue” in this game… look pathetic. You save a man from zombies, and he… JUST WALKS AWAY, walking along the ground. Surrounded by dozens of zombies. He doesn’t climb onto the rooftop or run away; he JUST WALKS AWAY, into a crowd of other zombies, after giving you an item/weapon as a reward for saving him. It feels incredibly sloppy. In the second game, at least the survivors were on the rooftops, which at least gave the feeling that they were actually SAVED by you, and not this botched approach.
In the end, The Beast failed to build on DL2’s strengths or recapture the original’s magic. It’s stuck somewhere in the middle, trying to please everyone and ultimately failing to deliver anything truly remarkable. All in all, it is a competent sequel that would be forgotten the next day. It’s functional, polished, and delivers exactly the experience fans of the genre expect: running, jumping, and crushing skulls. The problem is that it offers nothing more. It lacks the pioneering audacity of the original, and lacks the narrative ambition of the sequel.
The feeling of disappointment and boredom stems from the complete lack of surprises. You set out on a mission and know exactly what awaits you: parkour through familiar elements, battle familiar enemies, and be rewarded with familiar loot. The world is beautiful, but bland. The plot is there, but it’s not engaging. The music is there, but it’s not moving.
If you’re a die-hard fan of the series and just crave “more of the same,” The Beast will satisfy your hunger for a while. But if you’re hoping to relive the thrill of that first night in Harran or the thrill of transforming the urban landscape with your decisions, you’ll be bitterly disappointed.
Dying Light: The Beast is a ghost of a great franchise, competently executed but lacking the spark that once made it special. It’s a grind that, despite its apparent dynamism, leads nowhere. On top of all this, the game was extremely rough at release, and some of its bugs remain unfixed. The now-legendary bug with the missing day/night cycle, although it has been fixed now. The Jumper screams, which blare in your ear every 10 seconds no matter where you are until you restart the game, however, haven’t been. The music also breaks; at random moments, it simply cuts out, and you won’t hear it again until you restart.
Random teleportations, texture gaps, moments when a character hanging on a ledge simply falls to their death, rolling back to the nearest save—there are plenty of them in the game. Was The Beast even worth releasing? Yes, but not as a standalone game at full price, but as a DLC, without any pretensions to anything grand. We expected Crane’s return and a continuation of the story after what happened to him in The Following, but what we got was a circus on the road to Europe. And I don’t think post-release support will fix this; I played it once, and I don’t want to return.
If you want a zombie action game with good melee combat, you’re better off playing the first Dying Light or Dead Island 2 (which, in my opinion, is extremely underrated. The game isn’t shy about being a trashy zombie shooter, and it doesn’t put on a complicated face trying to give us any revelations, while still being incredibly fun both solo and co-op). My expectations are my problem, but this isn’t the sequel I thought I’d get.
