Dying Light: The Beast

Like an electrified baseball bat, The Beast is silly and perhaps disposable, but you can still have a great time swinging it. [Issue#416, p.110]

Dying Light: The Beast may not be groundbreaking, but with Beast Mode, Castor Woods, and a few surprisingly fun side quests, it delivers enough chaos and enjoyment to have you grinning as you tear through hordes of zombies.

Melee combat and parkour remain an entertaining pairing, but Dying Light is beginning to feel like it's just going through the motions.

Dying Light: The Beast attempts to reconnect with the original DNA that many players believed was altered by the second instalment. It features violent and impactful fights, an oppressive soundscape enhanced by Olivier Derivière's compositions, and stressful day/night cycles. This new Dying Light game defies convention to create an even stronger sense of immersion.

A lot of the fun you can have with Dying Light: The Beast is what you make of it yourself. Exploring the world, unlocking the safe houses, finding cool new weapon modifications and crafting recipes, and generally getting lost. Nothing about the experience was groundbreaking, nor was it as enthralling or immersive as other open-world games. Instead, it was good fun you can enjoy in short or long bursts, whether you want to sink your teeth into zombie hunting or chilling as you wander the wilds and urban spaces of Castor Hills.

A more gritty survival horror experience than Stay Human, but Techland's new first-person parkour game still stumbles a bit.

Dying Light: The Beast is an entertaining return to the rooftops and flesh pits I’ve come to love over the past decade. The gimmick of amping yourself up into a scary monster to fight other monsters sticks the landing and mostly makes up for a generic story and a map that has few surprises in store. However, aside from your new rampaging abilities and some freaky new boss fights, The Beast does stick pretty close to what worked in the last two games, so it may feel a bit rote to those who have played those recently. Its signature blend of parkour and melee-focused combat remains largely the same, but there’s certainly nothing wrong with having more Dying Light.

Is it a massive improvement on the Dying Light formula or a step up on what Dying Light 2: Stay Human recently offered? No, not at all. But is it still a blast to play, a simple, easy to pick-up title that has enough depth to make you want to return and continue playing. Yes, without question. The Dying Light formula remains a highlight, even if it is getting closer and closer to requiring big innovation.

Dying Light: The Beast is a return to form for the RPG series, but its exciting action and parkour are stymied by a ho-hum open-world design.

Dying Light: The Beast's parkour mechanics and crunchy melee combat are the two load-bearing pillars that make it a game worth leaping into, with support from a beautiful world to explore (minus the infected) and a tense day and night cycle that greatly raises the stakes on its survival elements. Beyond that, the mechanical and narrative pacing, inconsistent writing and narrative tone, and world design choices that feel antithetical to the series in the first place all bring it to a fairly uninteresting experience that is only worth it for however long you want to turn your brain off and enjoy watching digital infected brains go *splat.*

Dying Light The Beast brings back Kyle Crane, now with human and zombie DNA, to explore a new region. It retains the elements that have marked the series, parkour, intense combat, and exploration, and adds Beast Mode and mutations. The result is a fun, adrenaline-fueled game, perfect for fans, even if it doesn't offer any big surprises.

Dying Light: The Beast has great parkour and melee combat, but a bland story and an uninteresting Beast Mode mechanic leave it fun, but ultimately forgettable.