Dying Light: The Beast Review – Go Beast Mode

When I was jumping into Techland's Dying Light: The Beast, it wasn't for the third time since the first title's release in 2015. It was for my very first, and like an amateur parkourer trying to jump across one roof to another for the first time, I was cautiously enthusiastic. Aware that this could go horribly wrong, or be an amazing thrill.

Thankfully, after fearing I would suffer the former in my early hours, my time with it leaned closer to the latter thanks to its survival elements and the two tried-and-true pillars of the series. I began to understand why one of my best friends has put in hundreds of hours between the first two games.

Of course, I had heard a lot about the first two games, so I knew the basics. There are zombies, a first-person parkour system, and a focus on melee combat. I didn't know who Kyle Crane was, but thankfully, the game is prepared for me and other such players since there's a quick recap video ready to give you Cole's (Kyle's) notes on Crane's last outing.

This is all to say that everything about Dying Light was new to me, and what is now old hat for veterans of the series had a stronger impact on me because it was new. Like, how the parkour feels absolutely wild. Keeping to the rooftops was always a fun challenge that I enjoyed solving on the fly as a longtime fan of platformers. Finding a flow within it all and running across ledges or high wires to leap through half-open windows felt exhilarating. And all the more disappointing when a wrong step sent me to the ground.

But while I could see how its movement and combat could keep you locked in for hours, the whole package of The Beast lost me before I hit credits, thanks to some poor design choices and some flaws that brought the experience down from the start.

Overall, I found that Dying Light: The Beast is a land of contrasts, with equal parts I could do without and elements I loved as a newcomer to the series. It's a completely fine videogame; an enjoyable time, surely, for someone invested in Crane's story arc more than a newcomer like me could be, and anyone who appreciates crunchy and satisfying zombie kills.

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Before I dig deeper, a few bits of needed context. Dying Light: The Beast brings the first game's protagonist, Kyle Crane, back into the spotlight after Dying Light 2: Stay Human's Aiden Caldwell took center stage. Crane's story kicks back up in a research facility where he's been tested on and tortured for years. After being the personal lab rat to a man we know as 'The Baron' for a decade, when Crane gets his opportunity to escape, he succeeds and vows to take revenge.

You begin to meet a cast of characters along that journey, like Olivia, a mysterious woman who helps you escape in the first place and get stronger to take on The Baron. Jacob, the Sheriff, and the people of the Town Hall, who give you a place to rest your head while you help them stay alive, and help you in your fight against The Baron. Of course, getting revenge on the Baron and helping your new friends survive isn't as simple as it sounds at the beginning of the game, and the story unfolds in a fairly straightforward manner.

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I won't go any further into details to avoid spoilers, but what I'll say is that I don't think anyone will play Dying Light: The Beast for its story. I found it to be fairly bland and overall uninteresting, especially because the performance from Roger Craig Smith (Kyle Crane) jumped from contextually tone-deaf open-world quest speak to some emotionally charged and impactful moments, with Smith wonderfully portraying the anger Crane carries with him, and how his never-ending crusade to help people in impossible situations can lead to moments where Crane is reminded of the good that people are capable of. Nothing felt consistent, making it all the more difficult for me to get invested in the story.

And those better moments often came from side quests instead of the main campaign, which is a scenario that's always disappointed me in games. I've never subscribed to the notion that good side quests make up for a lacking core campaign. I think it's just another way of saying 'Don't worry, the game gets way better once you're 10 hours in,' since I might have to spend that kind of time getting to the side quests that are supposed to make the other bad parts worth it.

There are some undeniably cool and tense gameplay moments I won't spoil here, included in the missions you'll complete for the main campaign. It also has two boss fights out of the several you encounter that stand out as trying to do something more engaging with its combat, but the primary campaign never evolved beyond being a vehicle through which new characters and more interesting side quests are introduced.

With regards to the gameplay, as I said before, the parkour mechanics can feel exhilarating with how fluidly you can move from rooftop to rooftop, particularly when you get a grapple hook in the back half of the game. But there's a fairly major bone I have to pick with how you get around in Dying Light: The Beast.

A large chunk of the map is an area called Old Town, with tall buildings and rooftops galore to parkour through. There are other smaller town-like areas around it, but Old Town is where the game's parkour mechanics shine best. The rest of the map? A giant park with trees and bushes that you'll either run on your own two feet through or drive through to go from one objective to another. I thought I was playing a parkour open-world game, not a game where getting across the map in a reasonable amount of time means scavenging for fuel and going out of my way to find the closest working truck.

Every moment I spent driving instead of parkouring felt antithetical to what I thought was a key part of Dying Light's pitch. Could you imagine Insomniac making players drive around New York as Spider-Man as a significant part of how you're supposed to get around, instead of his usual web swinging? That's how against the grain it felt to get into a car in this game. I can understand it as an added layer to the survival and resource management woven into the gameplay, or even just as Techland wanting to try something new (although it was already a part of the Dying Light: The Following expansion). It just doesn't work to the game's benefit.

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Thankfully, Dying Light: The Beast's other core gameplay pillar, melee combat, doesn't have the same kind of problem. It's just good; the weapons are fun to use, the modifiers you can craft for them add some decent effects, particularly for critical hits, and entering Kyle's new 'Beast Mode' never lost its touch due to how perfectly Techland nailed it with attack and finishing animations that really make you feel like you could tear through anything.

On the flip side of tearing through enemies, I deeply enjoyed how tense I got if I was caught out at night. The threat of Volatiles around each corner and 'the chase' to get back to a safe zone had my heart pounding nearly every time, and trying to navigate while sneaking around to avoid a chase felt like one of the most intense cat-and-mouse games within a videogame I've ever played, as I did what I could to find my way in the dark, only turning my flashlight on for a few brief seconds to try and figure out my path forward without ringing a Volatiles' dinner bell.

I also happen to like weapon durability, and I appreciated that there were enough strong weapons to be found, crafted, and repaired that I didn't have to be precious with what I used. I enjoyed switching between different weapon classes to see what I preferred, and how a weapon's unique shape impacted my infected/human slicing skills, and making the necessary resource choices to either keep a weapon I'm having fun with going or move on to something else.

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What I could have done without is the color-coded system and slow upgrade pacing for everything, particularly the gear Crane wears. When upgrading your weapon's blueprints, you'll almost always see meaningful improvements in damage output, and what Crane is wearing hardly felt like it was impacting gameplay at all.

Levelling up, obviously, has a greater impact on your health, stamina, etc, than any piece of gear could. XP is, however, dolled out slowly, and the four sections of a skill tree you work your way through just feel like they are there because skill trees are a staple of the genre. The abilities on the trees feel empty, like they're included in the game because it's what's expected.

I don't mind a good skill tree, but when you're dedicating a late-game ability slot to just being able to craft a grenade launcher, that can't help but feel like a lack of creativity. I'd already found blueprints to craft items in the overworld, so why couldn't I have found grenade launcher blueprints? I understand it as a way to determine the flow of the challenge in a game so that players are not running around with an overpowered weapon from the get-go. But if pacing out the power fantasy of the endgame and managing the difficulty scale are the goals, then I think it would be far more engrossing to see that done through melee encounters and the abilities you can unlock to empower those encounters.

And while Castor Woods almost always looks like a scene from a postcard, Techland's style of zombies, or infected, or whatever you'd like to call them, is genuinely freaky in a way I really appreciated. They're bloody, gory, and fall apart to my knife with a satisfying, blood-splattering slash. Whenever I saw another head roll, it just made me think of my favorite slasher films, and made me want to keep playing to chop off another zombie's head.

Lastly, a note on the game's performance. I did hit a few frame rate drops here and there, playing on my laptop with an NVIDIA 3070Ti and an AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS on medium settings, but it didn't happen with any consistency that it broke my experience. What actually broke my experience was a progression-blocking bug I encountered early on in the game, though that was before a day-one patch was issued ahead of release, so hopefully it is fixed and you'll be spared having to rollback your save like I did to get around it. All I ask of my games is that they look good and run smoothly, and for the majority of my 35+ hours it took to hit credits, that was how The Beast ran.

Dying Light: The Beast has two core pillars that are fairly strong, and if you are already a fan of the series, then there's sure to be plenty here for you to enjoy, even if it might not knock it out of the park in every element. If you're new to the series and have no prior attachments to it, but love a good zombie-killing game now and then, I'd push you to really consider how much you want to spend your money on this game, when there are so many better games to spend your time with in 2025.

Overall, those two pillars only keep the game interesting for as long as you want to keep your brain turned off. A dash of well-executed survival elements around those pillars doesn't make up for the rest of the ways the game is lacking, making Dying Light: The Beast a missable title as we move into the final months of 2025 with plenty of major releases on the horizon.

PC version tested. Review code provided by the publisher.

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6.5

WCCFTECH RATING

Dying Light: The Beast

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.*

Pros

• Castor Woods is a gorgeous setting
• Combat is fun and satisfying to pull off, and Beast Mode feels especially fun to engage
• Parkour mechanics can feel exhilarating, particularly when you get into a good flow
• Survival elements that raise the stakes and the tension, including resource management and weapon durability

Cons

• Inconsistent narrative tone and mechanical pacing
• A poorly written core campaign
• A significant part of traversal feels entirely antithetical to the series

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