Dying Light: The Beast Reviews

Dying Light: The Beast is a ghost of a great franchise, competently executed but lacking the spark that once made it special. The game lacks the pioneering audacity of the original, and lacks the narrative ambition of the sequel. 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.

While more limited in scope than the mainline Dying Light titles, this side-quel ups the fun factor by giving the player a way to blow off steam with the addition of superpowers. Lighter in tone and with more room to breathe, Dying Light: The Beast puts just enough spin on the franchise's formula to keep from feeling like a retread. It turns out that the ability to stomp around and clear a room in 30 seconds was just what Dying Light needed.

Dying Light: The Beast brings back Kyle Crane for a revenge-driven, contrived story that mostly works. Having access to newfound powers means you can step toe-to-toe with these creatures, but the magic of the series is and always will be the parkour, the cities, and the exploration. I like being able to rip the heads off enemies, but I love being able to climb and ascend to the rooftops even more. Sure, the abilities are fun, but the formula doesn't deviate much outside of that. Ultimately, that parkour and melee combo from previous games is what makes Dying Light: The Beast fun.

Dying Light: The Beast plays like the greatest hits of the series’ formula with its brutalist combat and slickest parkour yet, and the return of the terrifying night cycle, making it the best Dying Light experience yet.

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It's clear that the emphasis of Dying Light and thus The Beast is to give you a world where you can run about within it and make infected corpses your playthings, but there's a lot of room for evolution. The Beast is successful at giving us another scrumptious slice of Dying Light, but the irony of The Beast is while it strives to be untamed, its leash can only extend so far before it's pulled forcefully back because of the limitations and lack of upgrades that meaningfully unleash the monster within. So yes, The Beast is good, but it's neutered.

Kyle Crane is back, and looking for revenge on the evil scientist who's spent 13 years experimenting on him in this enjoyable if sometimes uneven romp through Techland's greatest hits.

Dying Light: The Beast is not a safe sequel. It does not attempt to simply enlarge the cityscapes or double down on familiar systems. Instead, Techland recalibrates the franchise, opting for a more intimate, tension-driven approach rooted in the original’s survival horror fundamentals. While not every risk pays off, the ambition is appreciated. For players seeking another sprawling urban parkour playground, this entry may feel narrower in scope. However, for those who want to experience atmospheric, nerve-shredding moments, The Beast delivers. It challenges you not only to endure the infected but to examine the humanity you cling to in a world intent on stripping it away.

A game that goes back to its roots incredibly well. Dying Light: The Beast captures the horror and survival horror RPG of the first game, and really helped to build where the future of the series is going.

Dying Light: The Beast provides highly entertaining and engaging gameplay elements, but falters with its lackluster narrative and mundane visuals.

While The Beast was fun to binge through in a few days (around 21 hours, with plenty more side-quests still left to do), I feel like I've had my fill of Techland's specific brand of open-world design for now. But if the zombie parkour itch hits again, I think it says something that I'll probably return to Dying Light 2's sprawling cityscape over another scenic alpine excursion.

The game map is divided into four general areas: an industrial zone, a quaint village, a national park, and Old Town. The latter is probably the most familiar and fun, a city reminiscent of its namesake in Warsaw, and leaving it leads to less interesting and often cumbersome traversal. There’s often a parked 4x4 truck you can find and drive between objectives, but you’re otherwise just sprinting long miles past fields and forests in a line, squandering hours in a game whose strongest mechanics flourish in city centers.

While Dying Light: The Beast has some minor issues, the overall experience is fantastic and worth your time.

Post-apocalyptic parkour is the name of the game in Techland’s Dying Light series. With two mainline entries to its name, the series capitalizes on the zombie genre, even if it can fall into some tired tropes and clichés. Still, the iconic nighttime chases, gory combat, and realistic tone have made it more than just a survivor horror franchise. Dying Light: The Beast serves as the developer’s third entry in the series, and, fortunately, it’s as effective as a zombie bite: quick, effic...

Dying Light: The Beast went from potential expansion to a fully-fledged sequel, and although its origins are on full display in its narrative and protagonist, it never feels constrained by them. This is a fresh entry into the popular zombie-smashing franchise, taking the action from the city streets to a sleepy Alpine resort, but it's a welcome change of pace that opens up new and exciting ways to kill truckloads of infected Z-heads - it's just a shame that the human enemies still aren't all that interesting to fight.

Dying Light: The Beast is a bloody great time. Kyle Crane's return is a highlight, and while the pieces around him don't always fit, there's enough heartfelt interactions involved to make it enjoyable. The best part is the gameplay – an astoundingly brutal and adventurous romp through a gorgeous and well crafted world. It's a beast of an effort by Techland, and it pays off handsomely.

Dying Light: The Beast is like one of those “boots on the ground” first person shooter sequels, where the studio recognises that the last game maybe wasn’t quite what people wanted and tries to go back to what everyone loves the last time round. Where the original Dying Light put much of the focus on the zombies, how they were evolving, and keeping them terrifying, Dying Light 2 shifted focus to warring human factions like every other piece of zombie media you can find these days. Dying Light: The Beast seems to be a significant course correction, ensuring that the zombies are front and centre, not just on your screen, but in the narrative as well.

Techland's expansion turned standalone sequel winds up being the most enjoyable Dying Light so far, because it dials back the power fantasy.

The Beast isn’t as ambitious as Dying Light 2, but that sharper focus makes it feel like the true sequel to the first game.

The zombie apocalypse continues in Dying Light: The Beast, and this time you’ll be traversing the idyllic hills of a large European mountain town overrun with infected. Much of the game is an evolution of what’s made the series work in previous installments, with some notable new additions that spice things up. There are also as many returning frustrations as there are quality updates, making the whole experience something of a mixed bag.

Dying Light: The Beast is a polished, well-crafted experience that builds on the franchise's strengths while adding new creative flourishes to its formula.

Dying Light: The Beast is the promised sequel we were all waiting for. Its new combat additions make fighting more enjoyable and visceral, while Castor Woods provides not only the best setting of the franchise but also the ultimate post-apocalyptic parkour sandbox.

Dying Light: The Beast is a serious gore-fest that, when you dig a little deeper, turns out to be a rather silly playground teeming with ingenius ways of dispatching the undead. The fun, for me, was finding them all, and while it may not stick with me for long, this is still the best that Dying Light has ever been.

Dying Light: The Beast is everything I wanted from Techland’s return to the series. The combat is brutal and fun, the sandbox world is massive and rewarding to explore, and Beast Mode is an absolute highlight. I feel that this is still the best entry in the franchise and a must-play for fans of Dying Light.

Much like Kyle Crane's return, the series has also returned to form with Dying Light: The Beast. Although not a true sequel, it's a meaningful entry that dials down the tone to a much more sinister and grimier one. It's a reminder from Techland of why fans love the series in the first place—a gnarly yet technical combat system, over-the-top gore, and the thrill of freerunning all composited with a decent enough story, one that's sure to invoke the hope to live and die another day. You can effortlessly mow down enemies with a barrage of new unhinged artillery or viciously tear them apart with Beast Mode—it's your playground here, and it all adds up to make it perfect for veterans to experience while offering a slice to newcomers of what makes Dying Light feel so special. The Beast is awake, and so is the franchise once again.

As a sequel, Dying Light: The Beast succeeds in expanding on the foundations laid by its predecessors in ways that feel meaningful and player-minded.

Originally developed as a DLC for Dying Light 2: Stay Human, The Beast grew into a standalone release. This time, the series trades city skylines for a zombie-ravaged Europe, with the original’s hero back in the spotlight.

Techland made the right choice turning Dying Light: The Beast into a standalone entry in the series as it might just be the best yet. Taking control of Kyle Crane again is fantastic, especially now that he can tap into the power of his inner beast. But despite this, it remains mostly a tense experience, with a fantastic open world that begs to be explored.

Dying Light: The Beast is a goofy, bloody sequel with a monstrous twist, but doesn’t do much else to mix things up.

Dying Light: The Beast is neither an expansion nor a sequel. However, it is another good opportunity for an extremely spectacular extermination of zombies in a beautiful, open world of reasonable size.

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.

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 incredible evolution in the series by bringing back the movement and weapon feel, and evolving them to feel more brutal, which feels incredible after the overturned nature of what Dying Light 2 gave us.

Dying Light: The Beast started out life as an expansion for Dying Light 2: Stay Human. Growing into a standalone title, it may end up being my favorite in the series. It isn’t the biggest or the best; instead, it opts for a perfect length and unmatched gameplay. Kyle Crane is back and beastlier than ever in an exciting new direction for the franchise.