Dying Light: The Beast Review – Despite All My Rage

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Dying Light: The Beast isn’t necessarily a more realistic game than previous installments. You frequently transform and attack zombies with powerful, quick attacks, almost like Wolverine. However, despite this over-the-top ability, this expansion – which can also be played as a standalone game – actually emphasizes horror and survival more than any other game in the Dying Light series, and it’s been the most enjoyable experience I’ve had with the franchise so far.

Dying Light: The Beast brings back Kyle Crane as the main character, sending him to a new area called Castor Woods. This nature reserve features beautiful, old-fashioned villages that feel both detailed and simple. The game continues to be an open-world, first-person zombie experience focused on thrilling parkour moves and intense close-quarters combat. However, The Beast also introduces some new features and brings back some fan-favorites.

There are a lot of guns available now, although ammunition is harder to find. While guns work well, they don’t build up your special ability meter as quickly, so I often preferred sticking with the classic weapons: baseball bats, machetes, and pipes. I especially liked modifying these with elemental upgrades to set zombies on fire, shock them, or make them bleed with every hit.

Honestly, getting up close and personal with zombies is awesome in this game. Every swing feels weighty, and there’s a ton of different weapons you can use and customize. It’s not just about shooting – these zombies will keep coming at you even if you’ve already messed them up badly, like taking off a leg or splitting their face open! They patched something similar into Dying Light 2 a while back, but it still looks incredible and really makes each fight feel intense and unique. The developers clearly put a lot of effort into making every encounter stand out.

In The Beast, managing stamina is much more challenging than in previous games, and I really appreciated that. It made every encounter feel incredibly intense, like a true fight for survival. Enemies scaled well to my progress, forcing me to regularly return to safe areas to upgrade my weapons. Even my best weapons weren’t invincible; they had a limited number of repairs before being permanently broken. This is a big change from earlier games, where you could always carry and upgrade your favorite weapons indefinitely.

I found Dying Light 2 more manageable than The Beast, mainly because Aiden Caldwell had a wider range of parkour and fighting skills. While Kyle is still capable, his skill set isn’t as extensive, which made me feel more vulnerable – and I actually appreciated that. I often had to quickly back away from even small groups of zombies just to recover. Unlike Dying Light 2, The Beast requires you to be strategic and watch your stamina, as you can’t simply power through hordes of enemies.

There’s one exception to this: filling up your Beast Mode meter. When you do, you get a short period of almost complete invulnerability, plus the ability to rip zombies apart and jump incredibly high – it really makes you feel like a superhero! However, from a story perspective, Beast Mode feels like more of the same from Dying Light – excessive action focused on making you feel like an unstoppable force in a zombie apocalypse. I enjoy zombie stories, but I prefer slower, more atmospheric and unsettling experiences where hopelessness is the main feeling. Dying Light hasn’t consistently delivered that, and this doesn’t change that. Luckily, in terms of gameplay, Beast Mode works less as a way to simply feel powerful and more as a useful escape from difficult situations.

Throughout my roughly 30 hours playing, I often used the game’s ‘Beast Mode’ not to quickly defeat enemies, but as a desperate attempt to survive. The game actually seems designed for this – the ability charges up by taking damage as well as dealing it. Beast Mode isn’t about becoming overwhelmingly powerful; it’s a last-resort emergency tool, and using it when my life was on the line felt much more satisfying than some of the game’s more over-the-top moments.

The story occasionally dips into typical, low-budget horror tropes – the kind I’d usually skip in a movie – but the game itself doesn’t fully embrace them. It keeps the tension high and limits Kyle’s abilities, making survival a struggle compared to Aiden’s more powerful experience. This contrast is most noticeable and satisfying at night. The series has always excelled at making the day-night cycle feel like two completely different games. During the day, Kyle is capable and can manage to get by. But at night, the incredibly fast and strong Volatiles emerge, transforming the game into a true stealth horror experience.

How you move and fight changes dramatically depending on the time of day. During the day, you can move freely, climbing buildings, jumping across gaps, and swinging from trees, similar to games like Assassin’s Creed. But at night, you have to be much more careful, sneaking around and using a special sense to detect nearby monsters. If a monster finds you, the chase is incredibly intense – they’ll relentlessly pursue you, and the music will build tension. These chases attract even more monsters, who will try to corner you, knock you down, and won’t stop until you reach a safe zone with UV lights that keep them away-if you can make it.

Honestly, the nighttime in this game is terrifying – way more so than previous ones. The huge, dense forests on the map really add to the fear factor, and I’m totally here for it! Plus, night still gives you double XP, which is awesome. I used to grind side quests at night in the older games, but in Dying Light: The Beast, just *surviving* until I could reach a safe zone and fast-forward to daytime felt like a major win. Forget side quests, just get me to sunrise!

I always thought it was a little strange when *The Following* expansion for the first game took place in such a flat area, considering how much the game relies on climbing and moving around vertically. But in *Dying Light: The Beast*, the designers really got it right – they’ve added tons of opportunities for vertical movement even outside the villages, with cliffs, trees, and towers to climb. One of the things I love most about zombie games is that feeling of approaching a building and not knowing what’s inside. It sounds simple, but it’s so important to me that a zombie game captures that sense of discovery and tension. And Castor Woods is the perfect place for that, because it’s full of creepy cabins scattered everywhere. Combining that unsettling setting with the nighttime gameplay really gave me the survival-horror feeling I’ve been hoping this series would deliver for years.

The game’s embrace of horror is perfectly complemented by a fantastic reimagining of the classic theme song by Olivier Derivere, a composer I greatly admire. His original music truly brings the game to life. The initial theme always evoked the feel of ’70s zombie films like Dawn of the Dead. This new version, however, feels more akin to the frantic energy of 28 Days Later, and I’ve had its haunting melody stuck in my head for days – which is exactly what I wanted. It’s moved away from being an action-packed score and feels more like a proper horror soundtrack, fitting the game’s darker, more appealing direction.

This game originally started as an expansion for Dying Light 2, which actually helped it stay focused. While it’s not a full Dying Light 3, it’s much bigger than a standard downloadable add-on. It streamlines the open world, cutting out some of the filler found in Dying Light 2. You’ll be sneaking into stores filled with sleeping zombies, raiding military convoys for valuable supplies, and hunting for rare gear using cryptic treasure maps. These exciting and tense activities are familiar from previous games, but this time, they aren’t cluttered by all the extra stuff that often fills the game world.

I really loved how Dying Light 2 made me feel like everything I did actually mattered, except for a few of the racing side missions near the end – those just didn’t grab me, even though the vehicles handled great. It did eventually try the ‘live service’ approach, becoming one of those games constantly trying to keep you hooked with new content. But honestly, The Beast is a much more focused experience. It’s a solid 20-hour story with plenty to do on the side to flesh out the world, but it doesn’t overstay its welcome or feel like a grind.

This change perfectly captures what makes Dying Light: The Beast so good: it moves away from constantly adding new gadgets and instead focuses on creating a truly terrifying and challenging experience. This gives the game a much clearer identity. Unlike the previous game, there’s no glider, jumps aren’t as high, and while you start with more parkour skills, they don’t reach the same levels. It might seem odd that a game improves by *removing* things, but it works. Dying Light has always excelled at a few key things, but often tried to do too much at once. With The Beast, the game finally focuses on those strengths, delivering a scarier, more difficult, and more immersive world than anything we’ve seen before in the series.

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2025-09-18 19:36