Dying Light: The Beast Review

The success of Dying Light came down to three components: zombie gore, parkour movement, and the contrasting nighttime. Dying Light 2 faltered with its night action, but offered a different and mostly satisfactory parkour system with plenty of viscera. Dying Light: The Beast is like a mix of the last two games (+DLC) but somehow forgets what made each of them work. Its parkour is almost an afterthought, due to the disagreeable world design. And running out at night is best avoided. The Beast is the weakest game in the franchise, despite superficial efforts to be more like the first.

Kyle Crane is back. After years of torture at the hands of the comically clichéd Baron, Kyle escapes with the help from a rogue scientist named Olivia. The only way he can beat the Baron is to kill super-mutated Chimeras and inject their blood to gain beastly powers, and Olivia will help locate them as the story progresses. Perhaps the only good part of Kyle’s return is how often he voices the player’s own thoughts. How many Chimeras are there to kill? How many towers need climbing? These are rarely answered, but the desire to get down to business is appreciated.

Despite a decent beginning, the story is poor overall. While not as depressing as Dying Light 2, quests are rarely good quality. One cool side quest involved following a noisy pipe. Another asked Kyle to go back to an island refuge that was lost. Some quest chains have a decision at the end, but these don’t lead anywhere because there is zero follow-up. Major characters vanish from the world after they’ve served a purpose. So most quests are dull and some of the writing is awful. Not once but twice did survivors insist that the Baron is the real monster, just after Kyle decapitated his 500th walking corpse. The story is repetitive too, framed around hunting chimeras and doing similar tasks for survivor groups.

Quest activities are not great either. Too often you are sent to a location to climb a long and linear path of ledges. This was bad the first time and continued to be the worst part of quests. When you do get to a destination, you probably won’t find what you are looking for either. All Kyle seems to be doing is running fetch tasks and plugging in cables.

Fortunately the zombie killing and gore is still good. Ribs are shattered, legs get severed, torsos become separated, and rotten flesh is torn off the bone. Zombies like to grab and lunge, which makes moving around just a fraction annoying. If you take enough damage, Beast mode can be unleashed for quick zombie killing, but this is not even as fun as Dead Island 2’s fury mode, which is ironic. Guns are useful against humans, who dodge melee attacks with cat-like reflexes. But any shooting brings out runner zombies, so pick your poison.

When it comes to the world itself, it is unfortunately a liability for the franchise’s parkour movement. The landscape is wide and open, with only about 20% of it covered with buildings. This means that there are fewer opportunities to run over and through structures. But the main city is also poorly designed for such movement. It consists of high buildings placed in concentric rings with huge gaps between each ring. Climbing up is slow and clunky, as handholds are vague. Once you get up, you cannot run from A to B. You either have to regularly drop back down to street level or circle far around. There were only a few quest routes where the parkour flowed well, which is disappointing.

Night is a mere shadow of its old self. Initially, the atmosphere is great, like the original: dark and scary. Volatiles are out by default too, so on the surface, we’re back. But the Volatiles spawn right in front of you and circle your location. Night chases are annoying. Trying to lose Volatiles is hard because parkour is clumsy, even when fully upgraded. More than a few times the Volatiles made it to the rooftop before me and waited patiently so they could spill my intestines on the street below. You get double XP at night, but it is not worth it. And you can explore those dark zones during the day for the same rewards. Aside from a few night quests, it might as well not exist, which is crazy for a franchise named Dying Light.

What does get a good run are the countless pickup trucks that scatter the landscape. Unless you want to wait for the cold death of the universe, they become the default method of travel. This is odd in a series that was supposed to be about parkour. The cars are just pump-and-dump machines because they respawn in exactly the same location. It is quicker to quit the game, reload, find a freshly spawned vehicle nearby (that you previously left elsewhere) and drive to a destination, than to leg it. There is no fast travel, which would be fine if the world was compressed and fun to navigate. So driving boring trucks is what you will spend way too much time doing. Considering how central these cars are to the experience, it is a huge shame there are no meaningful customization options.

Dying Light: The Beast strays too far from the winning formula that the first game almost perfected. It offers minimal enjoyable parkour and the nights are a waste of time. And while the zombie killing is alright, there are plenty of other games that make that part more fun, like Dead Island 2. The Beast turns out to be more of a burden than the monster mash-up it was meant to be.

Performance: Good @ High Settings. Upscaling: XeSS Balanced @ 1440p

Test Machine: Ryzen 5 3600, ASUS 6700 XT, 16GB DDR4, Win 10 Pro