Dying Light The Beast Review – B-Movie Mayhem

I’ve always bounced off of Dying Light. With just over a dozen hours in the first and second games independently, I’ve found the experience of traversing rooftops littered with zombies to be fun, but forgettable. With Dying Light: The Beast, Techland is starting to figure out the joys of enhancing the power fantasy of stomping on the dead with abilities that perhaps should’ve been a part of the franchise from the start.

The Beast is not Dying Light 3, but it sure feels like the bones of it. Kyle Crane returns from the first game as the protagonist, and with excellent voice acting from Roger Craig Smith, manages to bring the franchise back on track with a singular narrative and focus. Gone are the winding narrative choices and extended RPG elements from Dying Light 2, and we’re left with a short, but focused story imbued with new, mechanical ideas that are ripe for exploration. However, the implementation of said ideas is short-lived. Don’t worry though, as there are plenty of direct connections to previous instalments, which, to be honest, could be a turn-off for those of us who wanted to enjoy this as an entry point.

Embrace The Beast

Here’s the new gimmick of this instalment — you’re half-human, half-zombie, all-Hulk. After years of being experimented upon by a generic madman scientist, Crane now possesses superhuman abilities that can turn the tide during battle, and sometimes during traversal. Once you’ve successfully dodged, lunged and swung arms across enough volatiles in the wild, Crane can enter “Beast mode”, and we’re not talking about the obnoxious YouTuber. 

Beast mode is a short, rage-induced period where Crane uses various super-powered abilities, most of which are only useful during fist-fights. You can dash through a horde without breaking a sweat, pick up giant boulders and throw them at bosses, and more. The beast mode is active for a short period, so using it strategically at the right time is the play. While you can min-max the timing to execute specific moves, you’re never given enough control to really change the pace of a battle to your liking.

READ MORE: GHOST OF YŌTEI REVIEW — SAMURAI SLASHER COMFORT

The highlight of The Beast is the Chimera boss battles. Each boss sees Crane face off against a new type of infected, all of which have an ace up their sleeve. Where one boss may be invisible, another may want to keep its distance while hurling gallons of toxin on you. I counted more than one boss that was straight up the Abomination from Incredible Hulk. The idea is for each boss to push Crane in using different senses and abilities, but most of them boil down to using the beast mode and throwing down at them. Killing a boss sees you gain Beast points, which can be used to upgrade and move up the Beast skill tree. And there you have it, the core loop of the game.

Storytelling & Survival Remain Weak

Where The Beast falters is, as expected, its storytelling. I simply don’t care as much about its characters as Techland wants me to. Even the mid-game twist of revealing the titular McGuffin, the monstrous beast, being suped-up Aiden Caldwell (DL2’s protagonist), seems like throwing crap at the wall to connect the games. It’s better than it being a random nobody, and I commend Techland’s desire to retain and close some narrative threads woven in previous instalments, but the b-movie delivery of its characters does a major disservice to this spinoff/sequel. 

Enough about combat, Dying Light is also known for its parkour and survival mechanics. Unfortunately, there’s not much to add here. Grapple hooks are always a welcome addition to any game, but it’s only when they feel right. On paper, a grapple hook is a perfect addition to the franchise, increasing mobility and fastening the pacing of chases. That’s not the case here, as it’s too unwieldy and erratic in its use. Neither Castor Woods’ townside nor its wilderness has enough verticality to deploy the grapple hook regularly, and it’s too slow to use in a pinch for evading hordes. You’re much better off using vehicles to traverse large distances, so long as you’ve hoarded enough fuel. 

That brings us to the last, and for me, the most frustrating part of the experience: survival. Durable weapons and vehicles ensure you’re always switching out your loadouts, and scavenging resources is second-nature when entering any space. The amount of picking up does not feel linearly proportional to the amount of resources they yield. I always found myself short on supplies to craft essentials like Molotovs. Selling valuables gets you a negligible amount of money, and it gets worse at higher levels, where maintaining your favourite tools requires a lot of upkeep.

READ MORE: DOOM: THE DARK AGES PACKS A LOT OF PUNCH

The checkpoint system is also unfair, kicking you back a couple of notches beyond where you’d expect to resuscitate after a fail. You may be climbing the tallest tower in the town, falter, and find yourself back at the entrance, forced to clear out the whole building once again before starting the climb. Resources spent during an encounter don’t come back after reloading a checkpoint, so in case you’ve used up all of your throwables and failed, you’d best get back to the grind before attempting to clear that place.

Of course, things take a turn for the worse when it’s nighttime, but I rarely went out adventuring during that time due to being ill-equipped. Levelling up can be much faster at night with a 2X multiplier on experience gained, but that’s offset by lower visibility and much more feral monsters. You can’t chain together parkour moves like you can in Assassin’s Creed, so there’s no intrinsic motivation to challenge yourself on the rooftops of Castor Woods.

I hope most of these issues can be sorted out in future updates, and Techland is already starting to show strong signs of post-launch support. In the two weeks I’ve spent playing through it, the developer has already started running community challenges with handsome rewards. Fixing and improving the game is a staple of the Dying Light franchise, and I’d love to see my nitpicks being worked on before delivering a third mainline entry.

PC Performance: Beast Mode

The Beast lives up to its name when it comes to its performance, at least on PC. Playing on my system with a Ryzen 7 5700X3D and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super, I could roam through the town at 90fps without breaking a sweat, with the caveat of using frame generation. With draw-distance at its highest, no upscaling or frame-gen at 1440p, I was getting around 45fps while walking around the town square.

To save a chunk of performance without losing any perceivable visual quality, turn down the draw distance multiplier to 150 or so. If you’re using an older GPU, don’t shy away from using FSR or DLSS. Techland has promised to add hardware ray-traced lighting support in the future, but I don’t see how transformative that addition will be, given the current performance of the title on high-end hardware.

Surprisingly, the game is Steam Deck verified, and the default settings run it close to 60fps, but that’s with FSR frame generation. This adds a ton of latency, leading to a slugging feeling when controlling Kyle, especially exacerbated in a game all about its smooth parkour movement. I recommend locking the frame rate to 30fps and staying away from frame generation on the handheld.

If you want the numbers, here they are:

Verdict

Dying Light: The Beast is a competent, often comforting sequel that retains the familiar highs of the franchise while dipping its toes in uncharted, more exciting territory.

Dying Light: The Beast is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.

REVIEW COPY PROVIDED BY TECHLAND.