The Dying Light series is one that’s persisted for years and has built up a steady fanbase, with the first game releasing a little over 10 years ago. Jumping over rooftops, dodging and killing zombies alike, and surviving the night, all return with Dying Light: The Beast. But was Techland able to craft an adventure worth your time? Find out what we thought in our Hands-On Preview.
Welcome to Castor Woods
Around a week ago, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to be flown out to LA and play around four hours or so of Dying Light: The Beast. Though before we get any further, here’s a quick disclaimer. While I’ve played maybe a couple of hours of the first game years ago, for all intents and purposes, I’m a newcomer to the franchise. So if you’re looking for a preview that compares and contrasts The Beast with the previous games, you’re in the wrong place. Though if you’re curious what someone brand new to the franchise thinks of this standalone release, then keep reading!
Dying Light: The Beast is a direct sequel to the DLC of the first game, Dying Light: The Following. You play as the same character, Kyle Crane, though it’s been ten years since you last saw him, and things aren’t exactly the same. Kyle has been trapped, tortured, and experimented on over this time and has become a mix of human and something else. The game starts with you breaking free from captivity and emerging into Castor Woods, your playground to explore and dominate.
Story-wise, the game revolves around you wanting to get revenge on “The Baron”, who had you captured, and you do so by extracting (and injecting) ‘boosters’ from large enemies called chimera. As you do this (and explore the lands), you come across survivors and enemies alike.
Bringing a Shovel to a Zombie Fight
As this is just a preview, I’m not going to break down every specific gameplay element, but I’ll talk about my feelings of how Dying Light: The Beast felt to play overall. If you’ve heard of this franchise before, then no doubt you know that it’s a first-person, parkour-focused zombie action-adventure game. With The Beast taking place in a mix of wooden nature and small towns, this is already a different experience as you switch between the open outdoors and the crowded city streets alike.
In my four hours or so of play, I had access to four main story and two side quests, of which I completed three and one, respectively. These led me to a good variety of activities, from boss fights to parkouring over rooftops, to exploring dark caves, to running through the woods. Let’s start with the combat.
Dying Light: The Beast is primarily a first-person, melee-centric combat game (well, at the start at least, as it seems this time around there is more of a focus on ranged weapons as the game progresses.) Now personally, I find it rare for a game to have good first-person melee combat. Most of the time, the best is simply serviceable. The Beast is certainly at the higher end of the spectrum here, providing a good variety in weapon type and a very satisfying “oomph” to your hits as you stab, smack, and slash away at whatever’s blocking you. At full display here in the game’s melee combat is the new gore and “brutality” system, with zombies quite literally falling apart as you smack them with a shovel. The first time I knocked one’s skullcap out, exposing their brains, I had to stop and stare. Quite gross but also quite satisfying.
There’s more to the melee combat, of course, such as being able to add mods to your weapons, and a skill tree which provides bonuses or new moves (such as a drop kick), but the gist of it is that it felt good and satisfying to play. And while I was never bored when putting the undead back in the ground, I was certainly overwhelmed at times with the sheer amount of infected blocking my way. Which leads nicely into our next section, the parkour/movement.
Hop, Skip, and Jump
It’s rare that you play a game where killing everything you can see isn’t the focus. In Dying Light: The Beast, you’ll often be swarmed and overwhelmed with dozens and dozens of zombies. Fighting everyone you see isn’t really a feasible strategy; instead, you’ll need to hop, skip, and jump your way around and above these mindless monsters to get to where you need to be. The parkour system from previous titles makes a full return of course, letting you climb and clamber almost anything you can see. This was most apparent in the small city you explore in Castor Woods, which has a large amount of verticality as you make your way through it. Staying on the ground isn’t just a surefire way of getting swarmed by zombies; it’s also much slower than mastering the mobility Kyle has and the various little tricks he can do to speed things up. Which is important as Dying Light: The Beast has no fast travel, by design.
Yes, you read that correctly. While Castor Woods isn’t some gigantic map, thankfully (a bit of the opposite, really), the game has no fast travel at all. So when an NPC tells you to explore a cave and report back, it’s all up to you. Which is where another core part of the game comes into play, momentum. I mentioned skill trees earlier, but they help with more than just combat. There are also skills such as “active landing”, which lets you keep your momentum when jumping from up high, or a skill that lets you vault over zombies in your way. There’s even a skill that gives you a small movement speed increase after doing stuff like a vault or active landing. Essentially, a big part of this game will be in mastering both your own movement skills and the map itself. Knowing what routes you can take, be it in the towns or the woods, is as important as how you take them. As a quick example, when I was making my way back to a quest giver, I cut my travel time by more than half by simply knowing what path worked best for me and by keeping my momentum going.
This mix of learning and adapting creates a feeling of improvement more akin to, say, learning your weapon move set in a Monster Hunter game, or boss patterns in a Souls-like. Meaning, it felt like a natural learning curve as I played, and while I’m sure there will be some who’ll gripe about the lack of fast travel, I think Techland made the right choice here.
You Hear That Scream? Time to Run
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Dying Light game without the night to worry about, and The Beast ramps up the tension and fear here another level. When night falls, the stronger infected come out to play, including the “volatiles”. If these athletic enemies catch sight of you, they engage a “chase”, where you need to run as quickly as you can to a hiding spot in order to get away. The longer the chase goes, the more that come after you. I had just one chase in my preview, and while it was fun, it also ended with me mis-timing a jump and falling to my death. With everything essentially pitch black besides your flashlight, the chases are what really test your map and parkour knowledge. Though with high risk also comes high reward, as infected killed at night give you more experience and loot than in the day.
The final thing I’ll mention is “The Beast” part of Dying Light: The Beast. As I mentioned earlier, Kyle has been experimented on over the years and has become something more than simply human, and this shows up in gameplay too. Initially, as you kill zombies and hit bosses, a small meter starts to fill up, and when it reaches its maximum, you automatically transform into “The Beast”, where you use just your hands to rip enemies apart. Literally.
The mode is fun to play and provides a nice change of pace from being swarmed and hunted to turning the tables on the enemies instead. It also has its own skill tree, where you can unlock new moves for the mode as well as the functionality to transform by choice, rather than simply when the bar fills up. This was a nice bit of storytelling through gameplay, as the implication is that you’re mastering this ability of yours little by little, staying in control rather than succumbing to the bloodlust.
This was, of course, a preview build, so I did have a few visual glitches here and there, such as some textures not loading in, but for the most part, my experience was smooth and without issue. We were playing on PCs so I’m not sure how well exactly the console performance is going to be yet, of course.
More Than Just DLC
There’s a fair bit more I could talk about, such as how human enemies were much more difficult to handle, or how scavenging and exploration are paramount to your survival, or the addition of a pickup truck to drive, but I’ve already gone on long enough. The game will also release with full four-player co-op when it comes out next month, August 21st, but we were sadly unable to test that this time around.
Dying Light: The Beast was originally meant to be a DLC to Dying Light 2 (to the point where they’re giving the game for free to owners of Dying Light 2’s Ultimate edition,) and the self-contained nature of the game certainly shows that, but Techland expanded the scope and decided to release the game on its own. A smart decision, especially with the cheaper entry point of $60 USD, as reducing barriers to play the game will ensure it has a higher chance of succeeding. If this preview was enough to pique your interest in the title, be sure to keep an eye out around release for our full review of Dying Light: The Beast.
