Dying Light: The Beast Reviews
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 blends a vicious revenge tale, breathtaking vistas, and feral new powers into one of Techland's most polished nightmares yet.
Dying Light: The Beast is a goofy, bloody sequel with a monstrous twist, but doesn’t do much else to mix things up.
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 might repeat some of the mistakes of previous games, but it also brings back everything that worked and focuses on them while delivering a more interesting story set in the series’ most unique location yet. The Beast might have started as DLC for the more ambitious Dying Light 2, but its contained success ends up being closer to the sequel we all asked for than that game ever was.
The amount of disgusting gore is an absolute delight.
Dying Light: The Beast can feel a touch safe at times with a serviceable story, but the high-flying parkour and gorgeous graphics are top-notch. Castor Woods makes for the perfect zombie-slaying playground for you to enjoy. It’s pure adrenaline packed into its 20 hours, continuing to carve out its own corner of the crowded zombie space.
Techland's expansion turned standalone sequel winds up being the most enjoyable Dying Light so far, because it dials back the power fantasy.
Dying Light: The Beast promises a full Dying Light experience, but can it capture the magic and horror of its predecessors as a standalone title?
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.
Techland was under the scrutiny of thousands of players worldwide - this was a final exam and the developer has passed with flying colors. Dying Light: The Beast is more Dying Light than ever, they've learned from the mistakes of the 2nd and returned to a path they should never have strayed from. It's fun, it's beast, it's crazy - in short, it's a masterpiece with one of the best protagonists and villains we've seen in years.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
The Beast is the Dying Light sequel I always wanted. It's dark, literally and tonally, focuses on zombies instead of warring human factions, and expands on some of the more outlandish and interesting ideas hinted at in the original. If this is indicative of what to expect in the franchise going forward, and it certainly looks that way, then I am excited.
Dying Light The Beast doesn't reinvent the wheel or introduce changes that revolutionize the series, but it does polish many aspects, enrich others, and add enough new features (a new setting, increased vehicle weight, etc.) to make the experience feel fresh, and it succeeds. And, most importantly, it's still as fun as the first day.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
A lot of the fun you can have with Dying Light: The Beast is what you make of it yourself. Exploring the world, unlocking the safe houses, finding cool new weapon modifications and crafting recipes, and generally getting lost. Nothing about the experience was groundbreaking, nor was it as enthralling or immersive as other open-world games. Instead, it was good fun you can enjoy in short or long bursts, whether you want to sink your teeth into zombie hunting or chilling as you wander the wilds and urban spaces of Castor Hills.
On a personal note, it’s really nice to see this series improve as it has over time. Despite being a vocal critic of its shortcomings, I want to love Dying Light, and if this represents where future games are going, I may just get what I’m hoping for.
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.
A proper follow-up for Kyle Crane
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.
Dying Light: The Beast isn't perfect, but it's a dark, brutal first-person survival horror game that's refreshingly consistent in its push for the series into both familiar and uncharted territory.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Dying Light: The Beast's parkour mechanics and crunchy melee combat are the two load-bearing pillars that make it a game worth leaping into, with support from a beautiful world to explore (minus the infected) and a tense day and night cycle that greatly raises the stakes on its survival elements. Beyond that, the mechanical and narrative pacing, inconsistent writing and narrative tone, and world design choices that feel antithetical to the series in the first place all bring it to a fairly uninteresting experience that is only worth it for however long you want to turn your brain off and enjoy watching digital infected brains go *splat.*