Luitenant_Gruber Dying Light: The Beast Review

*Warning: Spoilers* Surprisingly good game, but with some serious flaws. Dying Light: The Beast was a gem that came out of nowhere for me and my mate when we decided to play it together. This game was meant to be a DLC for one of the other Dying Light games but became its own standalone game in the end. In Dying Light: The Beast, you play Kyle who escapes a laboratory where the Baron has experimented on him for many years, to create the ultimate superhuman. In your quest for vengeance on the Baron, you need to find allies, collect resources, ammo, guns and dismantle the operations of the Baron and his army of guards. One key factor in achieving this, is hunting down Chimera’s. These are heavily mutilated monsters that possess immense power and are very hard to kill. When you finally do, you absorb their blood to increase your own superhuman abilities. Throughout your adventure you meet valuable allies, each with their own quests and rewards. There are many settlements and points of interest that you can explore through the huge open map. Although you are free wherever you want to go, some areas are very high level and will nuke you instantly. Scavenging items like alcohol, rags, scraps, batteries and other materials is essential and you use these to craft weapons, ammo and key items like training manuals. This game has some serious parkour mechanics that work most of the time. Sometimes they feel a little clunky and slow, but overall, it adds some variation to the game. With the exception of the climbing walls in the forest area… They took forever and added nothing else in terms of challenge or reward. The graphics in Dying Light: The Beast are amazing. The world is full of detail and enemies; forests and objects all look great. The best part is the breakdown of enemies. You hit them once and part of their heads fall off. You hit them again and now half their shoulders are split in half. So cool. The animations are fluent and overall, the game delivers a steady 60 FPS. The sound effects are also great. Guns sound very solid, especially the Marksman Rifle and shotgun, and environmental sounds are chilling and always give off a sense of danger lurking in the area at any given time. I have to say that I thought that the controls and menus were a little complicated. The way to select items, manage your inventory slots and tabs and the crafting system itself is very confusing sometimes. Speaking about inventory and menus, I really hated that you needed to press E to loot enemies. When killing a horde of zombies, the last thing I want to do, is holding E every time. When you mis click, what happened a lot with that many loot bags, you need to release E and press it all over again. The Perk system is fair, although many new skills do not feel that special or rewarding in my opinion. The leveling system works, but it takes forever. When you die, you lose XP, a penalty that infuriated me in the beginning because the XP earnings were so slow. Although my experience with Dying Light: The Beast was great; there were some serious issues that cannot be ignored. For starters, the crashes. The game crashed many times on me and my friend, without valid reason as far as I could find. The only good thing is that you get respawned next to your Co-op buddy when playing together, making it “bearable”. Then you got the Volatiles. These are very, very strong Infected that evolved to Rambo like maniacs. They are fast as light, strong as a bull and take five hundred and eighty thousand bullets to kill. Bullets you certainly don’t have. They kill you with one punch in the face and come in groups of three or more. The absolute biggest issue is that when you finally kill one of these motherf..., another immediately comes out of thin air to chase you. Even when you are in “Beast Mode”, they still destroy you with one blow. When me and my mate found out that there are special “Volatile Hive Missions”, we laughed ourselves to tears and never even touched the entrance of one of these dead traps. Lastly, there is one specific, game breaking bug that we also encountered. Near the end, when exploring the Asylum, all breaks lose and you need to make a run for the exit. In this run the main double doors in the first hallway suddenly shut closed and do not open again. This means insta-death when the invincible mad Volatiles start chasing you. After eight attempts, the door remained open for one of us and we could finally finish the mission. The final battle was okay but not as epic as we hoped. The story buildup towards this battle however, was absolutely great. Nevertheless, we beat the game and felt proud of ourselves. I would definitely recommend Dying Light: The Beast. It offers a ton of content, a huge open world, fair play time and overall, a good gaming experience.