Last week, among a group of gaming news outlets, including CGMagazine, I was invited by Polish developer Techland to play a four-hour preview build of Dying Light: The Beast during a hands-on session in sunny downtown Los Angeles, California.
While the clear skies and warm weather were completely at odds with the dark, violent and macabre visuals and gameplay we’ve come to expect from the Dying Light franchise for more than a decade, Dying Light: The Beast is shaping up to be not only the most visually impressive instalment in the series yet, but also one of the best-looking and best-playing first-person survival horror games on the market, rubbing shoulders with titles like Resident Evil Village and Dead Island 2.
“This is a beautiful tourist region called Castor Woods,” franchise director Tymon Smektała explained during his brief introduction of the game’s story and its new, idyllic wilderness setting. “Because of how breathtakingly nice it is, how many beautiful vistas you will see in the game, but all of those vistas will be full of zombies, we call this a ‘beautiful zombie apocalypse,’” he jokingly added.
Dying Light: The Beast’s proprietary game engine, known as the C-Engine, is the same one built from scratch for 2022’s Dying Light 2 Stay Human, but it now looks much better, especially on the PCs that my fellow journalists and I used to play the preview build. Naturally, as a console gamer, I’m curious how good The Beast will ultimately run on current-generation consoles. However, given the shared engine and the fact that Stay Human is already a fantastic-looking console game that continues to receive graphical improvements and content updates from Techland, I’m optimistic that The Beast will achieve 4K60 performance on PS5 and Xbox Series X and S without too many sacrifices.
“Dying Light: The Beast is shaping up to be not only the most visually impressive instalment in the series yet, but also one of the best-looking and best-playing first-person survival horror games on the market…”
My four-hour-plus gaming session for Dying Light: The Beast was just enough time to explore a decent chunk of the zombie-infested tourist town area of Castor Woods, one of the game’s five distinct biomes. Not only was I stunned by the fidelity of the town’s cobblestone walkways, shingled rooftops and chateau courtyards, all teeming with zombies during the day, but also by how trees and other foliage bend and sway realistically in strong storm winds, and how adverse weather like downpours and mist adds extra immersion.
It should surprise no one that Dying Light: The Beast plays well, too. Its parkour-influenced control scheme is lifted almost entirely from Dying Light 2, which makes sense when you consider that The Beast was originally planned as a DLC expansion for the second game (much like how Dying Light: The Following served as an expansion for the first). Now re-envisioned as a standalone sequel, Dying Light: The Beast aims to refine everything fans of the previous games loved while shedding elements that weren’t so well received (like the drawn-out phase in Dying Light 2 where guns didn’t exist).
For example, I used an official Xbox Series controller supplied by Techland for my entire play session. While I would have preferred to use my Xbox Elite Series 2 controller with my custom button-mapping layout enabled, even without that advantage I was pleased to discover that several aspects of Stay Human’s parkour feel have been tightened, giving Dying Light: The Beast a much smoother flow, especially when vaulting from one pole or beam to the next. That was easily my biggest complaint about the second Dying Light game, so it was nice to finally see that issue addressed here.
Additionally, combat in Dying Light: The Beast has become tougher, but climbing is easier. On the game’s default Survivor difficulty, even the weakest and slowest biters are far from pushovers. They’ll often trade blows when under sustained attack, forcing players to back off and recover stamina or heal if needed. Meanwhile, a new stamina meter limits how long returning protagonist Kyle Crane can fight before needing a breather, but it no longer applies to climbing. Players need not fear running out of grip strength and falling simply because they couldn’t find their next foothold in time.
Another subtle change related to stamina is that the player’s screen darkens slightly each time Kyle executes a move that uses a large amount of stamina, such as a punch or kick. This helps keep players in the midst of a fight aware that they’re about to run out of energy and might want to back off to regain it, so their blows will have a greater impact. This effect might get old over time, and I expect players will eventually evolve beyond it through natural progression, but for the purpose of the demo, I found it quite helpful.
Completely gone, however, are Dying Light 2 Stay Human’s pivotal dialogue choices and player actions that literally transform the city and its factions for better or worse. By contrast, Dying Light: The Beast is a more focused, linear tale of vengeance featuring Kyle Crane, the original protagonist of Dying Light, who after being captured, imprisoned and experimented on by an evil scientist known as the Baron for more than a decade, has finally escaped and re-emerged in the forests of Castor Woods (also called Beaver Woods). Fueled by rage, nightmares and scattered memories of horrifying experiments, Kyle has only one mission: find and kill the Baron.
“…several aspects of Stay Human’s parkour feel have been tightened, giving Dying Light: The Beast a much smoother flow…”
I welcome this tighter focus. While the branching narrative paths, environmental changes, and alternate endings of Dying Light 2 Stay Human were interesting to see unfold, the consequences of many of those choices felt predetermined and pushed the story toward a handful of outcomes that neither aligned with the motivations of its key characters nor made much sense.
By contrast, Dying Light: The Beast jettisons Stay Human’s choose-your-own-adventure mechanics from the start, offering a more traditional open-world structure and linear narrative. Crane is given far more agency, and that sense of freedom can be felt immediately when players encounter and talk with other characters in the game.
According to Techland, two overarching themes that clearly define what’s new in Dying Light: The Beast are “Half Beast, Half Survivor” and “Run the Rooftops, Rule the Roads.” In the original Dying Light, Kyle Crane was merely an undercover GRE agent turned survivor who ultimately became a hero by trying to find a cure for the Harran virus and helping stave off Harran’s nuclear annihilation for a time. But after years of imprisonment and experimentation against his will under the Baron, Crane has been irreversibly changed into a half-man, half-monster whose ferocity lives up to The Beast’s name.
Similar to Marvel’s Hulk, when fighting enemies, taking damage or suffering a critical injury, Crane gradually builds a rage meter that, when completely full, automatically activates “Beast Mode,” an invulnerable state that grants him abnormal strength, speed and other abilities for a short time. At the start of the demo, players have no control over when Beast Mode activates — it only kicks in when the rage meter is full and Crane is low on health — but as Crane gains and develops additional Beast abilities, he will eventually master the ability to trigger the transformation at will, as long as his rage meter is filled.
In Beast Mode, Crane’s abilities are nothing short of brutal. He can rip off zombie heads, tear bodies in half, pound the earth to knock attackers off their feet, throw heavy boulders and concrete blocks at enemies, and more. I didn’t make it far enough in the demo to unlock the ability to activate Beast Mode on command, but I still managed some interesting zombie kills while the mode was active.
Sometimes Beast Mode would trigger just as I dispatched the last biter in a group, leaving me with nothing to kill, prompting me to sprint toward any zombies I could find before the ability wore off, desperately swatting, punching and pounding — only to run away the instant it ended, which was hilarious.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned “Rule the Roads” theme confirms the return of vehicles to the franchise for the first time since 2016’s Dying Light: The Following DLC expansion. This time, however, instead of driving upgradeable, weaponized dune buggies built for quickly crossing open terrain, players will get behind the modest wheels of all-terrain pickup trucks left behind by the Castor Woods Park Ranger staff.
To be honest, this new addition initially feels like a bit of a downgrade. Players will need to collect salvage, parts and gasoline to keep their chosen pickup maintained, fueled and in working order. From what we’ve seen so far, players won’t be able to modify these vehicles with anti-zombie weaponry like electrified roll cages, spikes or mounted flamethrowers, as you could in The Following. That said, I still found the “Castor Woodsmobile” very effective at running over zombie hordes, and its speed seems appropriate for the biomes players will explore, such as the swamps. All pickup trucks are also equipped with UV headlights, so there’s that too.
“…two overarching themes that clearly define what’s new in Dying Light: The Beast are ‘Half Beast, Half Survivor’ and ‘Run the Rooftops, Rule the Roads.’
There’s a long list of additional improvements in Dying Light: The Beast that I could spend hours talking about, but I’ll summarize the best ones here. Guns are back, and not just as occasional wildcard items that can be used a handful of times and then discarded or dismantled. They are now plentiful enough to form a regular part of the player’s arsenal, provided they can find ammo.
Weapons will break, but they can be repaired — on the fly, no less — from within the weapon wheel. There doesn’t appear to be a limit on how many times a weapon can be repaired or reforged, so as long as players keep collecting the necessary resources, they should be able to stick with and upgrade their favourite weapons for longer.
In a nod to the original Dying Light, players will once again be able to use zombie guts as camouflage, allowing them to move stealthily through zombie hordes without always having to fight — a feature that was sorely missed in Stay Human. And finally, while we couldn’t experience it during our play session, The Beast will feature four-player drop-in, drop-out co-op for the entirety of the game, with shared progression, a feature that has been a staple of the Dying Light franchise from the beginning.
As sure as the sun rises and sets, we can’t talk about Dying Light: The Beast without mentioning the franchise’s signature day-to-night cycle mechanics. Once again, players (also known as survivors) will explore, scavenge, fight and evade dull-witted zombies, fast-moving virals and other undead abominations during the day. But as night falls and more powerful infected creatures spill into the streets, players will have to take to the rooftops, seek shelter under a safe-zone UV lamp, hide, or stand and fight alone in the dark.
At night, that last option — combat — is rarely a smart choice. Volatiles, the fearsome apex predators that stalk the streets after sunset, can kill a survivor in just a few blows. One of their blood-curdling screams can summon a whole pack to chase down and overwhelm their prey. Worse, they can climb almost anywhere a survivor can, making escape difficult once they’ve spotted you.
Only survivors who are well-armed, prepared and equipped stand a chance of surviving a fight against a single volatile — let alone two or three — and trying to evade them with just a flashlight, the occasional sound decoy (like fireworks or a car siren trap) and “Survivor Sense” is a terrifying proposition, especially once a chase begins.
“I had an absolute blast playing Dying Light: The Beast, and I literally can’t stop thinking about returning to Castor Woods on Aug. 22 to continue the story in earnest.”
If you’re an experienced Dying Light player and all this sounds familiar, that’s because it is — and it’s entirely intentional. Dying Light: The Beast may be a little while away, but it already feels like 2016’s original game refined, with a brand-new setting, story and luxurious graphical overhaul, all of which excite me as a franchise fan.
Now, I won’t lie. Despite my literal hundreds of hours of experience with the previous two Dying Light games, The Beast demo kicked my ass more than once during my four hours with it. Lowly virals sometimes chased me to the edge of town and killed me before I could heal because I figured I’d have a better chance of escaping than fighting them head-on. A couple of the demo’s environmental puzzles stumped me for more than 20 minutes apiece until, in the interest of time, I caved and asked a friendly Techland camp counsellor for a navigational hint to put me back on track.
In hindsight, I probably should have played the demo on Story Mode difficulty to see more of the game — and, yeah, maybe I should have insisted on bringing my Elite 2 controller after all. But the bottom line is that I had an absolute blast playing Dying Light: The Beast, and I literally can’t stop thinking about returning to Castor Woods on September 19 to continue the story in earnest — bloodthirsty zombies and giant friendly beavers be damned.
