Dying Light: The Beast review

I won't lie: punching a man's head clean off his shoulders with a single swing of my fist is pretty darn satisfying. It's not like Dying Light: The Beast needed to make me super-strong—I regularly launch zombies off rooftops with my two-footed flying kick and slice enemies in half lengthwise with an electrified machete I built in my bedroom—but I do appreciate the opportunity to hulk out with a bare-handed decapitation every now and then.

This time around, Techland's zombie parkour horror is going to the country, and the setting isn't the only thing that's changed. Dying Light: The Beast swaps the dense skyscraper forest of the last game, Stay Human, for a quaint village nestled in a rural landscape, and dispenses with a lot of the bells and whistles.

No more claiming sections of the city for factions, or setting up networks of two-way ziplines and jump pads, or soaring through the air with a paraglider. Even though it adds a bit of super-human strength to the mix, the zany parkour sandbox has been toned down to resemble a purer survival horror experience.

Thing is: I'm a bells and whistles kinda guy. I loved transforming the city in Stay Human into my own personal jungle gym, and you can't give me a bunch of cool toys in one game and then take them all away in the next one.

Remember how the movie Alien had one alien, and then Aliens had a ton of aliens, and then Alien 3 went back to one alien again? I wasn't a fan of that, either. To put it in parkour parlance, Dying Light: The Beast is more grounded, but winds up a little flat-footed as a result.

Kyle style

Kyle Crane, the gruff, selfless do-gooder of the original Dying Light is back, and boy is he angry, and also, boy is he occasionally a superhuman monster. Poor KC spent the last dozen years being tortured in a lab by an evil dude named "The Baron," who injected him with various zombie serums that means Kyle can now lose his shit and summon monster-like strength for short periods of time.

Now that Kyle's free of his prison, he wants revenge on The Baron, who rules the zombie-filled valley of Castor Woods with a private army.

But would you believe it: the first nice person Kyle meets in Castor Woods immediately injects him with more zombie fluids. Kyle is unhappy about this, but only briefly. You'd think someone who had spent more than a decade being stabbed with zombie needles would under no circumstances allow themselves to be stabbed with more zombie needles, but he's told injecting gross infectious gunk into his arm will make him stronger.

"Fine," Kyle says, immediately capitulating to continued injections of untested zombie fluids.

That's just how Kyle Crane rolls, folks: he's a one-dimensional hero who always does the most noble and badass thing for people he's known for no more than a few minutes, whether that means swimming through a flooded power plant in the dark or investigating a noise in a sewer filled with monsters or slamming putrid zombie juice into his veins because it'll make him jump higher.

And that's OK! I'm not here for the writing or characters or logic, I'm here to climb buildings and kick zombies off those buildings and craft a baseball bat that does both flame and shock damage. Techland thoughtfully made a "skip" button available during every single line of every conversation in The Beast. I smash it often.

Map quest

One of my biggest concerns was that The Beast, which was originally planned as DLC for Stay Human, was going to feel like an expansion and not a full game. I'm happy to say I don't get that feeling, except, well, I do get that feeling a little bit, sometimes. It's most noticeable in the first half of the game, which has a real shortage of side-quests—despite your main hideout being packed with NPCs, very few of them have anything for you to do and mostly stand around talking about how awesome Kyle Crane is. Once you've unlocked a second HQ midway through the game, there are a bunch more multi-part sidequests to keep you busy when you want a break from the main story.

Castor Woods itself doesn't feel like an expansion either, because it's a big ol' map. Probably a bit too big, honestly. Without a huge, modern city to traverse you can't do all that much rooftop freerunning before you run out of rooftop, and I spent a lot of time making trips back and forth, not just through the town but through industrial areas and farmland and forests where there's not much to climb and jump around on. (There are trucks you can drive, but they're slow and can't be customized, nothing like the vehicle from Dying Light's The Following expansion, if that's what you were hoping for.)

Even on a smaller scale, though, The Beast's parkour is still engaging, and there are at least a few decent climbing puzzles socked away here and there around the map: a power station with a single distant open window, a clock tower that needs to be scaled to connect an electrical cable, and a pair of towering industrial smokestacks with just enough bricks missing to create a subtle path of handholds that lead you to the top. I just wish there were more properly tall stuff to climb—what's here is fine, but can't match the exhilaration of some of the really big climbing puzzles of Stay Human.

Beastly

The Beast is a very videogamey videogame, and I mean that as a compliment. To unleash my beast powers, which is called going into Beast Mode, I have to fill my Beast Meter by doing damage or even just taking damage (Techland really, really wants you to fill your Beast Meter).

To unlock new Beast Skills I have to collect, you guessed it: Beast Points. If Techland didn't at least try to put together a promotion with MrBeast for this game, I'd be very surprised.

And I love Beast Mode. Briefly I can become more of a monster than the monsters I'm fighting, plunging my arm through one zombie's torso, popping another's head like a balloon between my palms, ripping an arm off another and skewering him with it.

I never found much practical use for some of my beast skills, like my super-jump, and one called "Hook Thrust" that lets me fling my grappling hook and then quickly yoink myself over to whatever it sunk into (you know, the way a beast uses a grappling hook). But it's fun to do these things anyway, to forget about stamina bars and health meters for a bit and just let loose with raw carnage.

And yeah, while fighting a room full of The Baron's soldiers, I punched one dude's head clean off. Zero complaints.

The gore, even when I'm not using Beast Mode, is extremely well done, with lots of fun and gross animations and deformations. I swung a club at one zombie and its lower jaw went flying off, then I smashed a hole in its sternum, then shattered its leg. When it fell, another zombie lunged at me and briefly tripped over the body of the one I'd just knocked down. I cut another zombie's arm off with a blade and it held up its stump, looked at it for a moment as if mildly surprised, then continued shambling at me. Then I knocked the top of its skull off and saw its wet brain. A+, would brutalize the undead again.

Fighting humans: also decent. The Baron's soldiers aren't overly smart, especially the idiots with axes or tonfas (I have never seen so many tonfas in a game) who just charge right at me and die. But after hours of zombie-smashing, I appreciated the sequences where I could just go bananas with shotguns and SMGs against the military and armed bandits. Screw parkour, at least for a few minutes: I've got a sniper rifle now.

Bossy boots

The premise of boss fights in Dying Light is a good one: there are extra-baddie zombies The Baron has cooked up in his lab and unleashed into the wild for testing, and to gain new beast powers you need to hunt these bosses down and defeat them, then inject their unique goo into your body.

But it turns out you don't do much hunting: an NPC usually just calls you on the radio and tells you where they are. Worse, the bosses themselves aren't particularly interesting, coming in one of two flavors: big or fast.

Big ones do the kind of things big ones do, like throw rocks and ground-pound, and fast ones speed around and jump at you and then speed away again. The least interesting boss is just a big, growling pile of hit points, and that's the one that's trotted out multiple times during the game.

It took me about 35 hours to complete the main story of Dying Light: The Beast, and I've still got a bunch of sidequests I never did, treasure maps I didn't hunt down, and activities like mini-power stations and safe houses I didn't complete. I'm happy it's big enough that it doesn't just feel like a padded-out expansion: with a couple exceptions, The Beast feels like a proper, full-on game. It's just not as good of a game as the last one.