Dying Light: The Beast Review
Blog Andrew Joseph 18 Sep , 2025 0
As I embarked on my fourth trip to jump over the roof while Twain cuts zombies into zombies through the dying Light series, I wondered if this violent survival horror film would make me feel less happy. But after more than 40 hours of tearing and rolling, I'm surprised to say that it's still interesting, keeping it human even though the basic changes haven't changed much since 2022. This trip through the immortal Eurasian cities and countryside can make you a person who injects monsters’ DNA, allowing you to tear people’s heads with your bare hands. It's satisfying, disturbing, caught at night and swarmed by volatiles, and the turmoil you have no hope of defeating is still absolutely terrifying. The only major disappointment is that the beast hasn't added a lot of things besides the clumsy mechanics, and after a decade of innovative games, this hasn't left a lot of surprises. Still, for a reliable entertaining series, there's something to say, I was glad to dig my nails.
The sequel continues the story of Kyle Crane, the protagonist of the first game, who is transformed into a half-human, half-beast monster through a rather terrible series of events, capable of jumping 50 feet off the air, screaming, causing psychological damage to the undead…and so, it's still strange. The thin paper plot isn't just about your revenge mission with the world's most versatile Bond villains and crazy scientists, it's totally downgraded, as you think, but at least enough excuses to hunt down the boss and with the side effects of usually better, sometimes kindness. Plus, even if the minimum of this story is about the same, the characters you encounter and make friends with along the way are so memorable that I don’t want to skip the long conversations where you can get to know them.
When you sprint to the final confrontation (which makes my completer about 40 hours, but easily done under 20), you can hunt dangerous, GM zombies, hunt with super powers called Chimeras, and inject your own blood. This is where the main new mechanisms of the beast come into play, such as being able to shoulder the ability to charge among zombies without destroying sweat and stupid people, for example, you can change the direction in the air by using obscene powers. Turning yourself into a Hulk's abhorrence in pursuit of revenge makes an already awesome frame neat and able to throw your machete and punch 20 zombies into 20 seconds in 10 seconds is very satisfying.
That said, even if this makes a fairly small tweak to the established dying light blueprint, as you will only be able to go all out every once in a while after suffering the expenses and damage caused by anger count. You're still waving the lead tube for the rest of the time, getting rid of volatiles every time, so it's very familiar if you're playing a dying light game before the vast majority of game time. It's by no means a bad thing, as it reminds some good times, but it seems a bit like a run/jump/slide memory lane.
Another thing that makes the beast different from its ex is the boss fighting the infected soup to unlock your new abilities. When you first encounter these encounters, it introduces a new type of bad guy and then starts to appear in the wild like a fast-moving skeleton zombie, jumping through the air, dancing on smaller undeads, and grabbing sharp claws for you on the blinking claws. Or another muscle, cruel ghoul gains invisible powers that make you look at your shoulders frantically and listen to the roar in the darkness. They were cool for the first time, but by the end of the campaign it felt a little like steam as they started rolling out variants of the same boss you had previously fought with, like a muscular, savage zombie, which can only be distinguished by his gas mask and the weaknesses of the poison. Still, they are always in the entertainment highlights at least in the process – I mean, who doesn’t like boss fights?
Castor Woods’ Open World Valley is a new environment where you spend all your time in seeking revenge, combining elements of the moment we see in other dying light games to become a comfortable little pack. It has spacious rural areas that are reminiscent of pristine expansion, and an urban area with a large number of stone buildings to fight for. Compared to the huge map of the Dying Light and its first sequel, Castor Woods is small, and you can definitely see that the roots of the beast were originally considered to be the Expanded 2 when dying 2, when you encounter the mountains in the box you can be crossed by cars in minutes, but that's not a bad thing because they don't use them well without the space to expand the space.
It also includes anything that is needed for any good dying light game: In the main urban areas, I remembered the advantages of sticking to the roof and jumping around to avoid the tribes below, while stepping into the forest and swamps, these things make up most of the map, and I tried my best to beat my destination, avoid the destination, and avoid it. Like many beasts, everything about castor forest is perfectly acceptable, and there isn't much to do to stand out, but I still leave a lot of new memories and a terrible path to destruction.
Finally, I did have to hand it over to Techland to make the beast the most technically dying light game to date- I was able to do it all the way with no major or consistent bugs. I played on a high-end PC so it's likely that the best experience people would like to have hoped for, but it's worth noting that apart from a crash and pop-up pop-up here and there, it's been a very smooth journey – which I've played most of the time before patches for a day. There were a few annoying moments where I got stuck in a vent due to some buggy geometry and couldn't progress through the area until I'd jiggled my character around for a couple of minutes, and a few times where my character got stuck in the environment at the worst possible time and jeopardized my mission, but these were rare enough situations that they didn't make me want to hulk out and throw things at the screen.