Dying Light: The Beast dials up the horror and keeps the parkouring, zombie-bashing action – and it's a blast

Alright, I'm just gonna get straight to the point: did you love the first two Dying Light games? You did? Okay, I'll save you some time - you're definitely going to enjoy Techland's latest instalment in its survival zombie game series, Dying Light: The Beast.

There's enough to set The Beast apart from its predecessors, even if it follows the same broad gameplay template and stars returning leading man Kyle Crane, protagonist of the original game and its expansion, The Following.

Things didn't go so great for Kyle the first time around; in the (now canon) ending of The Following, he ended up betrayed, infected, captured, and used as an unwilling test subject. The viral outbreak has gone worldwide, and 90% of the global population is dead or infected.

More than a full in-universe decade later, he breaks out of a mysterious laboratory, and we’re off to the races once again: time to bash some skulls with improvised melee weapons and parkour your way across the rooftops like a bloodlusted Sébastien Foucan. Dying Light: The Beast isn't overly concerned with being serious or grounded; we're here for a little bit of the ol’ ultraviolence, and boy, is it fun.

Worlds apart

Considering that Dying Light: The Beast was purportedly originally planned as extra downloadable content (DLC) to Dying Light 2, it sure as hell has a good amount of content in it. Instead of the more urban settings of the first two games, The Beast takes place in the cozy woodland resort town of Castor Woods, nestled in a valley in an alpine landscape.

Well, I say ‘cozy’ - it's not exactly a pleasant place to be by the time Kyle breaks loose. Hordes of poor infected souls roam the cobbled streets and forest underbrush, deadly mutant variants stalk the night, and a rogue paramilitary group commanded by a villainous oligarch is attempting to seize control of the region. So far, so Dying Light.

But the shift to a more rural setting proves to be exactly the injection of freshness this series needed. The map isn't particularly large, but it's big enough to make navigating on foot take a while, and the focus on urban verticality is lessened here. Yes, there are still pylons and watchtowers for Kyle to clamber up, but also more wide-open spaces, divided by trees and thick bushes that make ambushes a constant threat to the unwary explorer. The woodland environments are also beautiful, as is the primary settlement, the Old Town, crumbling in its majesty as nature begins to reclaim it.

Parkour is still alive and well in The Beast. The Old Town is a fantastically dense environment, full of telephone poles and open windows that form a perfect obstacle course when you're running for your life from an angry Volatile.

But even beyond the built-up areas, there are branches to swing on and rocky cliff faces to climb, and the grappling hook makes a welcome return too, helping you more rapidly circumnavigate your hostile surroundings. Sadly, the glider from Dying Light 2: Stay Human doesn't make an appearance, but that's understandable given the less vertical nature of this locale.

Night falls

There's another significant factor that differentiates The Beast’s setting from the first two games, though it doesn't become apparent until after sunset. In the first two games, you were never that far from a light source, be it a trashcan fire or the headlights of an abandoned vehicle (or simply bright moonlight). Here, when it gets dark, it gets dark.

When the sun goes down, getting around without using your trusty flashlight is night-impossible - though of course, using it runs the risk of attracting powerful, dangerous zombies called Volatiles, who retain their mechanics from the previous titles. Alerting one immediately triggers a chase, at which point your best option is to sprint full-pelt back to the protective UV lights of the nearest safehouse; Volatiles are fast, aggressive, and very hard to kill without some serious weapon upgrades.

This oppressive darkness, combined with the visceral gore and bleak yet beautiful Alpine ambience, makes The Beast feel a lot more horror-adjacent than previous entries into the series. It's a welcome shift in tone - not a full swerve into horror since Kyle remains an absolute murder machine, but definitely a darker vibe that I greatly enjoyed as a lifelong lover of the genre.

Narratively, it's fine. The story is a fairly by-the-numbers adventure, with no huge twists that weren't so obvious a blind man could see them a mile off. The characters are a rogue’s gallery of familiar tropes - the no-nonsense sheriff, the bespectacled physics geek, the sage old black dude, the cartoonishly evil Baron - and the dialogue is… well, the voice acting is decent, at least.

I don't mind the predictability of it all, though; the main plot has a schlocky, B-movie feel that is actually fairly endearing. The Beast isn't interested in telling a fantastically deep and thought-provoking tale; at the end of the day, every cutscene is just a vehicle to deliver Kyle and his huge biceps to the next group of infected or soldiers he has to brutalize.

Old dog, new tricks

Speaking of vehicles, you can drive cars in this one! The lack of vehicles in the second game always seemed odd to me, considering that the first game’s DLC, The Following (which also first explored the idea of a more rural setting), dipped its toe in those waters with the drivable buggy.

In The Beast, you can find abandoned forest ranger cars strewn across the wilderness, which serve as the most effective way to get from A to B outside the more densely-packed areas of Castor Woods. There's no fast travel here - and I'll be honest, the map is a little too large for this omission to go unnoticed. Although mowing down hordes of the infected never stops being fun, trekking back and forth from the major safehouses to turn in completed quests and sell off your accumulated loot quickly becomes a chore.

The vehicles, along with the frequent climbing sections and heavier focus on gunfights with human enemies that began in Dying Light: Stay Human, give The Beast a distinct whiff of Far Cry. I'm not complaining, to be clear; I love that series, and the gunplay and stealth elements on offer here work reasonably well.

Really, the combat as a whole is a definite highlight of The Beast: from crunchy melee combat with improvised weapons like hammers and fire axes, to tense stealthy takedowns with Kyle’s trusty bow and arrows, it all feels good. The gore is spectacular - bones crack, limbs are sliced off, heads fly from shoulders in showers of blood. Stunning a group of weak Biters with Kyle’s UV flashlight before unleashing a sweeping heavy attack with a two-handed axe that knocks them all to the ground at once feels great.

There's a wide range of melee weapons on offer, both craftable and lying around the environment, and while these weapons do degrade with use, they can be repaired multiple times before breaking and will generally last you a long time. Ranged weapons don't degrade, meaning that you only ever need one grenade launcher or sniper rifle; any extras can be broken down for parts.

The crafting system remains largely as it was in previous games; nothing overly complex, just gather parts and break down unneeded gear, then put it together to make something great at killing stuff. Weapons must be crafted at workbenches in safe zones, but consumables and other single-use gear (like gas grenades or incendiary arrows) can be crafted from the inventory screen or quick-select menu at any time. I was particularly fond of the explosive throwing knives, which stick into enemies before turning them into a fine red mist a few seconds later.

Feeling beastly

Another new addition is right there in the title: Kyle’s years of being an unethical bioscience guinea pig have unlocked his weird virus powers, letting him tap into ‘Beast Mode’ (yes, it's really called that) for a short time after dealing or taking enough damage.

In Beast Mode, you regenerate health constantly, take reduced damage, and forsake your usual arsenal for some meaty infected fists that absolutely demolish all but the strongest foes in seconds. It's fun, and the game usually auto-spawns a handful of fast-moving zombies whenever you activate it, amping up the intensity of any fight where you decide to use it. Progressing the narrative and defeating certain infected boss enemies grants skill points, which can be spent to gain extra abilities in Beast Mode, like jumping further or barrelling through enemies while sprinting. There's also a regular skill tree that accumulates points as you level up, which lets you unlock stuff like new parkour-related attacks and weapon crafting blueprints.

The enemies you face in The Beast are a mostly familiar selection for anyone who has played a game with zombies in it before. You’ve got your garden variety Biters, which are slow and weak but dangerous in large numbers, then the faster but more fragile Virals, the armored zombies, zombies who jump, zombies who spit acid for ranged attacks, bloated zombies who explode - you know, typical zombie shooter fare.

There are glimpses of more inspired designs here and there (I really like the returning ‘Goon’ enemy type, a hulking brute with a chunk of concrete and rebar gruesomely fused to its arm), but for the most part, the enemy design is fairly run-of-the-mill.

If I have one significant criticism of the enemies, it’s that they’re a bit too eager with the grapple mechanic. Let an infected get too close, and they’ll grab you, dealing a bit of damage and prompting a quick-time event to shove them away.

Now, this should be relatively easy to avoid, but the devs seem to love hiding Biters behind doorframes and corners to ambush and damage you immediately with no chance of avoiding it. Even sometimes in direct combat, I encountered infected who could seemingly slip past a melee attack mid-swing to interrupt it with the grapple QTE, or grapple me immediately as soon as I escaped from a different enemy grapple. I think there’s a reasonable argument that it’s supposed to be punishing - it can be a death sentence if you’re reckless and allow yourself to be surrounded by a swarm of enemies - but more often than not, it just felt like an annoying roadblock to the otherwise enjoyable melee combat.

Guns out

Thankfully, the overall gameplay challenge feels good outside of my grapple-related woes. I switched between all three different difficulty levels during my playthrough, and found that the highest difficulty provided a stiff challenge perfect for the most masochistic player, while the lowest had me feeling almost immediately overpowered. I played most of the game on medium difficulty, where death was never too far away, but I died more times to misjudged parkour jumps than enemy attacks.

Much like the previous Dying Light games, melee is consistently reliable, while ranged weapons are something of a mixed bag. Early guns are completely feeble against infected enemies, who can shrug off multiple pistol or SMG headshots, and the bow is similarly underpowered until you unlock a skill that lets you deal bonus damage on well-timed shots. But later on, you get access to more powerful weapons like the grenade launcher and the crossbow, which can trivialise many encounters - assuming you can keep them stocked with ammo, which is scarce.

Although the game doesn’t make you fight human enemies too often, small squads of mercenaries and bandits can be found lurking around Castor Woods, and there are several large-scale gunfights that take place over the course of the main campaign.

These dips into conventional cover-shooter gameplay certainly feel a bit less engaging than facing savage zombie hordes, but thankfully they don’t outstay their welcome - the infected might eat bullets like nobody’s business, but a single headshot is enough to take down most human opponents, so most fights are over quickly provided you have the ammo to spare (which you usually will, because the game is quite generous with placing supplies before large scripted battles).

Squishing bugs

Playing through the main campaign (with a bit of time spent exploring and completing side-quests) took me just shy of 22 hours, but this was by no means an exhaustive playthrough: I could easily sink another 20 hours into The Beast to complete everything.

There’s a good amount of safehouses to unlock and secrets to uncover, and while the list of sidequests is perhaps a little sparse, they’re more fleshed out than simple fetch quests - you’ll be hunting a particularly dangerous infected in the woods, or clearing out a series of power substations across the map to help a band of survivors.

In terms of performance on PC, I was able to get a good framerate at 1440p Medium settings with my RTX 5070 desktop, and 1080p Low on an RTX 4060 gaming laptop. DLSS resolution upscaling is helpful at higher resolutions, but I found that Nvidia’s frame-generation was rather wonky, creating too much blur in busy scenes to make the improved framerate worth it.

There’s also a small amount of visual and physics jank here, which I remember being present in the other Dying Light games; think loot items occasionally falling through the floor or Kyle’s hand distorting weirdly while trying to climb the side of a building. At one point, I found it raining inside one half of an abandoned diner (pictured above). It’s nothing game-breaking and rarely actually intrusive, but I do hope that some early patches help remedy these issues, because otherwise the game runs fine for the most part.

It did occur to me about halfway through my playthrough that The Beast might be coasting on players' foreknowledge from the previous games - I personally didn't have any issues with un- or under-explained mechanics, but I would note that a completely fresh player might struggle a bit to understand certain elements of the game, since the tutorials here are pretty bare-bones and have a tendency to either over- or under-explain specific gameplay elements.

Overall, I had a blast with Dying Light: The Beast. It’s not reinventing the wheel: Techland has a solid formula that mixes traditional open-world action sandbox elements with a solid parkour-based movement system and high enemy density, so it’s understandable that The Beast wouldn’t be too much of a deviation from the norm. Still, the new setting is a breath of fresh air, and it still feels fantastic to dropkick a zombie off a roof.

Should you play Dying Light: the Beast?

Play it if...

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Accessibility

On the topic of accessibility, we've got the usual suite of options I've come to expect in any major game: motion sickness reduction, directional audio indicators, and colorblind presets are all present and accounted for, and the subtitles can be customized as well.

How I reviewed Dying Light: The Beast

I spent a while tinkering with the various gameplay, graphical, and accessibility settings in order to get a complete feel for the game, as well as playing through the main campaign at a reasonably fast pace. Of course, I also spent some time checking out the side-quests and just exploring the world, while also being sure to use every new piece of gear I encountered (in case any of them were extremely under- or over-powered - the grenade launcher definitely falls into the latter category).

I played the majority of the game on my gaming PC, with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D and Nvidia RTX 5070, using an Asus ROG Strix Scope RX II keyboard and Logitech G502 Lightspeed mouse or a Hyperx Clutch controller. Audio was a combination of the HyperX Cloud Flight S headset and the SteelSeries Arena 9 speakers.

To see how the game would perform on different hardware, I also loaded it up on my RTX 4060 gaming laptop to test out performance on a lower-spec system.

First reviewed September 2025