Dying Light: The Beast holds the same promise as many of its peers in the standalone expansion space, like Uncharted: The Lost Legacy and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales. The idea of playing a more focused version of its fully featured predecessor is especially appealing for Dying Light since Dying Light 2: Stay Human suffered from a lack of direction and was too thinly spread. But The Beast does not embrace its denser format and instead falls flat on its face by doubling down on the series’ worst tendencies.
These faceplants are often literal because of its clumsy parkour controls. Sometimes running through Swiss Alps-esque Castor Woods and the nearby city can be exhilarating when everything comes together. Bunny hopping between chimneys and vaulting over waist-high railings in one unbroken streak is a rush, but The Beast makes this thrill all too rare because of the uncountable number of ways it halts the player’s momentum.
Besides the oddball, hard-to-classify struggles that have returning zombie slayer Kyle Crane weirdly grip the wrong side of a surface, fail to grab one entirely, or slip up in some other unpredictable way, climbing remains its biggest issue. Mantling over obstacles is excruciatingly slow and means players have to essentially start from a crawl every time they need to wall-run vertically up to the next ledge or don’t land cleanly on a platform; the latter of which also happens frequently due to the unpredictable and unreliable grappling hook. And since buildings and the terrain aren’t flat, this jerky stop-and-start happens constantly and kills the forward propulsion that’s at the heart and soul of parkour.
Rating: 2/5
It’s a massive lingering issue carried over from the last installment and is sadly baked into this game’s infected DNA. Many of its missions corral the player into dark, cramped environments or force them to laboriously climb handholds as if they were Nathan Drake and solve tedious environmental puzzles, all while repeatedly interrupting the action for boring walkie-talkie cutscenes. For a series that boasts about its supposed fluid platforming and movement systems, The Beast — continuing a sad trend from its predecessors — cannot seem to understand how often it confines players or slows them down and how antithetical it is to the type of game it claims to be. There are a few missions that have players running for their lives, but these adrenaline-heavy segments are short-lived and only offer a glimpse at an experience that more intelligently grasps what makes it unique.
The Beast also repeatedly leans into other systems that do not play to its strengths. Melee combat is brutal and entertainingly gory, but also mashy and something the game throws at the player far too often. Having to hack out of a scenario gets old quickly, especially since The Beast offers next to nothing new here. Just about everything has been carried over from Dying Light 2, including the mind-numbing primal beast mode that has Kyle go feral with rage. Infected and humans alike also take too many hits to fell, artificially dragging these many bouts out even longer. Bosses highlight all of these issues and then some and are infuriating tests of patience that have players slashing and slicing for multiple minutes as the hideous freak in question does the same few attacks over and over. And, of course, these battles are almost always further padded out with scores of weaker infected.
Guns are also an option, but they only introduce more headaches. While they handle smoothly, getting pecked at by aggressive soldiers while in the middle of some bloody fisticuffs adds an annoying wrinkle that feels out of place in Dying Light. Dying Light 2 intelligently didn’t launch with firearms (although, disappointingly, they were patched in later), and The Beast demonstrates how little they fit this specific type of zombie game.
However, the guns are more of a symptom of The Beast’s more broad and fundamental issue: It’s wildly unfocused. It’s an open-world survival zombie game with up to four-player co-op, crafting, stealth, loot, multiple skill trees, guns, melee combat, driving, and a day/night cycle that influences the tempo of the gameplay. That’s a lot of bullet points and none of them are as polished as they should be.
While the aforementioned problems with the combat and platforming are more glaring, its stealth is underbaked and sluggish, once again requiring players to slow down. The loot systems are laughable since they only offer pathetic buffs like 6% less recoil and 1.5% damage resistance against infected attacks. The skill trees are either filled with useless abilities and are just literally copied and pasted from Dying Light 2. The day/night cycle seems to set up two different and appealing tones since nighttime puts players on the defensive, but running away from the buff and crusty Volatiles is usually a death sentence because of the cumbersome controls and how ferociously overtuned these mutants are. With so much mechanical bloat, The Beast proves Dying Light, as a series, should scale down, refocus, and stop trying to be so many things it is not.
The narrative also fundamentally misunderstands what kind of game The Beast is. Kyle’s journey to take revenge on those who spent years experimenting on him is a straightforward premise that should work, but it’s full of long cutscenes starring dull characters with no arcs or personalities (which includes Kyle himself). Objectives do little to build suspense or flesh out the cast and almost always drag on with multiple filler steps and the aforementioned walkie-talkie scenes that bring everything to a halt. Combined with an impressively shallow villain and a late-game plot twist that’s obvious from the very first scene, The Beast is woefully ill-prepared to tell the story it foolishly focuses too hard on.
Dying Light: The Beast’s inability to focus on the right aspects is its ultimate downfall. The parkour should be the focal point the title revolves around since it is its most unique feature with the greatest potential, yet it’s hobbled by inaccurate controls and incessant losses in momentum. Most of the other mechanics — like its stealth, melee combat, and RPG systems — are shallow or superfluous; flavorless gruel meant to pad out the menu. It’s hard not to see the breadth having anything but a negative influence on its depth, showing how this beast isn’t nearly as formidable as it should be.
A review copy for PS5 was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
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