I’ve been regularly playing the original Dying Light for ten years now – because it’s a great game and probably the best zombie game ever created. I’ve also played its predecessors Dead Island and Dead Island Riptide more than once.
Dying Light 2 was a gigantic let-down on more levels than anyone can count – but the worst offenders were the zombies that only got triggered by the player character and that always ignored other human NPCs until the player entered the scene. That was the most immersion-breaking thing imaginable in a game that plays after the zombie apocalypse has wiped out most of mankind already.
Dying Light The Beast is a tiny bit better than Dying Light 2 – but only because Kyle Crane, the player character from the original game, and his original voice actor have returned.
I recorded the gameplay footage that I linked below from the Xbox version that is available in the German Xbox store – and that is the reason why you see pixelated/censored footage in the “previously on Dying Light” video. Believe it or not, the original Dying Light was banned in Germany – you had to either import a physical medium from Austria or any other country in the world or buy it from the British (or Austrian) Xbox store. The good news is that Techland do not “region lock” their games.
If you live in Germany and want to play an uncensored version of Dying Light The Beast, you can buy the game in the German Xbox store, but before installing it, set your console’s location to “United Kingdom” (for example), reboot the console, download and install the game while the console is set to United Kingdom. Once the game is on your internal disk drive, it is safe to set the location back to Germany and reboot the console again. You will then have a fully uncensored version of Dying Light The Beast. I don’t know what you can do on PS5 or Steam; at this point in time, I only own the Xbox version of the game.
Exploration in Dying Light The Beast is piss boring and unrewarding. The game world feels… overwhelmingly uninteresting and annoyingly repetitive. Even the rock structures that you can climb feel “samey”, if not copy & paste-level identical. But well, at least they are marked with white paint instead of yellow paint. That’s already progress in the year 2025, right?
In the beginning, the game’s “story” is just a vehicle to chase you over the map from one annoying “Dark Souls-like” boss fight to another annoying “Dark Souls-like” boss fight.
There are two things that I truly hate in games:
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- Jump & Run sequences in 3D First Person Shooters (which is why I cannot stand Doom Eternal) and
- Idiotic “boss fights”.
I hate Dark Souls-like game play in general. I absolutely despise having to remember movement and button press patterns just to win some annoying “boss fight” and I hate the “git gud” mentality behind that.
And now Techland in their infinite wisdom and complete lack of understanding of what made their original game so good decided to turn Dying Light into yet another Dark Souls-like game.
Then we have the “Beast mode” which in the first hours of the game is a useless addition to the game since it only triggers when the game decides so. Later you can manually trigger it, provided that you invested in the necessary skills for that to happen. Icons appear on the screen informing you that you can now trigger beast mode – but what the prerequisites for that are, I still have absolutely no clue. Beast mode is an unpredictable game mechanic which makes it more annoying than fun.
Once you made it through the first hours and get to pursue side quests, the game gets better and becomes more fun to play. But truth be told, it then also begins to feel a lot like Arkane Austin’s Redfall. If that does not mean anything to you, Redfall was that vampire game that was almost completely broken when it released and thus was trashed by all reviewers. It took Arkane Austin four major patches to fix Redfall, and after Patch 4 it had become a decent game that I very much liked, but by then it was too late for the studio and the reputation of the game to recover from the damage that had been dealt to it by the disastrous launch. In any case, the quests and the story in Dying Light The Beast have an uncanny resemblance with Redfall. The rest feels like verbatim copies of missions from the original Dying Light: Fixing power substations, anyone? Now in how many Techland games did we have to do this…?
As I’ve already mentioned, traversing the map is… dull and uninteresting. You never feel “inspired” to explore – if there even is anything to explore, that is. There are cars in the game, but the map was not designed for driving with a car and even if you find a car, it will only have fuel for a few seconds of driving, which renders the whole idea of having cars in the game meaningless and frustrating. This becomes a problem because there is no fast travel in the game and all the missions require you to go from point a to point b just to listen to a line of dialog the NPCs could have given you over the radio – so there’s a lot of traveling that only exists so stretch the game’s playtime.
And to be very clear about this: The “new” grappling hook is absolutely no fun and plain and simple just sucks.
Then I saw the same immersion-breaking crap happen that already ruined Dying Light 2 for me: A group of solder NPCs had another NPC captured in the middle of a road, surrounded by zombies. The zombies did not react to the NPCs at all – until I opened fire on the group of soldiers, then all hell broke loose and the zombies and the soldier NPCs almost exclusively focused on me and a few attacked the captured NPC. I cannot for the life of me find an explanation for why Techland introduced this severe downgrade in Dying Light 2 and now also in Dying Light The Beast when they already had a perfectly fine implementation for zombie and NPC behavior in the first Dying Light – where zombies went after the closest thing that was not a zombie and the other NPCs first and foremost tried to defend themselves and stay alive before they went after the player. In the sequels, you can observe a scripted event taking place, but unless it is part of the script, zombies and NPCs usually ignore and keep their distance from each other.
Annoyances in the Xbox Series release (1.0.1.0) and day 1 patch (1.0.2.0) versions:
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- I downloaded the game (version 1.0.1.0) on both of my consoles, which was two times 46 GB. The moment I launched the game for the first time on my Series S, I was informed that there was… a full-size 46 GB update to version 1.0.2.0 available (on each console). So I had to wait another hour on launch day before I could play the game.
- Some story missions have bugs that they will not complete; for some reason, the game loses count and is waiting for you to kill enemies that are simply no longer there. The only way to fix this is to fully quit the game and start the mission from the last time the game saved. I’ve had this happen in two story missions.
- There are also a couple of side quests where climbing or dropping down to a plateau cannot have received sufficient QA – or the developers decided to ignore the feedback of their test players; quite often, you have to repeat the whole exercise simply because the game triggered wrong (e.g. it let’s you slide down a power line instead of dropping you down to a plateau where you actually wanted to go).
To top it all off, the game looks like blurry crap in performance mode on Xbox Series X and you definitely do not want to play it in quality mode because the game then drops to 30 FPS that make your eyes hurt and will cause actual physical headache. The Nintendo Switch port of Dying Light on the original Switch feels better to play than Dying Light The Beast’s quality mode on Xbox Series X. And on Switch 2, it looks and feels better than the performance mode of Dying Light The Beast on Xbox Series X. That should tell you everything you never wanted to know about a brand-new AAA game.
The main problem with Dying Light The Beast is that it cannot shake the feeling that it is an over-priced standalone DLC. The game does not feel like something that’s worth the price they’re asking for it. It just feels small in scope when compared to the original Dying Light, it’s more in the ballpark of the excellent The Following DLC for the original game.
If you only know Dying Light 2 then Dying Light The Beast will feel like a significant upgrade – mostly because Dying Light 2 was so terribly disappointing. But even when measured against that low bar, it’s still not remotely in the same league as the original Dying Light.
If you liked the first Dying Light, it is quite hard to recommend this game to you: After five or six hours, the game reaches an “okay” grade and fans of the franchise will keep playing it because they recognize enough of the original’s DNA in it to keep going and, of course, fans of the original will want to know what happens next to Kyle Crane. But despite the fact that it’s now over ten years old, the original is still a much better game than both its successors in every aspect.
Update after having completed the game:
The mission structure of annoying fetch quests that chase you all over the small map just to extend their runtime never changed until the very end. That same structure also applies to missions that take place in (large) indoor missions: Struggle your way to the upper floor of the place through tons of infected only to then be sent back to the basement to do something there (usually to restore power) and then go back to the top floor. At least Kyle Crane is aware of that and makes cynical remarks like “it’s in the basement – of course it is” or “and only now you remember that we need another part for this”.
Restoring safe houses and safe spots quite often comes with ridiculous parkour and climbing exercises that are only there to frustrate the living daylights out of the player. I only have two of those places left after I had completed the campaign: A chimney safe spot and the silos. And I cannot be bothered anymore to waste my time on that bullshit game design. It’s also not exactly as if you would need that many safe houses and safe spots in a game as small as Dying Light The Beast in the first place. Those places only exist as additional chores to keep you busy. In reality, you can just walk to any point in the map quite fast and easily and get the job done and be back before nightfall.
Update: I have now also finished the chimney safe spot and also did everything that could be done at the silos safe house – only to run into the common bug with the unbreakable supply box, so I cannot complete this safe house because of an actual bug in the game. There are plenty of discussions about this on the Internet. And it’s yet another example for lousy QA.
The map itself, despite its various and very different biomes that are ridiculously and unrealistically close together, is quite bland and uninteresting, and free exploration gets punished in this game: There are not that many locations in the first place, and the game will most likely send you back to any location in one of its many fetch quests and then pretend that you have never been there before. That’s lazy programming and bad game design. Also, there usually is nothing interesting to find in any place anyway. You can only get that excited about finding another bag of rice or a pile of scrap, you know.
The main problem with the general design of the game’s location is this: A zombie apocalypse only feels “total” when you can roam a really dead and lifeless city. Parkour and a grappling hook are only fun as game mechanics when you have a large city where you can use them to your heart’s content. Harran was much more of a fun apocalyptic playground as the small provincial town that Dying Light The Beast gives us. Also, a city that’s already grown over with wild vegetation looks more like a ruin that belongs into an archeological treasure hunt game like Uncharted than in a zombie apocalypse game.
I suggest to level designers of zombie games to read the late Z.A. Recht’s Morning Star trilogy; especially the first novel Plague Of The Dead is a master lesson for location selection and creepy location design that fans of the zombie genre really want to have in all of their zombie fiction. Z. A. Recht understood the zombie genre and what its fans want better than anybody else.
Crafting is basically useless in Dying Light The Beast. I crafted the heck out of my equipment in the original game and also in Techland’s original Dead Island, because it added a lot of fun elements. In The Beast, the main campaign is already over before you even found most of the blueprints and then there is nothing left to do with them; crafting basically is a non-used and obsolete feature in this game.
The game does not end on a cliffhanger, but it ends on the clear note that there will be a sequel. The Beast has a typical unsatisfying “middle of a trilogy” story that leads nowhere and most of the characters you interacted with just magically disappear from the map once you’ve completed the main story. They’re just gone without any explanation, which is quite disappointing.
In total, Dying Light The Beast tries to be more than it actually is: A standalone DLC for Dying Light 2. It has a very small map that even feels smaller than “The Following” DLC for the original Dying Light. The Beast and The Following are roughly the same size in scope – now guess which one was actually worth its asking price.
Dying Light The Beast is not bad, it is generally an “okay” entry in the Dying Light franchise, but it certainly is not remotely as good as the current hype around it wants you to believe. It is disappointing because it is a small and short game compared to the original Dying Light and just wastes most of its potential and game mechanics because there simply is not enough game there to use all those mechanics and to have fun with them.
The original Dying Light still towers over both its successors and the more years pass and the more other zombie games come and go, the more obvious it becomes that the first Dying Light is for zombie games what George A. Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead was for zombie movies.
