In case you were wondering, Dying lithe protagonist Kyle Crane has been in captivity, suffering under the brutal Baron’s unethical DNA-splicing experiments with zombies, for the better part of a decade. Yes, he’s had his fair share of coarse patches, but I’m content to report that Crane has escaped and is understandably out for blood.
Crane is the titular monster Dying Light: BeastAn 18-hour standalone adventure that began life as a story-driven expansion for the game Dying Light 2The aforementioned DLC was leaked last year thanks to hackers, so the developers at Techland changed their plans and decided to create something even more ambitious. Dying Light: Beast takes place in a huge novel region, a forgotten forest called Castor Woods, where families would vacation before the zombie apocalypse. Now it’s a playground for an apex predator like Crane, a immense, parkour-friendly mix of industrial complexes and plazas, peppered with raiders and roaming plague carriers. That’s not all bad, though—Crane’s decade of living in hell has given him novel skills he’ll need to deal with the Freaks (what’s left of Baron’s other themes).
Despite the obvious connection to the legacy of the Techland series, Dying Light: Beast It’s meant to be an entry point for novel players, a focused experience that brings to mind the more stimulating essence of zombie combat. Dying Light 2with additional superpowers. The hands-free demo I saw at Gamescom showed Crane parkouring through an Old Town full of run-down apartments, dust particles hanging beautifully in the air. Eventually, he reached a distant forest and began stomping down moss-covered cable cars toward a hideout. As the sun finally set, Crane’s movements took on a stealthy gait as he ducked into towering grass to throw out bait and control the unique enemies that only appear at night.
The interior encounter environments were well-detailed, with long-forgotten ephemera, but I was quickly distracted from the tense atmosphere by the blood-based graffiti on the walls of the hideout, which read, “Do not open the corpse inside.” Importantly, the combat environments are reactive, with popping fuse boxes and flaming pyres providing alternative routes beyond the reliable Dying lithe“smack and gash” melee. Up close, the combat looked wonderfully disgusting. Sideways blows with a baseball bat tore a slit in the cheek of a gesticulating zombie — and then a final blow accelerated the decomposition of the face, leaving an unrecognizable dent. As Crane secured the shelter in the demo, there were a few exploration-based puzzles, standard cable-following gameplay focused on activating generators and picking locks, with a few fights thrown in between.
Outside, adverse weather conditions brought a storm of dynamics to the open world, where you could trip up reactive encounters like a stupid marauder crowding around a loot chest. Elsewhere, Crane used his parkour skills to sprint around the interior of a stone silo and reach an enemy vantage point that doubled as a flourishing viewpoint. Crane could jump, climb, and skulk around the open world on foot, or, if that worked, hop into a pickup truck for a much less subtle zombie management system.
If you are not a fan of stealth, you can also play Beast like a first-person shooter, but while the gunplay looks solid, it’s just another arrow in your quiver alongside throwing knives, propane tanks, and face-melting beast powers. However, the Gib-friendly gore mechanic sweetens the pot. A shotgun blast to the hipbone rips apart said soldiers, their intestines hanging in the air and their lower halves remaining on solid ground.
Photo: Techland
In the intercut scenes, Roger Craig Smith’s Crane is cynical and sarcastic, responding to the orders of his caretaker, Olivia, with pithy, tough-guy quips. He’s not the most likable character in the world—Crane always sounds like he’s gargling with fishbowl pebbles—but his emotional detachment from reality is to be expected, given the Baron’s decade of deeply unethical psychological experiments.
The massive bad didn’t make an appearance in my Gamescom demo, but one of his creatures, the Behemoth, a mass of flesh carelessly speckled with horseshoe-shaped metal handles, did. Crane lured this menace with rebar to an ominously shaped clearing to initiate one of Dying Light: Beastboss fights. These are par for the course, with Crane dodging and dashing into attacks with his machete and outmaneuvering a lumbering hulk. My attention was piqued when, halfway through the game, Crane engaged “Beast Mode,” which added an orange vignette to the screen. In addition to forcing Crane to fight barehanded, entering Beast Mode allowed him to pick up nearby environmental objects (in this case, a stone pillar) and throw them at unsuspecting zombies.
All said, Dying Light: Beast looks like an attractive sequel Dying Light 2especially if you miss Crane’s original adventure in Harran. But I’d expect more renewal than revolution. I’m particularly keen on the idea of jumping into Castor Woods in four-player co-op, like the good ancient days Dead Islandsharing progress with buddies and watching systems intersect for some raucous post-apocalyptic fun. I just hope Crane’s superficial banter doesn’t undermine what the series does best—ragdoll parkour combat comedy.
Dying Light: Beast is coming to PlayStation, Windows PC, and Xbox. There is no release date at the time of writing, but in honor of the game’s development history, it will be available for free to owners of the Ultimate Edition Dying Light 2.
