Dying Light: The Beast short review

So, I just finished the co-op campaign on Brutal mode with a friend, and honestly, here's the TLDR: wait for a sale and a couple more patches. This is NOT worth the £50 they're asking for. Go play Dead Island 2 instead.

Before we get started, I'm fully aware of the history here: this was clearly a DLC, padded out and rushed to market so they could sell it at full price. They already frontloaded the profits by pushing people to buy the Ultimate Edition of Dying Light 2 last year with the promise of getting this for 'free'. However, since they are marketing and charging for it as a full-priced standalone game, I'll judge it as such.

For context, I played the original Dying Light twice in co-op, once on base game and again with The Following expansion. As for Dying Light 2? My friend and I tried it a year after release and swiftly refunded it before the two hour mark. It seems that whether it's due to rushed development or pure ignorance, Techland still doesn't truly understand what made the first game a success.

Let's start with the basics: the game is riddled with bugs. We're talking teleporting zombies, enemies spawning out of thin air, overlapping dynamic events, dodgy hitboxes, or weapons that just don't do damage to certain enemy types. The glitches are so frequent and obvious it's clear this had minimal playtesting. I even caught two blatant grammar errors in the dialogue, and that was while skipping most of it.

https://i.postimg.cc/ZnLqhT1Z/Screenshot-2025-10-30-184121.png

That leads us to the writing:

They're clearly still suffering from the brain drain after firing Chris Avellone back during the peak of that 'believe all women' mess. You know, the man who was later proven completely innocent and successfully sued his accusers? Yeah, Techland didn't bother with an investigation; they just cut ties with their lead narrative designer. That decision gutted DL2, and the rot continues here. I can't tell what's worse: the story, the dialogue, or the absolute arse directing in the cutscenes. The ludo-narrative dissonance is jarring; the character you play is completely different from the one they force on you in writings.

Which brings us to Crane. I could not care less about him, his grating voice actor, or his return. Seriously, did people actually self-insert into this guy? Aiden from DL2 was just Crane with a different name: a generic white dude with no discernible personality. Is Techland really so clueless they thought people liked the first game because of the generic protagonist?

The entire plot hinges on Crane wanting revenge after 15 years of being drugged and experimented on, even with their half-arsed explanation of him being some 'special half-infected'. It’s a premise so profoundly stupid it insults the player's intelligence. Let's be clear about the reality: he wouldn't be a jacked, quippy action hero. He'd be a wreck. His muscles, including the ones needed for speech, would have atrophied into uselessness. He would forget how to bloody talk.

They try to handwave this with a magic adrenaline shot, but before that, he has to be guided by Olivia on the comms. A man in his state wouldn't even be able to comprehend language, let alone follow complex instructions from a walkie-talkie. An abstract concept like 'revenge' would be meaningless to someone whose mind is equals to a sea cucumber.

But no, he pops out of his 15-year torture coma looking like The Rock, ready for a quip-filled rampage. As for the other characters? They're just… there, spouting exaggerated accents to fill the silence. It's just another galling example of the game's braindead writing from top to bottom.

https://i.postimg.cc/k4nFm5pv/Screenshot-2025-10-30-174728.png

Fifteen years as a lab rat clearly did wonders for his flexibility. Note the exquisitely janky animation.

Now, for the combat:

Techland advertised its physics-based melee like it was something revolutionary. It isn't, and worse, it isn't fun. Most of the time, a heavy attack just makes a zombie sway slightly before they continue their attack. Light attacks are like using a fly swatter while draining your garbage stamina bar. The guns are basic.

There wasn't a single moment where I thought it was actually fun to kill the zombies. It begs the question: why bother hyping a combat system when using it feels like a tedious chore? It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire genre.

Techland has over a decade of experience in this space, yet the team behind Dead Island 2 somehow managed to make combat infinitely more visceral and satisfying. And the gore? It's Dead Island 2's FLESH system every day of the week, no contest.

Loot and Gears:

The gear and equipment systems are just as shallow as the combat. Honestly, I wore one set of armour for the entire game because the minuscule percentage bonuses on offer don't matter. It's the same for melee weapons; just pick one you like and upgrade it as you level. Some unique weapons have distinct bonuses, but the combat is too fundamentally basic to ever make you care about strategic variety.

But the shallow gear is nothing compared to one of the most unfun, tedious, and backward design choices in the entire game: the looting.

In 2025, Techland has decided that players should have to press a button to grab every single item they see, individually, each with its own little hand-grab animation. You have to hold a button to search a bag or a zombie, again, individually. There is no 'loot all' option. They have actively chosen to make this a mandatory 'gameplay' mechanic.

Here’s a common scenario: you find a room full of lockers or desks. You must walk up to every single one, trigger an opening animation, then look inside to see if it even has loot - which it often doesn't. Since the items are just basic materials necessary for crafting, this process becomes an extremely time-wasting chore if you want to engage with the game's systems at all.

A cynic might say it's a deliberate design choice to artificially extend playtime. After all, you can't be that oblivious to Quality of Life features that have been standard for a decade.

Beast...?

"Beast Mode" is another gimmick with little payoff. It takes forever to fill the gauge for a few seconds of spamming left-click, occasionally triggering an execution animation. The AoE attacks you unlock later just drain the gauge faster. It's pointless against anything tougher than a normal zombie and does nothing to bosses. Try it at night against a pack of Volatiles and...insert waking up in heaven meme.

And for the rest:

As for the parkour, the novelty wore off in the 2010s. The problem here is that half the map is empty fields and forests with nothing to parkour on. The system itself becomes infuriating when it decides to grab a ledge inside a tiny room you never aimed for, or when it initiates a wall run instead of a simple climb. Too often, it's just a nuisance, especially when story and side missions force you into extended, tedious parkour sections.

The Chimera bosses were somewhat interesting for the first three or four encounters, but then the writers clearly forgot about them. The boss fights are just recycled and plopped into different areas.

The PC keybinding options are highly questionable. Who decided that a heavy AoE swing should require you to hold down the mouse button and press TAB? The revive button is R, which is also reload key, and the context option for reviving is small... Yeah. The jumping dropkick is Space then a double tap of E. Why? It's completely unintuitive. The grappling hook adds nothing. It's a clunky, context-sensitive tool, not a fluid traversal mechanic. I didn't even know it had dedicated hook points because my UI was bugged. I played the entire game without the prompts until my friend mentioned he was getting spammed by them.

Some side missions, like the Starchild ones, had interesting moments, but the vast majority are just "go here, fetch this, maybe do some parkour, come back."

The one thing I can praise without reservation is the co-op. The seamless drop-in/drop-out progression is fantastic, and more games need to implement it this well.