Dying Light: The Beast is billed as a return to horror for the undead freerunning series, which took a tumble into Ubisoft icon-farming territory with Dying Light 2: Stay Human. I can’t remember enough about either previous game to make forensic comparisons, but I can say that I spent 15 minutes of my Beast hands-on being chased by what felt like a zombie decathlon team, and it was, on the whole, quite jolly.
My “Volatile” pursuers were quicker sprinters and so, moving in a straight line was a recipe for mauling. I stayed alive, instead, by relentlessly doubling back across smaller terrain fixtures such as boxcars and wire fences, trying and failing to break the pathfinding or at least, engineer a zombo traffic jam while I made my escape. Oh, so you’re going to chase me onto this shipping crate, are you? Well in that case, I’m going to jump off it again. I can do this all day, smart guy. Except that I can’t, actually, because the game dev presenting this demo has the look of a man beginning to regret his life choices in a possibly-explosive way, so let’s put an end to these parkour parlor games and head for the waypoint.
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After much Benny Hilling aboot the train tracks, I found my way to a second floor saferoom and slammed the window down on the squelching fingers of my persecutors. Alas, the saferoom proved unsafe. In The Beast, each refuge has to be secured after entry by means of a different, smaller scale objective.
It’s a nice way of calibrating the player’s relief, trading the frenzy of headlong flight for the slow burn of – in this case – finding and reactivating the power generator. As is the whimsical habit of power generators, this one lurked in a basement full of restive horizontal undead. Fortunately, the room full of restive horizontal undead proved a fine opportunity to test out the new Dying Light’s titular beast mode. Charged up in regular melee, this allows you to bat the carping corpses around like party balloons.
It’s fair to say that returning Dying Light protagonist Kyle Crane has never been more capable on paper than he is in The Beast. He’s a trained athlete from the off, and has access to both Dying Light 2’s flashier melee moveset and the first game’s guns (which were belatedly introduced to the second game after release). Stir in the Beast functionality – a byproduct of zombie infection, which Kyle aims to cure – and you have the base ingredients of Doom Eternal, plus dropkicks. But all of that puissance is checked, in theory, by the greater threats you’ll encounter in the open world after dark.
“I think the most important change coming from player feedback is how scary and how tense and how difficult the night experience is,” Techland’s franchise director Tymon Smektała told me after my hands-on. “We wanted to make our nights a little bit more accessible in Dying Light 2, and it worked – the game was a commercial success.
“But our core community told us that, hey, this is not Dying Light. We want Dying Light to be this scary, horror experience that really stays on our minds when we go to bed. So Dying Light: The Beast is like the night is dark, the Volatiles, the apex predators, the kings of the night are all around you. You really have to play very carefully, not making any sudden moves, not making any unexpected noises. I think this is the biggest thing that’s come from the feedback. This is a proper survival horror game.”
Naturally, the level of horror is also modulated by the terrain. Rather than the multiple maps of previous games, Dying Light: The Beast has one open world with different biomes and architecture types spread across urban areas and farmland. The tourist district in the middle is “parkour paradise”, as Smektała comments. The swamps around the outskirts are less amenable to freerunning, especially in foggy conditions. If you find the prospect of swamp levels irksome, and why wouldn’t you, please know that there are driveable (and destructible) cars to speed you through them.
Going by my demo, the map’s industrial regions are excellent for climbing, but also unhelpfully awash with living humans wielding rifles and bows. I didn’t pick up much of the backstory here, but the gist appears to be that somebody’s doing experiments with the zombies, and that somebody has a private army at their disposal.
I quite enjoyed my time bopping around the industrial district, playfully inserting arrows into eyesockets and then retrieving them along with the victim’s weapons and ammunition. I was less impressed by a subsequent spell of warehouse combat in which the game’s Far Cry feel gave way to straightforward corridor shooting. Dying Light has never convinced me as an FPS, and The Beast’s abundance of customisable firearms seems unlikely to change that opinion. The human adversaries are routine white noise, so far: some take cover and try to flank, others run at you waving a machete, and none of them are much shop at parkour. It’s possible that’ll change over time, as with threats in the previous games.
I was least wowed by the bossfight which concluded the demo. Having bust out of an underground lab, I had to lure a rogue enhanced zombie with a big bottle of T-viral perfume, then put a stop to its nonsense. Said enhanced zombie proved to be a corpse with shoulders the size of elephant seals. I feel it’s a real indictment of horror games when their idea of a pace-changer is a zombie who gets down the gym now and then.
The boss commenced lobbing wreckage at me and doing well-telegraphed battering ram attacks, while garden variety ghouls rolled up to chew on my flanks. I died a lot, mostly because, to be honest, I did not feel sufficiently compelled to dodge or use my gear. But then I once again sensed the cosmic weariness rising in the developer seated at my elbow, and pulled through the battle just in time for my brief closing chat with Smektała.
I have not thought about Dying Light for years – there are a lot of zombie horror games, and first-person parkour isn’t the captivating flourish it was in the days of the original Mirror’s Edge. Everybody knows how to pole-swing now, even Doomguy. Still, now that I’ve seen The Beast up-close, I’m sort of rooting for it. I’m crossing my fingers that the meathead boss fights and corner-strafing peekshoots are infrequent or skippable, and that the vast majority of the game is simply about running away in the dark.