Sitting down to play Dying Light: The Beast and sitting down to review it are two completely different experiences.
When I play, I’m instantly transported back to some of my happiest co-op memories, scrambling over rooftops with my partner and best friends, making dumb plans that usually ended with Volatiles chasing us into an alley.
When I write about it, I’m back in that same place emotionally, because strip away the shinier graphics and a decade of gaming evolution, and what you’ve really got here isn’t just a nostalgic callback to the original Dying Light, it basically is the original Dying Light.
For better, and for worse.
And honestly? That makes this game feel like a homecoming.
A very bloody, zombie-infested, limb-tossing homecoming, but one where the smell of rotting flesh still feels comfortingly familiar.
And that’s also what makes writing about it hard.
Fangs, Fists, and Familiar Footsteps
The big hook this time is that you’re part-human, part-monster, which finally lets you live the dream of ripping heads off with your bare hands.
It’s equal parts satisfying and unsettling.
Sure, the game lets you shoulder-charge through crowds, leap 50 feet, and scream zombies into therapy sessions.
However, for most of your time, you’re still doing the usual: smashing skulls with pipes, scavenging supplies, and making nighttime dashes that make you regret every bad life choice that led to this moment.
Playing as Kyle Crane, now upgraded to “half-man, half-beast, all-therapy-case”, you’re chasing down a stock-standard evil scientist who feels like he fell out of a rejected Bond script.
The story? Who cares? Nobody’s coming to Dying Light for Shakespeare.
You’re here to parkour, panic, and punch zombies so hard they apply for disability.
The Highs and the Lows (Mostly High-Speed Rooftops)
My favourite moments? Perching with a bow, thinning out the horde like a proud undead pest control specialist, until the arrows run out, and I’m forced into a screaming melee sprint through the streets, hacking at everything that twitches.
Peak chaos.
My least favourite? Dark zones.
They all blur together like someone copy-pasted the same nightmare corridor and hit “repeat.”
Add in NPCs who repeat dialogue more than your gran retelling that story about her cat, and, yeah, it drags. But to be fair, that’s always been the case with Dying Light.
But here’s the thing: once you add a co-op partner, all that frustration dissolves into laughter and panicked button-mashing.
And that’s always been Dying Light’s magic. Playing solo is fine, but with friends, it’s transcendent zombie nonsense.
The Beast’s New Tricks
The headline mechanic is unlocking new beastly powers by hunting down Chimeras, mutated super-zombies who are basically boss fights wrapped in rotting skin.
These encounters are fantastic the first time you meet them: a skeletal sprinter that dives at you out of nowhere, or a brutish ghoul that turns invisible and has you spinning in circles like a paranoid meerkat.
But later on, much like the dark zones, they start to feel all too familiar.
Still, smashing through these baddies to gain new abilities never stopped being fun.
Some are slick, like charging through crowds like a zombie bowling ball. Others are goofy, like slingshotting yourself mid-air with the grappling hook like a parkour Spider-Man on steroids.
Either way, they’re a bloody good time.
Castor Woods: Welcome Back to the Playground
The new setting, Castor Woods, blends rural countryside with an urban sprawl, giving you plenty of rooftops to sprint across and fields to get lost in.
It’s part The Following, part OG city map, and all wrapped up in a package that feels less like innovation and more like a remix album of the greatest hits.
And don’t get me wrong, that’s not a complaint, it’s comfort food. The rooftops are still a thrill, the open fields still make you paranoid, and the night still makes you wish you had a second pair of pants handy.
At the end of the day, Dying Light: The Beast doesn’t reinvent the undead wheel, but it doesn’t really need to.
This is a reliably fun, consistently chaotic return to the rooftops, alleys, and panic-sprints that made the original such a classic.
Yes, the story is weak, the dark zones are repetitive, and the new mechanics don’t change the formula as much as they probably should have after ten years.
But none of that matters when you’re dodging through hordes with a friend and laugh-crying while you get swarmed by Volatiles.
If you loved Dying Light, this will feel like coming home…, you know, the kind of home where zombies keep trying to eat your face.
