When a Game Fights Its Own Fun: My Wild Ride Through Dying Light: The Beast
AI Gaming News Author · Eurogamer ·
Dying Light: The Beast delivers exhilarating parkour and zombie-smashing action in stunning Alpine settings, but its self-serious and dreary narrative constantly tries to dampen the fun. It's a game of glorious contrasts, where the gameplay truly shines despite itself.
Alright, listen up, mates. I've been tinkering with the latest buzz around *Dying Light: The Beast*, and bloody hell, it’s wilder than it first appeared. You know that feeling when you cast a spell, and it works a bit too well in one direction, while totally fizzling in another? That’s pretty much *The Beast* in a nutshell, trying to be two games at once.
Fair warning: this news sounds a bit like an existential crisis at first glance, but stick with me, because it’s about to get interesting. Especially if you, like me, found the original *Dying Light* to be a bit of a dreary affair, despite all the ingredients for a cracking time. Zombies? Check. Ludicrous gravity-defying parkour? Absolutely. Spooky night-time nasties? You got it. But for some reason, it all felt buried under a thick layer of 'Very Serious Apocalypse,' draining the joy right out of the glorious limb-detaching mayhem.
My hope, then, was that Techland might have lightened up a touch, perhaps found a sense of humor amid the digital gore since then. After all, the best stories often have a wink and a nod, don't they? But *Dying Light: The Beast* – which started life as a *Dying Light 2* expansion before deciding it wanted to be a full, standalone game (a bold move, that!) – does not exactly roll out the red carpet with confetti cannons. (Original source: Eurogamer)
We’re back with Kyle Crane, the original series protagonist. Now, I’m not saying a hero needs to be cracking jokes every five minutes, but Crane is, and I quote, ‘a dour man with large muscles and no personality.’ For 13 years, he’s been strapped to an operating table, enduring indignities for science. And the opening sequence, bless its heart, makes *sure* you know he's not best pleased about it. Many, many times over. It’s like watching a cutscene from the early 2000s that forgot how to end, filled with samey research facility corridors and air ducts. For a moment, I thought I’d accidentally stumbled into a forgotten level of *Half-Life* from '98, but without the crowbar-wielding charm.
And sadly, in the first couple of hours, the storytelling doesn't exactly get its sprint on. It’s content to drag itself along from one unimaginative objective and gravely earnest NPC encounter to the next. It's almost as if the game is actively trying to be boring, which is a curious choice for something designed to let you punt zombies off rooftops. Why, oh why, would you make a game about smashing the undead in the face with a modified spade, and then try to slap the joy out of proceedings with such determined self-seriousness?
But! And this is a big, beautiful, parkour-fueled 'but'! The moment I bashed open an improbably located side entrance (because, of course, there’s always an improbable side entrance) and emerged blinking into the glorious sunlight, *The Beast* had my full, undivided attention. It was like accidentally finding a secret level where everything suddenly makes sense.
Instead of the usual filth, grime, and urban squalor, this latest *Dying Light* goes full-on rural. We’re talking the spruce forest sprawls and gleaming mountain vistas of the Swiss Alps. And mate, it's absolutely stunning. Imagine slinking down winding tracks through gently swaying trees, teetering across rickety bridges beneath perfectly poised waterfalls. It's an almost literal breath of fresh air after the claustrophobic sci-fi sterility of the intro. And when you hit a clearing and get your first glimpse of Castor Woods proper – a vast, picturesque expanse stretching out before you – it's genuinely breathtaking. We're talking stone monasteries festooned with pretty pink wildflowers, quaint towns of densely packed buildings, and even the kind of impossibly ornate mountaintop castle that would make King Ludwig II blush. It'd be a lovely holiday spot if it wasn't for, you know, the flesh-eating hordes.
Thankfully, their presence is a lot easier to tolerate when walloping them proves to be so endlessly satisfying. *The Beast* remains a glorious sandbox of ad-hoc weaponry – a spade can be as mighty as a machete in the right hands. You'll scour the world for bludgeoning tools, gather resources to craft upgrades, and then just pulverize and smash your way through. Sending zombies rag-dolling off rooftops never gets old, and I confess to a giggle or two when a suddenly detached limb goes flying across the screen. And this time, for reasons lost amid the glassy-eyed exposition, Crane has a super-strength 'Beast gauge' you can trigger for some truly magnificent, fist-flying carnage. We're talking squishing heads and ripping off arms in a blood-soaked frenzy. It’s pure, unadulterated, wonderfully chaotic fun.
When the spotlight is firmly on the action, it’s genuinely, enormously entertaining. This is particularly true when the gore-strewn mayhem is working in tandem with *Dying Light: The Beast*'s deft parkour system. When events conspire to send you into traversal overdrive – careening violently through cramped streets, springing heroically up onto overhanging ledges, then lunging across wonky rooftops and gaping alleyways, smashing zombie heads as you go – it feels like pure digital poetry. And there’s a whole different kind of thrill when the dark night falls, and your spring-heeled adventures take a considerably more tense turn against creatures powerful enough that evasion is your only hope. It’s good stuff, fair dinkum.
So, here’s the rub, the grand paradox of *Dying Light: The Beast*: I’ve been enjoying it immensely, truly, madly, deeply, in between the bits where my zombie-maiming high isn’t immediately being deflated by another insipid narrative intervention. It’s a game that’s constantly battling itself, trying to be a serious, dour story while simultaneously delivering some of the most exhilarating, joyful zombie-slaying and parkour action I’ve experienced. It’s like a wizard who can summon dragons but insists on reading the phone book as a bedtime story.
But with the fresh Alpine air in my nostrils, and that gorgeous rural landscape to explore, it feels like *The Beast* might just have tipped the balance enough to win me over. It’s proof that sometimes, the 'what happens if...' can lead to genuinely exciting gameplay, even if the 'why' of the story feels a bit like an afterthought. My prediction? You'll curse the cutscenes, but you'll grin like a maniac when you're soaring through the mountains, cleaving undead in two. And for a game that tried so hard to be boring, that's a pretty magical achievement.
Tags: Zombie Survival, Parkour, Action RPG, Techland, Dying Light
Original article: Eurogamer