The Dying Light series has always held a special place in the zombie genre. After all, it was one of the first, if not the first, to implement parkour and make it a vital part of surviving. Thankfully, Dying Light: The Beast follows the same formula that fans have come to expect while building upon the game’s overall story. Ahead of the game’s launch, Tech Raptor was recently invited to a hands-on preview event where we got to play a little over four hours of the upcoming game.
Interestingly, Dying Light: The Beast breaks the trend of playing as a new character. Instead, players are once again in the boots of Kyle Crane, the protagonist of the first Dying Light. But things are a bit different this time around. Due to a series of experiments on him, Crane now has superhuman-like abilities called Beast Mode that allow him to murder anything around him easily. The only way to activate it was by building a bar that would only fill when you attacked someone. If timed right, Beast Mode can help out in the heat of battle.
My demo opened up with Crane running through the woods into a mansion. I noticed early on that The Beast does a great job of blending Urban environments with Nature. There’ll be a lot of times where you’ll find yourself running through the woods and have nothing to climb onto or jump on. This was a new direction to take the series because, in previous titles, you always had some kind of roof or ledge from which you could jump when needed.
At first, this may not sound like a good idea on paper, but it adds an extra layer of fear in the game. Because in many ways, you’re now exposed, and it requires you to think quickly, if not, you run the risk of getting swarmed by a horde of zombies. To combat this, Techland introduced 4×4 trucks that you can drive in certain map regions. Admittedly, though I found myself avoiding cars because of how unreliable they can be, because of how it can get stuck in ditches or in a street filled with abandoned cars, running around proved to be the better method nine times out of ten.
Once I entered the mansion and fought through a small group of zombies, I was immediately ambushed by a larger-than-life zombie called Chimera. These are essentially lab-created super zombies that are in Beast Mode 24/7.
Throughout my demo, I fought a small handful of Chimera, and each had its own unique fight. Despite that, they all shared a few common traits. Like Souls-like games, each boss has a second phase, and once you get to it, their moveset would drastically change, and throughout the fight, they would eventually call for backup, and you’d be forced to fight regular zombies while dealing with trying not to get killed by the boss.
As fun and engaging as these fights were, they all handicapped themselves because of how beefy the bosses were. A lot of the time, it felt as if my hits weren’t doing too much damage, and this caused nearly all of the fights to drag on longer than I would have liked.
Another thing worth pointing out is some of the tropes implemented in Dying Light: The Beast. As I progressed through the story, I was eventually greeted by a woman who betrayed the game’s main antagonist. The issue that stood out to me was that it followed an old 2000s trope of having an attractive blonde woman help this dark and broody man through the powers of science, because she couldn’t defend or accomplish what she wanted to do herself. It felt odd then and odd now to see such dated clichés being played out again in 2025. But that’s where a lot of my complaints begin and end.
Although many of the story beats I got were extremely limited to the small section I was playing, it offered an interesting twist. In short, Crane is looking to get revenge on the man who experimented on him, and to do this, he has to gain the trust of local survivors to ensure he’ll have enough manpower to do so. But that wasn’t the part that stood out to me. The Beast makes it clear that the big bad of this game is, by all accounts, a monster and someone who lost their humanity in hopes of gaining power. But to take him down, Crane has to become a monster himself, literally.
This is done by mixing his DNA with the dead Chimeras you kill along the way. This proposed a unique question: “How much of yourself can you sell, before you lose your humanity?” Obviously, this question wasn’t answered in the few hours I played, but it left me wondering how the bigger picture would unfold.
One thing that caught me off guard was the improved combat system. Sure, shooting a bow and gun feels good, but at its core, Dying Light has always been a guerrilla survival game in the sense that just about anything can be a melee weapon. In Dying Light: The Beast, swinging a weapon around feels a lot more authentic. Seeing the difference in animations between lighting one-handed blades and two-handed hammers was something I appreciated, even more so when I found myself in tight environments, because this forced my character to use these in unique ways that still felt realistic.
In keeping things realistic, The Beast didn’t shy away from the gore this time. As I was hacking and slashing through zombies, I immediately saw the effects my weapons were having. For example, every time I would hit a zombie in the face, I would see their flesh and skull open more and more with each hit. Or if I went for a gut attack, their intestines would come flying out.
The nice cherry on top of this was how precise arm attacks would be. I found myself testing how accurate it was. If I used a blade and swung at the hand only, the hand would fall off, but if I hit the elbow, then the bottom half of the arm would fall off. This nice attention to detail helps sell how grim and dark the world of Dying Light is.
Of course, some of Dying Light’s core parts are the parkour and Day and Night systems. I’m happy to report that both are as fun and engaging as ever. Like the other Dyling Light games, the world still feels like a massive sandbox. This makes running from rooftop to rooftop even more fun because the game encourages you to run around and find hidden paths that make getting around much easier.
When night hits, the rules of the game are flipped once again. Although it’s still possible to be aggressive and hunt down zombies, it’s not the best idea. This is mainly because this is one of the only times Volatiles come out, and fighting them is never an easy task. But what’s interesting is if you happen to get spotted by one, it’ll create a unique sequence that lets you know how many Volatiles are actively trying to kill you. If you have a Volatile chasing you, more will appear, and the hunt for you will be even more challenging to survive.
Overall, my time with Dying Light: The Beast was fun. If you’ve played any of the games, you can pick up a controller and understand it almost instantly. Although it feels similar to the first two Dying Light games, it captures the charm of what makes them so enjoyable while improving many core features that help take the game in a new direction. Dying Light: The Beast will be released on August 22 and will be playable on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
