“Dying Light: Beast” This is a classic example of making lemonade when God gives you lemons. Or a leaker, in the case of Techland, who revealed the news during a behind-closed-doors game preview at Gamescom 2024. to 40 minutes. This is the result of hard work and creative thinking after scrapping some plans for Dying Light 2 DLC due to a rather serious leak.
Rather than proceed with the now-publicly-publicized plan, the Techland team decided to instead create The Beast, a middle measure between standard DLC and an entirely new game. It’s certainly shorter than the full game, and still has the core skeleton of Dying Light 2, but it’s an entirely new map with returning characters and some nice new gameplay features that should seal the deal Even sweeter.
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Kyle Crane from Dying Light 1 is back, and as you might imagine, he’s grumpy and moody. He’s been locked up in a lab for the past few years, but now he’s escaped and is hunting down the people who kept him there. To help him get answers and a little revenge, he has a new partner who talks to him over the radio, as well as some beastly powers that go a long way toward his survival. It’s a pretty cool concept for a spin-off – think Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, but swap the hilarity for a more serious, gritty approach and you get the overall vibe on offer here.
He brings with him some new features, including a plethora of guns at your disposal, thanks in part to a greater focus on human guards and thugs standing in the way. There’s even a car you can drive around with, equipped with storage space in the back to carry heavy mission items and other junk. But perhaps the biggest content comes from Kyle’s beast form. In the trailer, he’s depicted as a lone stalker, bursting out of trees to take out armed guards. In the gameplay demo we saw? It’s more like he’s got his hands on the Rubber Hulk, swinging haymakers at zombies, and hurling giant chunks of concrete within a limited window.
I laughed when I saw it, I’m not going to lie, seeing a guy punch out a poor zombie in the middle of some scrapyard. The fact that Kyle has to be super crazy to use it first doesn’t help. This is Hulk mode, although being able to rip the monster’s head off – a new giant zombie boss-style enemy – is really cool. Kyle is positioned as a machine-gun-toting lone werewolf who is able to hold his own with his survival skills, but he also has a dark, feral side. This either sounds cool or will undoubtedly make you cringe, and you can only make this distinction based on your own intuition.
Ultimately, Dying Light: Beasts is an admirable departure from the base game, adding just enough content to warrant its standalone status. I really like how those who purchased the Ultimate Edition of Dying Light 2 got Beast for free – it wasn’t the player’s fault after all, it became its own thing. But with The Beast on the horizon, I find myself wanting the next big thing in Techland. “Dying Light 3”, a brand new adventure. The team has done a great job with the game and taking the base workload in cool new directions.
Dying Light 2 was only released in February 2022 (I know right, it feels like a long time ago), and Techland has managed to do a lot with it since then. It has released a million different bundles, a reloaded version, and various updates along the way. Watching “Beasts,” I thought it was a good ending. Introduce an old protagonist, give him a proper farewell, and then ride the entire series off into the sunset or towards new horizons, maybe? Now is the time.
So if you want to celebrate Dying Light, Beast seems like a good way to do it. There’s no release date yet, nor pricing, although questions on the subject have been popping up regularly at Gamescom. Keep an eye out for it, especially if you’re a Dying Light fan.