Dying Light: The Beast Literally Brings Out the Big Guns for a Shooting-Heavy Spin-Off | gamescom 2024
The original Dying Light’s story ended with protagonist Kyle Crane suffering a miserable fate; either blasted to atoms by a nuclear bomb or twisted into an infected. But that, it turns out, wasn’t the end of his story. Techland’s new entry in the series, Dying Light: The Beast, appears to lock in the latter of those endings as canon, revealing Crane was held captive for 13 years, subjected to experiments by a villain known only as The Baron. Now free, Crane seeks revenge for the trials and tortures that have turned him into the titular beast. But, if what I’ve seen of this new Dying Light is representative of the entire game, it’s not the beast powers that change the game – it’s the guns.
Dying Light: The Beast began life as DLC for Dying Light 2, but developer Techland changed course after some of its work was leaked. The project bloomed into a full, standalone game (although if you did buy Dying Light 2’s ultimate edition you get The Beast for free - Techland promised DLC and intends to fulfil that promise). Perhaps because of this origin, The Beast feels very familiar. Much of what I saw in the 45-minute hands-off demo was very much a continuation of the 2022 zombie smasher, from the robust parkour, to the world design, to the ‘follow the yellow cable’ puzzles that activate UV-protected safe houses. This certainly doesn’t seem like a ‘full’ sequel, but there does appear to be enough fresh ideas to justify its transition to a standalone game.
The new map is more rural, with something of a ‘village’ feel. Yes, there are still buildings and rooftops to leap and vault across, but these are surrounded by dense woodland. The demo showed Kyle creeping through tall grass in an effort to avoid nighttime horrors (which, once again, are much stronger than the zombies that appear during the day). Kyle notably doesn’t seem to suffer from the same infection Adien did in DL2 - there’s no immunity gauge ticking down on the HUD – so he can seemingly stay out in the dark as long
Read more on ign.com
