So much of Dying Light is informed by the series’ melee-first design. Its impact can be seen in the damage system that causes its grotesque zombies to fall apart with every slash of your blade, as well as the weapon crafting, which turns household tools into hilariously impractical killing machines. And, of course, it influences the parkour movement, which allows you to keep well away from chewing teeth and clawing hands.
So what happens when you add guns to this close-quarters formula? And I don’t mean one or two rusty pistols, but a whole armoury stocked with shotguns, assault rifles, and plentiful ammo. That’s a question the next game in the series, Dying Light: The Beast, poses. The answer is not the obvious one. Far from transforming into a regular first-person shooter, guns have turned Techland’s latest into something that feels closer to Crysis or even (if you squint a bit) Dishonored. They’re another layer of an increasingly varied toolset that ensures every encounter is a sandbox solved by your own rules.
For this month’s IGN First, I was able to play an hour-long mission from an early section of Dying Light: The Beast. This meant stepping into the combat boots of Kyle Crane, the returning protagonist of the original Dying Light. Held hostage and experimented on for 13 years by a shadowy figure known only as The Baron, I join Kyle a few hours into his quest for revenge. Deep within the new, much more rural zone of Castor Woods, I infiltrate one of The Baron’s factories. And, standing on the facility’s roof, I realise my options are more varied than the last time I played Dying Light.
Using Kyle’s heightened “survivor” senses (a benefit of all those experiments he endured), I’m able to highlight the patrolling members of The Baron’s militia. Some are marked in orange, while others are red; an indication of who is armed with melee weapons or guns, respectively. It’s a colour-coded threat level that helps me set up a plan of action. Yes, it’s all very Batman: Arkham.
I start right in front of me with a blissfully unaware bowman. Approaching silently, I perform a melee takedown using a shiv I’ve crafted – much faster than choking him out – and then swipe the bow from his corpse. Bows were, of course, in Dying Light 2, but kept out of reach until the back half of the game. Their earlier introduction in The Beast promises a greater level of engagement options across the campaign, especially considering their ranged stealth potential.
Notching an arrow, I headshot the bowman’s buddies, including a rifle-wielding sniper on the opposite roof. No one hears him slump to the floor, so I’m free to parkour across and add his gun to my collection. Once again, my engagement opportunities expand: no longer limited to firing single arrows and enduring long draw speeds, I can take out groups of charging melee enemies before they make it into striking range… although everyone around me will know exactly what’s going on. Might as well make a spectacle of it, then.
I dive down to the roof below, where a further two riflemen, a squad of brawlers, and – delightfully – a pile of explosive gas canisters await. The dive triggers a slow-motion effect. It’s hardly the slick bullet time of Max Payne and the old FEAR games, feeling more as if you’re suddenly travelling through sticky air rather than becoming John Wick, but it nonetheless successfully emphasises Kyle’s military background.
With this expanded toolkit, Dying Light’s encounters have graduated into a space similar to Crysis and Far Cry’s sandboxes. Using Kyle’s survivor sense allows you to methodically remove enemies with guns from the playing field before going toe-to-toe with less dangerous foes. Flowing fluidly from stealth takedowns to silent headshots to shell-sputtering shoot-outs allowed me greater control over the space than I’ve come to expect from the typically messy melees of Dying Light 2. Combined with the parkour, which makes a respectable stand-in for teleportation, there’s even a little of Dishonored’s strategy to be found here, too – albeit less elegant in execution. My hope is that, beyond the boundaries of this demo, there are encounters that encourage a strong variety of approaches.
I’ve reason to be hopeful. As I explore Castor Woods, I encounter a zombie wearing a battery pack that detonates on contact, sending arcing forks of electricity through the horde. Another wears an explosive canister on its back – just one good shot will turn him and his buddies into barbeque. Talking of seared flesh, I later acquire a flamethrower. It’s clear that there are plenty of toys to experiment with, and I hope that Techland is playful enough to use these elements to coax players into cleverly absurd solutions for clearing out the undead and deadly alike.
It’s worth noting that Techland has upped its game when it comes to stealth, too. The bow, shivs, and tools like throwing knives are naturally all very good at silently dispatching human opponents, but there’s now a method for quietly avoiding zombies, too. Taking more than a few pages from The Walking Dead’s book, you can now smear yourself in undead guts in order to mask your human scent, and then casually walk through the horde. It’s a simple stealth tool, but one that’s incredibly evocative of the fiction Dying Light revels in.
But Kyle isn’t special because he can use a gun or take a bath in a zombie’s insides. Those aforementioned experiments have turned him into the titular Beast. It’s a similar backstory to that of Aiden Caldwell, the protagonist of Dying Light 2, but where Aiden’s infection gave him some zombie-like superhuman abilities, Kyle has become something much closer to a leaping wrecking ball. Triggered at will after taking and dealing enough damage to fill a meter, Beast Mode allows you to tear regular enemies apart with gory animations akin to Doom’s Glory Kills. A thunderous ground pound violently throws foes to the seven winds – using it indoors is effectively a screen wipe attack, sending zombies splattering into the walls and ceiling. All this came in handy against the demo’s final boss, a towering “Chimera” zombie known as a Behemoth, which is capable of hurling engine blocks and concrete boulders across the arena. The Behemoth has a number of easily recognised attack patterns, but the challenge is in its resilience, as well as the number of minions that shamble after you. With Beast Mode engaged, I was able to easily clear those mobs and inflict big damage spikes against the boss.
But as much as going toe-to-toe with another beast is good fun, I’m actually more interested in the utility aspects of Kyle’s mutations. Techland tells me that playtesters have used the Beast mode’s extended leap ability to bypass entire parkour challenges. And so it’s the unconventional uses of these abilities that promise to join the likes of guns and camouflaging yourself with guts in ensuring that The Beast feels like a meaningful upgrade over its predecessor.
The scope of this demo was pretty limited – in fact, it was largely a playable version of the hands-off presentation I saw at gamescom last year, and so there is almost certainly more to see in time. But being able to wander about this small slice of the world on my own time allowed me to enjoy some of the smaller details. The world feels like a substantial upgrade over Dying Light 2, not so much in level design (although much of what I liked about the old town section of Villedor returns) but in atmosphere. The new weather effects system is exceptional, with storms drenching the landscape with heavy rain and winds whipping trees, bushes, and long grass into a frenzy. And when the sun sets, the light really does die. It’s nearly impossible to see during the witching hour, forcing you to sparingly use your flashlight to navigate between the patrol paths of the much more difficult nighttime terrors. Long-time fans who pine for the scarier nights of the first game should hopefully be well catered for.
When I left my appointment with Techland at gamescom last year, I was somewhat skeptical as to how guns would affect the core ideas Dying Light is built on. Naturally, the studio wanted to show off its new toys, and that hands-off demo was played largely as a shooter. But having had the opportunity to play myself, in which I had the agency to choose when and where guns were deployed, I quickly learned that firearms are just one component of Dying Light: The Beast, not the main attraction. Their addition, alongside what feels like a strengthened inclusion of the bow and the series’ many trademark DIY melee solutions, made the demo’s encounters feel richer and more textured. Each combat scenario felt like a problem with a dozen solutions, rather than the melee mosh pits that I typically found myself in while playing Dying Light 2.
The question now is how all this evolves over the wider game. There are several tools and weapons that I didn’t get extensive or any time at all with, such as the aforementioned flamethrower and oddities like a throwable shock knife, and so my hope is that The Beast constantly adds weapons with unique utilities to the toolkit. And then, of course, there’s your mutations; each Chimera you kill allows you to inject more freaky DNA into your veins and unlock a skill tree of powers. I can only hope that the further down those branches you go, the more wild your ability set becomes. And provided the campaign continues to offer up interesting challenges that encourage the use of both abilities and tools, then I think The Beast could be a much more interesting sequel than it initially appears to be.
Matt Purslow is IGN's Senior Features Editor.
