Dying Light: The Beast Review: A Hero’s Return to Open Country Earns Its 7.8

Techland has spent a decade teaching players to fear the dark. With Dying Light: The Beast, it finally hands them a reason to run toward it.

The studio’s 2025 survival horror release puts Kyle Crane back in the lead for the first time since the original game. He is no longer the selfless GRE operative who saved lives during the initial outbreak. After 13 years of torture and experimentation at the hands of a villain called the Baron, Crane escapes captivity with volatile DNA mixed into his own — and a beast he has to fight from the inside.

Dying Light: The Beast is out now on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. It scores 7.8 out of 10.

Trailer, via Dying Light.

A prison break in the Western Alps

The game opens in Castor Woods, a rural tourist destination in the Western Alps now overrun by zombies. Crane’s escape is triggered by another test subject, subject beta, breaching containment. A woman named Olivia helps him out of the lab, then trades her knowledge for his protection: kill the Baron’s experimental beasts, the Chimeras, pull the GSB catalyst from their bodies, and use it to get stronger.

It is a clean loop, and Techland knows it. Every Chimera is a boss fight that pays out in power, and every dose of catalyst pushes Crane further from human. The premise does the work that a lesser game would hand to a cutscene.

The Baron, later named Marius Fischer, once owned a biotech company. Now he wants to perfect the virus and control the world with it. Olivia’s research on the samples Crane collects is how the player learns what he is actually building. That structure — revenge plot on the surface, science project underneath — is the smartest thing in the script.

Beast Mode and the 4×4

Combat runs on two tracks. Crane can use melee weapons and firearms, or he can enter Beast Mode, which unlocks bare-handed attacks powerful enough to wreck enemies and lets him hurl environment objects at them. Superhuman speed comes standard; he sprints faster than any ordinary person.

Movement is the other half. Crane’s parkour skills carry him across Castor Woods on foot, and a 4×4 vehicle covers the distance when the map opens up. Zombies stay slow in sunlight and turn aggressive at night, the same rule the first game set. Four-player cooperative multiplayer returns.

The skill tree keeps unlocking as players progress, boosting Crane’s combat prowess further. It is a lot of systems stacked on one another, and the game is at its best when they collide — a daytime supply run that turns into a night sprint, a Beast Mode burst spent on the wrong Chimera.

The Sheriff problem

Seeking allies, Crane finds survivors holed up in the local Town Hall, led by a woman called the Sheriff. She warns him that a “Beast” has been hunting down the Baron’s men. When word arrives that the Baron is personally overseeing an operation at a mine, Crane and the Sheriff infiltrate the grounds to kill him directly.

Then she betrays him. The Sheriff tries to hand Crane over to the Baron. The Beast — her real target — interferes, and Kyle’s intervention lets both of them escape captivity while the Sheriff flees.

It is the strongest sequence in the game and the one that justifies the title. Crane is not hunting a monster. He is sharing a body with one, and the people around him have already decided which half they trust.

Restored Land and what comes next

Techland has packaged the base game, all previously released updates, and the premiere Restored Land content into one release. That bundle includes Legend Levels, New Game+, ray tracing, Nightmare Mode, dozens of new finishers, hundreds of parkour and gameplay improvements, and visual and audio enhancements.

Here is the running order for what a new player actually gets:

The ports for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were in development before their cancellation on July 14, 2026. That is a fact worth stating plainly: if you are still on last-generation hardware, this game is not coming for you.

What the 7.8 means

The Beast was originally envisioned as a downloadable content pack for Dying Light 2 Stay Human. It became a standalone game instead, released on September 18, 2025, and that origin shows in the best way. This is not a bloated sequel trying to reinvent a formula. It is a tighter, meaner version of one Techland already had.

The weaknesses are inherited, not new. Castor Woods is a beautiful ruin, but the open world still leans on the same scavenging rhythms the series has used since 2015. Beast Mode is a genuine addition; the 4×4 is transport, not a mechanic with its own ideas. And the story’s best material — Crane’s 13 years in the Baron’s lab, the slow loss of his own DNA — arrives mostly as backstory rather than as something the player lives through.

What holds it at 7.8 is the tension between the two halves of its hero. Techland built a game where the power fantasy and the horror are the same resource. Every catalyst Crane takes makes him stronger and less himself, and the game never lets the player forget which one they chose. The Sheriff’s betrayal lands because the player has already been asking the same question she has: is the thing in the Town Hall still Kyle Crane?

That is a sharper idea than most zombie games bother with, and it is the reason The Beast is worth the return trip. The apocalypse here is not the backdrop. It is the argument.

7.8 of 10.

Dying Light The Beast · game review · Kyle Crane · survival horror · Techland · zombie game