When it comes to zombie games, I’m faced with a recurring dilemma: Do I want to experience raw realism as a puny living being trying to survive against all odds? Or do I want to be a guns-blazing, larger-than-life action hero who stops for no undead horde? Dying Light: The Beast lets me experience both. It rules.
Developed by longtime Dying Light studio Techland, Dying Light: The Beast was released smack in the middle of September 2025 — one of the most crowded release windows in modern gaming. Amid hits like Hades 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Borderlands 4, and Silent Hill f, Dying Light: The Beast more than holds its own. Played from a first-person perspective, this action-adventure game puts you in the boots of Kyle Crane, the returning protagonist from the original 2015 Dying Light. Having been subjected to gruesome experiments for the past 13 years, poor Kyle has turned into some sort of human-zombie hybrid, giving him superhuman abilities akin to the strongest zombie bosses, but without losing his humanity.
As Kyle sets out to take revenge on the Baron, the man responsible for his torture, he has to fight his way through a zombie-ridden, open-world version of the Western Alps. Traversing this world is a delight on its own; after securing an old monastery, it won’t be long before you get to explore a gorgeous village and a vast countryside against an epic backdrop of snowy mountains. Like any proper zombie game, Dying Light: The Beast understands that a world without humans isn’t just doom and gloom; it can be beautiful, too.
But beauty isn’t the only thing offered by this locale; to get from one place to the next, Kyle can either grab a car or use his top-notch parkour skills, which include running, jumping, climbing, and sliding. Racing over the abandoned highway is quite fun, especially when you hit a zombie or two, but it doesn’t compare to the intensity and freedom of rooftop parkour, where every wrong jump can be your last. Unfortunately, as the majority of the game map is set in either woodland or countryside, the Old Town is the only place with ample rooftop parkour opportunities — it’s enough to satisfy my parkour cravings, but I wouldn’t have minded another village.
Now, seeing this magnificent landscape overrun by zombies should make me sad… But it really doesn’t, as fighting zombies in Dying Light: The Beast is pure joy. You can take your pick of melee and ranged weapons, though melee options take center stage as bullets are scarce — and gunfire attracts zombies. It’s a good thing, therefore, that melee combat is the superior of the two; not only does every slash visibly injure a zombie, but you really feel the impact, especially from blunt weapons. Almost just as good are The Beast’s tools: grenades, molotovs, decoys, and — my personal favorite — throwing knives. Nothing more satisfying than quietly disposing of minor zombies with a single, well-aimed blade.
When you get dropped into a zombie apocalypse, you don’t just want to gun down zombies, do you? You’d want to smash them, knife them, take them out from behind, kick them off a building, lure them into a trap, set them ablaze, maybe hit them with a crossbow bolt as you fly overhead in slow-motion… That kind of stuff. Thanks to Dying Light: The Beast’s expansive arsenal of weapons and gadgets, you can do all that and more as you approach each situation differently.
But those are your main combat tools — what about Kyle’s special abilities? The first one, Beast Mode, feels brilliant and boring in equal measure. Upon activation, Kyle becomes inhumanly strong for a short while, allowing him to rip through any zombie that dares to come near. The first time I used it, this unexpected, adrenaline-fueled move felt amazing, but as I used it more often, I started to realize something: More than a cool combat ability, Beast Mode feels like a cheat code.
While taking and dealing damage will automatically charge and activate Beast Mode at the start of the game, eventually, you can modify its skill tree and use it whenever you please. Got chased by a horde? Beast Mode will destroy them in seconds. Scary stealth section? Beast Mode will clear the room for you. Facing a particularly bulky boss? Just use Beast Mode to instantly deplete a hefty chunk of its HP. Having this opt-out at my disposal may sound great in theory, but in practice, it severely reduces the sense of threat I’m looking for in a zombie survival game.
I’ve considered ignoring the ability to remedy this, but refusing to use Beast Mode in a game called The Beast does feel a bit odd. A better way to offset Beast Mode’s advantage is to play on brutal mode (hard difficulty) as opposed to survival mode (normal difficulty), which will make each fight more difficult. Beware, however, that loot, shop supplies, and even your stamina bar will suffer restrictions.
Unlike Beast Mode, the Survivor Sense special ability is handled perfectly. This scanning ability reveals all nearby items and zombies — but only “volatile” zombies, a.k.a. the ones with higher mobility and the capacity to alert the horde. This proved to be the perfect balance for me; while I don’t wish to see every zombie, as that would remove all feelings of dread as well as the need for caution, stealth, and tactical decisions that defines Dying Light games, it would be too hard to complete stealth sections without the ability to mark volatile zombies — I’d have to boost the screen brightness to 100.
The only thing Survivor Sense might improve upon is item visibility. Marked with nothing but a small grey dot, it’s easy to miss the loot, and I don’t see any accessibility options to fix this. While we’re on the topic of minor annoyances, it would’ve been great to get a fast travel and auto-loot option as well — going from zombie to zombie to collect scraps is far from my favorite activity in this game. But while some weaknesses are minor enough to be excused (looking at you, English road and shop signs, and conveniently spray-painted ledges on natural rock walls), a rather prominent one in Dying Light: The Beast is its story.
Kyle Crane is a nice bloke, but he’s a pretty standard man-of-few-words action hero. His sole motivation? Vengeance, of course! His nemesis, the Baron, is your average power-craving bad guy who’s got an unlimited supply of henchmen to throw at you. Naturally, in his quest to bring down this Baron, Kyle is aided by a stern but conventionally attractive woman with a knack for science. This premise sets you up for a ton of “Find the survivors,” “Retrieve this item,” and “Search this site” type of quests. I won’t spoil any plot twists here, but not one of them came as a surprise to me.
Thankfully, I’m not looking for a narrative masterpiece; I just want to slay zombies, and Dying Light: The Beast happens to be an excellent zombie survival game with a stunning world, delightful parkour, and amazing combat. Balancing action with vulnerability isn’t easy, but between Beast Mode transformations, and not in the least due to the limitations of Survivor Sense, Kyle Crane is human enough for this game to scare the living daylights out of me.
