Dying Light The Beast review - a gloriously silly zombie sandbox

It feels like an intrusion, rooting through drawers and bags. The building's occupants are dead, of course, but still. I'd be pretty annoyed if I knew someone was rummaging through my possessions, even if I was a bloodthirsty zombie. Moreso, if anything. Those are my bits of wiring. Hey! That's MY pile of scrap. The residents of the lovely Alps-adjacent town of Dying Light: The Beast don't really seem to mind - they're more concerned with making my insides my outsides. Must be dinner time.

Dying Light: The Beast is a zombie game about revenge and a kleptomaniac stuck in an eternal Jekyll and Hyde struggle. It's about helping the little guy, and it's about supergluing a flamethrower onto an axe. There's a certain pace to The Beast that took me a while to attune to; its outrageous gore and serious tone belie what is ultimately a silly sandbox for bashing the undead.

A lot of what I'm doing can be shoehorned into three categories: running, hoovering up tat, and caving in skulls. It's quite satisfying, really, like scratching several itches at once, and I've found that most of what Dying Light asks of me can be solved by doing any combination of those three things. Need power to this building? Well, I'd better parkour across some rooftops, collect a cable, and decapitate the former residents of this substation, then.

There is a proper story here, of course. I've been trapped in a facility, subjected to the horrors of modern science for over a decade, and now it's payback time. The picturesque town I find myself in has been overrun by aggressive infected, and I'm trying to get enough of a foothold to take the fight to the man in charge.

Anyone who has bumped into a Dying Light game in the past knows what to expect here, but for the uninitiated, it's a first-person action game with a heavy reliance on melee combat. Weapons can be crafted, found, and modified to fit your needs, and the swathes of enemies are your punching bags.

That isn't to say I have the run of the place: going out at night is a death wish with hulking (yet surprisingly agile) beasts pottering around, and while the infected aren't much of an issue in small groups, it's easy enough to bite off more than I can chew and be swallowed by a crowd. It's all about knowing my limits and adjusting accordingly, although with a hockey stick that doubles as a small explosive device, my survival instincts can be clouded by my confidence.

So I follow instructions over the radio, doing odd jobs to make the lives of the survivors a little easier, with occasional breakthroughs in the story that allow me to improve myself to do more bashing. Levelling up allows me to refine the parts of my character, to sharpen the things I like to do best. Like driving, for instance, can be improved so I use less fuel, and the cars last longer against the onslaught, which is useful because there's a lot more distance to cover here.

The Beast has a built-up area much like its predecessors, where I can leap from building to building, parkouring like the best of them to stay out of reach of any teeth that want to find themselves in my flesh. Most of the map, however, is farmland, small pockets of civilization - open space, basically. It's a lot denser than that might sound, though, with many points of interest and small incidental bits of environmental story scattered around.

I find an abandoned picnic at one point, with a little note. It lambasts a scout leader for wandering off and leaving the group, and hints at the direction they may have gone in. Wandering that way, I see a sunbleached skeleton at the end of a dock. It's the scoutmaster, and from the note at their feet, they couldn't take it anymore. These are small inclusions, but they give the overtly hostile landscape a human touch, and a tragic one, in this case.

I flip between story missions and icon hunting on the map, creating a satisfying balance for myself. Delving deeper than I probably should often yields a powerful new weapon, or just some valuable resources to improve my already substantial arsenal of pointy objects. I always have to keep an eye on the time, though, because I start to get nervous around 5 PM, and will do anything to avoid being caught short in the dark.

The handful of times I have been out after curfew, it hasn't gone especially well. There is a special type of infected that enjoys the nightlife, and if they ever catch wind I'm outside past my bedtime, then they beeline for me and attempt to remove my head from its rightful place. These powerful zombies can see the glow from my flashlight, so while I could fumble around in the pitch black, my nerve just isn't up to it.

It must be quite frustrating for those I'm helping. Here I am, Mr. Beast (not that one), waltzing in, tearing legally distinct zombies in half with my bare hands - the hero, right? Yet whenever they give me a job to do, I'm off taking a nap because it's past midday and I couldn't possibly. Much like one of those mugs that says 'Don't bother me before I've had my coffee', don't even think about asking me to do anything when sundown is in sight.

The story is simple, yet effective, the combat packs a real punch, and the world feels lived in and, weirdly enough, alive. I had a great time with Dying Light: The Beast, and I'm sure that newcomers and series veterans will find a lot to like here - this is the best version of Dying Light to date, and is well worth your time.