Most open-world games have a feature that can turn many people off: they are infinite. This, which can be a virtue for younger players or for those who only play one or two games a year, is a curse for the rest. Having vast amounts of side missions, icons to complete, and an endless main story does not appeal to a significant portion of the audience. It feels like work. And that makes certain games disappointing.
This was one of the reasons why Dying Light 2: Stay Human did not succeed. It was a game that was marketed as a parkour survival horror, but we spent as much time leveling up stats, exploring the terrain, having conversations with people, or fighting zombies as we did actually managing our resources or fleeing from threats. Not to mention running errands for people who really contributed nothing to the story or the world. This is something they wanted to address in Dying Light: The Beast in the simplest way possible: by making it much more straightforward.
A game of kicking zombies and doing parkour
Born as a DLC for Dying Light 2: Stay Human, Dying Light: The Beast starts where that one left off. But if you’ve never played any Dying Light, don’t worry, as it’s not necessary. The game takes care of explaining everything you need to know, and even without that, the story it wants to tell is perfectly understandable.
In the game, we embody Kyle Crane, a man immune to the strange disease that has come to the world in the post-apocalypse. Most of humanity is dead and, instead of lying eternally, they have decided to return to kill and eat those who are still alive. Kyle is not only immune, but they have also decided to experiment on him to test the possibility of turning him into a biological weapon, and from there arises one of the main mechanics of the game: the Beast Mode. A mode in which we can become a beastly entity to quickly and effectively eliminate enemies for a limited time.
Otherwise, the game is Dying Light. The entire emphasis of the game is on parkour from one place to another, fighting with melee weapons against all kinds of zombies and avoiding, as much as possible, fighting more than a couple of enemies at the same time, or doing so at night, as their strength increases significantly. Occasionally using vehicles and firearms, we will need them for the more dramatic encounters, and especially for some bosses that have just the right level of difficulty to force us to think about how we need to approach them to defeat them.
Neither 50 nor 100 hours ahead
That said, the great value point of Dying Light: The Beast is that it is brief. At least, if you want it to be. With about 12 to 15 hours of story ahead, it is perfectly possible to ignore the side missions and stick to the story and feel satisfied without feeling like you’ve missed anything. And if you want more? You can double your playtime, or even add a few more hours to that, by doing the side missions offered by the characters you encounter.
If you add to that the possibility of completely customizing the UI —we recommend playing in Immersive Mode, even if the game tells you not to do so in your first playthrough—, the game becomes tremendously enjoyable. A delight that is as simple as it is direct.
Because sometimes all you need is a fun game that knows what it wants to do, but doesn’t demand all your leisure hours. And that’s what Dying Light: The Beast does. Being a fun game that knows exactly what it wants to be, and that could even be polished in some aspects, is never less than a well of fun.
