After announcing the release date for Dying Light: The Beast, Techland also shared a large 30-minute gameplay walkthrough for the upcoming game. You can watch it below.
In this mission, protagonist Kyle Crane (who returns from the original Dying Light – check our interview with voice actor Roger Craig Smith here) is investigating an old chemical factory south of the city, operated by a group known as the Baron’s men. This factory is the base for sinister experiments on Chimeras, mutated zombie creatures crucial to the game’s plot.
Gameplay in Dying Light: The Beast stresses smart survival: simply put, not every encounter should be met with direct combat. For example, large groups of zombies known as Biters are best handled with distraction tactics like using decoys instead of fighting head-on.
In the mission seen in this Dying Light: The Beast gameplay walkthrough, Kyle, aided by a character named Olivia, follows clues leading to the abandoned factory. Here, he also faces the Virals, a faster type of zombie who is especially dangerous because they still maintain some human-like intelligence and behaviors. As in previous franchise entries, with dusk approaching, the impending night signals a dramatic increase in danger, ramping up the game’s tension even further.
Abandoned buildings like the factory serve dual purposes: they are both potential traps and sources of valuable resources such as crafting materials and weapons. Attention to detail and careful exploration are vital for survival, with players encouraged to scour for hidden loot while constantly assessing the environment for threats. On that note, a new mechanic called Survivor Sense helps players identify enemies’ locations and types.
Dying Light: The Beast also introduces a dynamic weather system, which adds realism and variety to the environments of Castor Woods but can pose additional challenges for the player. The game world is varied and includes multiple biomes such as swamps, national parks, and industrial zones, each with distinct visuals and gameplay dynamics. Furthermore, the open world will feel more dynamic thanks to raider activity outside the safe zones, producing emergent gameplay moments.
Eventually, Kyle steals a pickup truck, showing off how the addition of vehicles in Dying Light: The Beast provides enhanced mobility and ways to physically engage hordes. Of course, vehicles can be damaged, and there’s the fuel scarcity to deal with.
The walkthrough concludes with Kyle confronting one of the aforementioned Chimeras, a massive mutated monster. It’s here that we get to see Kyle’s Beast meter, a special ability gauge that, once filled, allows him to unleash his Beast Mode, granting temporary superhuman powers he gained from all the experiments he was subjected to over the last thirteen years.
Dying Light: The Beast launches on August 22 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X.
