Dying Light: The Beast is making the most out of rough situation, but more than anything it has me craving something totally fresh from Techland

Dying Light: The Beast is a prime example of making lemonade when god gives you lemons. Or leakers, in the case of Techland, which revealed it press during previews of the game behind closed doors at Gamescom 2024. Inside a small room, attendees were trucking through a 30-40 minute playthrough of the upcoming Dying Light 2 spin-off. It came as a result of some hard work and creative thinking following a pretty nasty data leak which gave up the plans for some Dying Light 2 DLC.

Instead of proceeding with the plan, one that everyone now knew about, the Techland team decided to pivot into creating The Beast, a kinda halfway measure between a standard DLC and a whole new game. It’s shorter than a full game for sure, and still has the skeleton of Dying Light 2 at its core, but it’s a whole new map with a returning character and some nice new gameplay features that should sweeten the deal.

Kyle Crane from Dying Light 1 is back, and he’s all gruff and moody as you’d expect. He’s spent the last few years locked away in a lab, but now he’s escaped and hunting down the guy who kept him there. To help him get answers and a bit of vengeance he’s got a new sidekick chatting to him over the radio, and some bestial powers that’ll go a long way in keeping him alive. A pretty cool concept for a spin-off – think Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, but swap the hilarity for a sterner, more stoic approach and you arrive at the general vibe on offer here.

With him come some new features, including a load of guns you can mess around with, thanks in part to a larger focus on human guards and goons standing in your way. There’s even a car you can drive around, equipped with storage space in the back for carrying around heavy quest items and other junk. But perhaps the biggest inclusion comes in the form of Kyle’s beast form. In the reveal trailer, he’s depicted as this lone stalker, darting from trees to take out armed guards. In the gameplay demo we saw? It’s more like he put his rubber Hulk hands on, swinging haymakers at zombies and throwing huge concrete blocks around within a limited window.

I chuckled when I saw it, I won’t lie, the sight of some guy just boxing out a poor zombie in the middle of some scrapyard. The fact that Kyle has to get super duper mad to use it first didn’t help. It’s a Hulk mode, and while the being able to rip the head off of a freak – a new giant zombie boss-style enemy – is cool sure. Kyle is positioned as a lone werewolf with a machine gun, able to hold his own with his survival skills but with a darker, feral side to him. This will either sound quite cool or undoubtedly cringe to you and you’ve just got to go with your gut on making that distinction.

Ultimately, Dying Light: The Beast is an admirable departure from the base game, with enough added in there to warrant its standalone position. I am a huge fan of how those who bought the Ultimate Edition of Dying Light 2 get The Beast for free – it’s not the player’s fault that this morphed into its own thing after all. But with The Beast now nearly here, I find myself wanting the next big thing from Techland. A Dying Light 3, a new adventure alltogether. The team have done great work with the game, and are pulling that base amount of work into cool new directions.

Dying Light 2 only came out in February 2022 (I know right, it feels like forever ago) and Techland’s managed to do a lot with it since then. It’s released a million different bundles, a reloaded edition, and various updates along the way. Watching The Beast, it felt to me like a good ending point. Bring in the old main character, give him a proper send off, then take the entire franchise into the sunset or towards a new horizon, maybe? Now’s the time for it.

So if you want to celebrate Dying Light, The Beast seems like a good way to do so. There’s no release date yet, nor is there a price tag for it, despite questions on the subject coming fast and often at Gamescom. Keep an eye out for it, especially if you’re a Dying Light fan.