Dying Light: The Beast has received overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam.
As the third installment in the highly acclaimed Dying Light series, Dying Light: The Beast has sold 1.5 million copies and received 13,000 Steam reviews within just one month of release—90% of which are positive.
Some say that after ten years, the "Harran Superman" Kyle Crane has returned by popular demand, setting the tone accordingly.
Some also say that the female protagonist Olivia has an excellent face model, looking more appealing than Lawan from the previous game, so the enthusiastic community response is well-deserved.
Compared to the development team "turning over a new leaf," abandoning niche radical aesthetics, or using the new main storyline to connect the first two Dying Light games with various narrative twists—the aspect of Dying Light: The Beast that surprised me the most was actually its optimization.
While many major titles suffer from optimization issues and some developers still mock users of mid-to-low-end platforms on social media, Dying Light: The Beast not only avoids locking out high-end users but can even run at high frame rates on platforms equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and an Intel® Core™ i3-10105 processor, which is quite surprising.
Image source: Bilibili @Maoju—a well-known reviewer of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
Speaking of which, "top-tier optimization" has always been a specialty of these Polish developers at Techland. I personally played the original Dying Light at 30 fps on a low-voltage laptop equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M. For Dying Light 2: Stay Human, many community members reported that it doesn't demand high specs; even outdated hardware like the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 can run it smoothly.
Techland's conservative approach of sticking to their own C-engine and not easily chasing "high-end gaming technology" can be described as a blessing for users of mid-to-low-end gaming platforms.
Besides treating users of low-end device platforms with respect, Techland's dedication to localization—or rather, the Polish developers' commitment to the experience of Chinese players—is also quite remarkable.
Besides the original Dying Light that made the series famous, Techland has prepared carefully adapted Chinese localization and voiceovers for almost every subsequent Dying Light game. Especially in Dying Light: The Beast, Kyle Crane's Chinese voice acting, with its grounded curses, emotional releases, and natural expressions, even reminds people of Shenyang Street and brings back memories of that noisy summer kicked open by "Hu Cilang."
These Polish developers clearly value and respect feedback and experiences from Chinese players, and are willing to invest time and effort into optimizing the actual gameplay experience for the Chinese region. This is quite rare in an era where AI machine translation is rampant.
Image source: Bilibili @Zonghengjia & Youxia
Moreover, from a map design perspective, Dying Light: The Beast no longer fills the map with大量 redundant high-rise buildings like previous entries in the series. Instead, the map design resembles interconnected small sandbox areas, each with its own narrative and experiential focus. Many areas even exist specifically for certain tasks or story segments. For example, in the Fisherman's Island side quest, players can follow the clues left behind on the map to fully grasp the ugliness and absurdity of human nature in the post-apocalyptic world.
In terms of safe zone design, Dying Light: The Beast continues to strive for unique and independent puzzle-solving experiences. Many medium and large safe zones in this installment, such as the Silo Safe Zone and the Library Tower Safe Zone, have elevated their design quality. Players can no longer mindlessly maneuver and solve puzzles by simply climbing walls as they could in previous games.
Observing the terrain first, then making a plan, and finally executing it is the main theme of puzzle-solving in Dying Light: The Beast. Although many people complain that this design tests parkour skills and luck too much, requiring repeated restarts if any aspect falls short.
This is indeed the case in some situations, but challenging oneself has always been the eternal theme of Dying Light. The parkour missions, special bounties, prisons, and Bozak tribes in the first game, as well as the hanging-on-by-a-thread scenarios, crystal collections, and night combat in the second game, all push players' skills and abilities to their limits.
Furthermore, Kyle Crane's skill tree in Dying Light: The Beast differs from previous entries in the series. Our Harran Superman starts with many parkour techniques that required skill unlocks in the first and second games—even after 13 years of torment, the memories of running freely through the streets and alleys of Harran have not been forgotten.
The most interesting part is that the "Beast Mode," which was a limited-time feature in Aiden's main storyline in the second game, has now become a standard offensive tool for the Harran Superman.
Players first encounter this skill at the end of the game's prologue, when Kyle Crane escapes from the Baron's laboratory. At that time, Kyle Crane is at a "low point in life," about to break free from the Baron's control and regain freedom, but his physical condition is terrible, his weapons are rudimentary, and zombies are everywhere.
At this moment, the beast mode's roar and the gore-splattered zombie horde before you showcase the most primal, brutal, and satisfying aspects of this skill to perfection. Techland's control over emotion and presentation is truly masterful.
Although player stats inevitably inflate in the late game, and the attack patterns and skill output of Beast Mode become too simple and brute-force, diminishing its prominence—at least in the early to mid-game, Beast Mode feels like a "zombie deleter" prepared by the Harran Superman for players. Whether fighting bosses solo or clearing zombie hordes, you just need to keep fighting to fill up the transformation gauge. Once your rage is maxed out, you can go all out, overturning Everythinggj in front of you and mincing every monster in your path.
Is there any moment more satisfying and stress-relieving than this?
Although Dying Light: The Beast cannot compare to the previous two entries in terms of content volume, as a "third installment" expanded from DLC—often jokingly referred to by players as "Dying Light 2.5"—it still delivers a solid and replayable experience: about 30 hours for the main story and 15 to 20 hours for side quests and exploration. Firearms are no longer stingily withheld from players as they were in the second game. Within just a few hours of progressing through the main story, players can acquire these powerful weapons from characters and enemies—pistols, rifles, submachine guns, shotguns, and marksman rifles, covering all bases. The early-game experience is completely different from Dying Light 2: Stay Human.
Most commendably, Dying Light: The Beast implements a shared main story progression system for multiplayer. Players no longer need to jump between online teammates repeatedly just to catch up on story progress as they did in previous games.
I almost regained the passion I had when staying up all night with friends to save Harran City, running freely through the quaint town at the foot of the Alps in Beaver Valley and the vast plains. Although the Night Hunters in Dying Light: The Beast are still ridiculously strong, and bugs like perpetual day and perpetual night still exist—wait, no, Techland has been intensely fixing bugs recently, eliminating the perpetual day and night issues, and even continuing to reply to player comments in the Steam review section, showing their sincerity.
So, there will be bread, and there will be milk, as long as we wait for updates to Hunter Mode and more weapons...
Night Hunters? What Night Hunters? In the face of our Harran Superman, armed with sharp weapons, they are nothing but easy prey.