KYLE TRIALS

Kyle Crane is out for revenge in DYING LIGHT: THE BEAST

- By Christopher Livingston

Punching a man’s head clean off his shoulders with a single swing of my fist is darn satisfying. It’s not like Dying Light: The Beast needed to make me super-strong – I regularly launch zombies off rooftops with my two-footed flying kick and slice enemies in half lengthwise with an electrified machete I built in my bedroom – but I do appreciate the opportunity to hulk out with a barehanded decapitation every so often.

This time around, Techland’s zombie parkour horror is going to the country, and the setting isn’t the only thing that’s changed. Dying Light: The Beast swaps the dense skyscraper forest of the last game, Stay Human, for a quaint village nestled in a rural landscape, and dispenses with a lot of the bells and whistles.

No more claiming sections of the city for factions, or setting up networks of two-way ziplines and jump pads, or soaring through the air with a paraglider. Even though it adds a bit of superhuman strength to the mix, the zany parkour sandbox has been toned down to resemble a purer survival horror experience.

KYLE STYLE

Thing is: I'm a bells and whistles kinda guy. I loved transforming the city in Stay Human into my own jungle gym, but you can’t give me a bunch of toys in one game and then take them all away in the next one.

Remember how the movie Alien had one alien, and then Aliens had a ton of aliens, and then Alien 3 went back to one alien again? I wasn’t a fan of that, either. To put it in parkour parlance, Dying Light: The Beast is more grounded, but winds up a little flatfooted as a result.

Kyle Crane, the gruff, selfless do-gooder of the original