Skip to main content
GamesRadar+
GamesRadar+
GamesRadar+ The Games, Movies, TV & Comics You Love
Search GamesRadar+
View Profile
Xbox Series X
Nintendo Switch
Nintendo Switch 2
Tabletop Gaming
Toys & Collectibles
Retro Gamer
Newsletters
Total Film
Gaming Magazines
Why subscribe?
Subscribe from just £3
Takes you closer to the games, movies and TV you love
Try a single issue or save on a subscription
Issues delivered straight to your door or device
From£9.99View
Summer Game Fest
New games for 2025
Upcoming Switch 2 games
Switch 2 stock
Recommended reading
Survival Horror Games
Dying Light: The Beast director says no-one expected Dying Light 1 to be “such a kickass game,” but admits “we made some missteps” on Dying Light 2
Open World Games
Dying Light: The Beast – Everything we know so far
Survival Horror Games
“For us, it really is Dying Light 3”: Techland admits Dying Light 2 “lost the horror, lost the tension,” but says The Beast is “the best Dying Light that we have ever made”
Survival Horror Games
“Our fans would kill us”: Dying Light: The Beast director outlines Techland’s “areas of perfection” that “we cannot mess up to any extent”
Now that I know The Blood of Dawnwalker is a vampire game that’s not about Doing The Right Thing as a Very Special Boy, 2026 can’t come soon enough
Adventure Games
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle reawakened a PS2-era phobia that made me quit survival horror in 2003, and I’m still recovering
Survival Horror Games
Dying Light: The Beast dev says “we are not Call of Duty” and the series has a “complicated relationship” with guns, but The Beast’s firearms should finally be “on par” with melee
Survival Horror Games
Dying Light 2
I’m replaying Dying Light 2 to prepare for The Beast, and I finally get why it isn’t scary: it tried to fix something that wasn’t broken
Jasmine Gould-Wilson
26 June 2025
Now Playing | Nights are a bit of a sleeper in Dying Light 2, and I’m ready for The Beast to change that
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Techland)
The scariest thing about Dying Light 2: Stay Human is running low on mushrooms. I say this having, only moments ago, run straight into a Volatile. But instead of being terrified of being chased through the streets of Villedor by a horde of undead monsters, all of my attention is on Aiden’s biomarker.
Despite how much I’m enjoying my new playthrough, I’m surprised by how un-scary it is. It’s a bit of a dampener that the thing that made Techland’s explosive 2015 original such a novel concept – the dynamic day and night cycles – becomes overshadowed by Aiden’s little problem in Dying Light 2. Techland has acknowledged how the game “lost its horror,” and intends to rectify that when Dying Light: The Beast taps back into the fear factor this August.
Even as another protagonist fights against his own biology, I’m excited for Techland to balance things out and remind us why this is one of the best zombie game franchises ever – and the first thing to go has to be those darn mushrooms.
(Image credit: Techland)
Evolving the nightmare
(Image credit: Techland)
Dying Light: The Beast wants to be “the ultimate zombie adventure”, and it only exists because Techland’s DLC plans leaked
Where the first Dying Light leverages our own fears against us, forcing the player to weigh up the pros and cons of venturing through Harran by night, Dying Light 2 feels like more of a management sim.
You may like
Dying Light: The Beast director says no-one expected Dying Light 1 to be “such a kickass game,” but admits “we made some missteps” on Dying Light 2
Dying Light: The Beast – Everything we know so far
“For us, it really is Dying Light 3”: Techland admits Dying Light 2 “lost the horror, lost the tension,” but says The Beast is “the best Dying Light that we have ever made”
The culprit? Aiden’s status as an infected survivor. It dictates everything about moving through the game in his shoes, often pulling focus away from combat encounters if he spends long enough in the dark for the infection to spread.
As a concept, I like it; Aiden’s infection does complicate the riskiness of Dying Light’s already intimidating night cycles – volatiles stalk the shadows, making agility, stealth, and height mandatory if you want to make it back to base without triggering a chase. Throw in an unstable health condition that needs constant care, a boatload of mushrooms, stabilizers, and a biomarker to track its progress, and on paper, Dying Light 2 should have been a good kind of scary rather than the stressful kind.
(Image credit: Techland)
But as I mantle a steep overhang while climbing a ramshackle building, I’m unshaken by the shrieking undead on my tail or the sheer drop beneath me. Knowing I have far more pressing matters at hand – my humanity, specifically – makes volatiles less scary and more of a nuisance. Instead, I snarf a handful of mushrooms while making a beeline for the nearest UV light, paying very little attention to what I might run into on the way.
Rather than feeling daunted by the terrors of the dark in Dying Light 2, I simply feel exasperated by a single question: do I have enough stabilizers and mushrooms to get me through the quest un-zombified, even if I did manage to stealth it?
I don’t recall being so aware of how Aiden’s infection mutes the scariness when I first played it in 2022. But now, right off the back of an earlier replay of Dying Light 1 last year, the difference is night and day – no pun intended.
Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsReceive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsorsBy submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.
Animal instinct
(Image credit: Techland)
Where the first Dying Light leverages our own fears against us, […] Dying Light 2 feels more of a management sim.
By trying to up the stakes in Dying Light 2, I can’t help but view Aiden’s predicament as a distraction from the franchise’s core values: night time is scary, and you should fear it rather than loathe it.
Kyle Crane doesn’t need a biomonitor to make nights in Harran a terrifying prospect. The threats are already omnipresent, and his precious humanity is the thing you’re fighting to preserve.
I used to agonize over whether a night time mission was worth it in the first Dying Light, carefully considering the payoff in exchange for what was always a heart-pounding, unpredictable journey. Aiden, meanwhile? I find myself less concerned about his safety. I mean, he’s kind of doomed anyway, right?
That might sound callous, especially given how The Beast sees Kyle Crane somewhat changed himself after years spent suffering through human experimentation. But the difference here is in the mechanics. Instead of trying to make night times more complex by adding even more downsides to them – like a guy who’s allergic to darkness being exposed to it all the time, for example – The Beast looks to incentivize players to take risks for a powerful reward.
(Image credit: Techland)
In the latest gameplay deep-dive on YouTube, Techland outlines Kyle’s “beast mode” system. Upon dealing or taking damage, he becomes “more agitated” – and if he rages out, he unleashes the beast within. I’m talking tearing throats out with his bare hands, ripping heads off, slashing and punching infected and humans alike thanks to his bio-enhancements.
Not only does this sound like a superpower in a way, it also sounds like its own resource to manage. Picking and choosing when to go into beast mode sounds like a lot of fun to me, necessitating players to either engage or avoid combat accordingly.
There’s only a few short months to go until The Beast is unleashed, and until that time, I’ll keep trying to fall in love with Dying Light 2 again. Much as I enjoy Techland’s brand of zombie-killing chaos, however, I’m still very much looking forward to stepping back into Kyle Crane’s familiar (if rather stinky) boots to see how the developer has learned from its past to bring Dying Light back to its roots: scaring people.
Dying Light: The Beast is just one of many upcoming Xbox Series X games on the way in 2025
See more PC Gaming Features
Xbox Series X
PlayStation
Jasmine Gould-Wilson
Social Links Navigation
Staff Writer, GamesRadar+
Jasmine is a staff writer at GamesRadar+. Raised in Hong Kong and having graduated with an English Literature degree from Queen Mary, University of London in 2017, her passion for entertainment writing has taken her from reviewing underground concerts to blogging about the intersection between horror movies and browser games. Having made the career jump from TV broadcast operations to video games journalism during the pandemic, she cut her teeth as a freelance writer with TheGamer, Gamezo, and Tech Radar Gaming before accepting a full-time role here at GamesRadar. Whether Jasmine is researching the latest in gaming litigation for a news piece, writing how-to guides for The Sims 4, or extolling the necessity of a Resident Evil: CODE Veronica remake, you’ll probably find her listening to metalcore at the same time.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
Dying Light: The Beast director says no-one expected Dying Light 1 to be “such a kickass game,” but admits “we made some missteps” on Dying Light 2
Dying Light: The Beast – Everything we know so far
“For us, it really is Dying Light 3”: Techland admits Dying Light 2 “lost the horror, lost the tension,” but says The Beast is “the best Dying Light that we have ever made”
“Our fans would kill us”: Dying Light: The Beast director outlines Techland’s “areas of perfection” that “we cannot mess up to any extent”
Now that I know The Blood of Dawnwalker is a vampire game that’s not about Doing The Right Thing as a Very Special Boy, 2026 can’t come soon enough
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle reawakened a PS2-era phobia that made me quit survival horror in 2003, and I’m still recovering
Latest in Survival Horror Games
Dying Light: The Beast director says no-one expected Dying Light 1 to be “such a kickass game,” but admits “we made some missteps” on Dying Light 2
10 years later, the original Dying Light is getting a chunky visual upgrade with audio improvements this week, but it’s not a “complete overhaul or remaster”
Dying Light: The Beast director says he’s “a little bit surprised” that more studios haven’t followed Techland’s “go anywhere” approach to open-world game design
Setting Silent Hill f in Japan is the smartest move Konami has made for the survival horror series since The Room moved out in 2004
“Our fans would kill us”: Dying Light: The Beast director outlines Techland’s “areas of perfection” that “we cannot mess up to any extent”
29 years of Resident Evil has left the horror series riddled with lore issues, but I’m convinced Requiem can finally tie it all together
Latest in Features
Oblivion Remastered proves I was wrong to give up on the original game 10 years ago, but I worry Bethesda has lost the magic that made Cyrodiil’s open world RPG shine
Switch 2 has the weakest launch lineup of any Nintendo console I’ve owned, but I’m still just one good single-player game away from dropping $500
The Fantastic Four changed superhero comics forever, and could do the same for the MCU
The best settings to use with your NVIDIA RTX 50 series for DOOM: The Dark Ages
My new Netflix obsession is an animated K-pop musical about demon hunters that I watched 8 times in one week
After 10 hours of The Alters, I’ve been trapped in a Groundhog Day of mutiny and magnetic storms – and I fear even movie night can’t save me
GAME REVIEWS
MOVIE REVIEWS
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach review: “This tarpunk delivery epic is more Metal Gear Solid than ever, for better and worse”
Rematch review: “As with Rocket League, the just-one-more-game pull is magnetic”
Tron: Catalyst review: “Disc slinging is a thrill in this gorgeous rendition of the series, but I’m let down by a time-loop story that falls flat”
FBC: Firebreak review: “A disappointingly bland multiplayer FPS that’s missing far too much of what made Control special”
Dune: Awakening review: “Both extremely compelling and extraordinarily boring, sometimes at the same time – yet still a true Dune love letter”
M3GAN 2.0 review: “A bold sequel with a slightly underwhelming conclusion”
28 Years Later Review: “Enough terror, splatter and suspense to satisfy”
Predator: Killer of Killers review: “Great characters, thrilling action, and gorgeous Arcane-esque animation”
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina review: “Brilliant action, even if the plot gives you a sense of déjà vu”
Karate Kid: Legends review: “Better than Karate Kid (2010), nothing on Karate Kid (1984)”
Ironheart review: “A relic of Marvel’s content-at-all-costs era”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 review: “The show’s most assured run of episodes to date”
Doctor Who season 2, episode 8 spoiler review: ‘The Reality War’ is “a mix of the good, the bad, and the truly baffling”
Doctor Who season 2, episode 7 spoiler review: ‘Wish World’ is “an exciting and ambitious” start to the season finale, with hints of WandaVision
Rick and Morty season 8 review: “Largely plays it too safe after years of crossing boundaries”
GamesRadar+ is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site.
Contact Future’s experts
Terms and conditions
Privacy policy
Cookies policy
Advertise with us
Review guidelines
Write for us
Accessibility Statement
Future Publishing Limited Quay House, The Ambury,
BA1 1UA. All rights reserved. England and Wales company registration number 2008885.
Please login or signup to comment
Please wait…