In real life, I’m not a violent man. I’d even go so far as to say that I’m a bit of a pacifist, though 2025 has really tested the limits of that day after day. It takes a special kind of game to really bring the animal out in me, leaving me to soak in some digital bloodshed with a smile. Dying Light: The Beast is very much that flavor of game.
At this year’s Summer Game Fest, I got 45 minutes of hands-on time with Techland’s latest zombie survival game. I’ve only really experienced the series from a distance until now, so I walked into my demo unsure if its gory combat would hook me. As soon as I beat down an entire room full of monsters with Kyle Crane’s beastly new powers, I felt like I had found the safe outlet for my repressed rage that I’ve really needed all year.
Despite being more of a spinoff, Dying Light: The Beast isn’t so different from Dying Light 2: Stay Human. It takes place in a zombie filled world full of shambling monsters whose flesh can be torn up with barbed wire baseball bats and crowbars. Kyle Crane, the hero of the first Dying Light game, returns here in a revenge story as he tracks down the Baron, a villain who performed some kind of horrible experiment on Crane. That kicks off a quest for blood that features all of Dying Light’s signature features, from rooftop parkour to deadly dropkicks.
The one slight departure from Dying Light 2 is that The Beast leans more into survival horror territory this time. When the sun is out, I can easy get around sporadic patches of zombies who are easily felled by a few good bat bonks or fooled with a decoy grenade. The earliest part of my demo as me treating them like punching bags as I hack through their flesh, skin and blood flying everywhere. That changes when night falls and far more dangerous creatures fill up the streets. I need to go into stealth mode to survive, scrambling up abandoned train cars and hiding in thick forests to avoid getting chased down and beaten to death. Those are the rare moments where I feel powerless. Any other time? I’m the one in control.
Techland goes to great lengths here to make sure that every one of Crane’s weapons just feels morbidly satisfying to use. When I get a bow midway through my demo, I take pleasure in lining up headshots that take out wandering guards with laser precision. Shortly after that, I drop into a dark basement and get to blow through corridors full of zombies with a tremendously powerful shotgun. Even my dropkick is a weapon of mass destruction, sending weak zombies flying. Everything just hits.
That idea gets taken to the next level here thanks to Kyle Crane’s new trick. Due to the experiments inflicted upon him, Crane can now activate beast mode when building up enough power. When activated, it essentially turns him into an unstoppable killing machine for a brief moment. I first get to use it when I fix a fuse box in a basement and find myself trapped in a room with a dozen zombies. I unleash my inner animal, throwing out rapid punches without my stamina bar draining. Seconds later, the undead are back on the floor. It happens in an instant and I’m almost left panting when it’s done. It’s absolutely thrilling.
Everything comes together in the demo’s final boss fight, as I need to take down a hulking flesh monster in a junkyard filled with abandoned cars. I unload every bullet I have into it while dodging away from its charging attacks at the last second. I get to use another lethal tool there: a flamethrower that chars its skin until it looks like a well-done steak. It gets desperate in its second phase, grabbing hold of a shambling zombie and tossing it at me. I dodge, get some final shots in, and eventually tear my foes head clean off. It feels like I’ve just watched a battle between lions in the jungle, and I’m the one left with blood in my jaws.
If bloodshed isn’t your thing, there’s a lot more to The Beast than its sheer brutality. I’m especially impressed by the environmental design here, a parkour playground that sends me running around densely detailed rooftops. One puzzle segment has me climbing my way up an abandoned water tower, pushing me to observe the intricate design to find loose pipes I can mantle up with the right timing. It all makes for a world full of pathways that feel like they exist naturally in the world, rather than heavily signposted platforming gauntlets.
I’m sure I’ll appreciate that even more in the final game, but I mostly look forward to swinging that baseball bat again and watching it cave in a zombie’s face. It’s grotesque, but I can be grotesque when a game is this good at turning me into a depraved little monster.
Dying Light: The Beast launches on August 22 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.