Recent reviews by Stharon

Dying Light: The Beast began as DLC for Dying Light 2 but evolved into one of Techland’s best games yet. Fans of the franchise should absolutely try it. Before diving in, though, please, Techland—remove the double Epic Games pop-up.

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Castor Woods is a diverse, compact region mixing open plains, forests, mountains, industrial zones, and towns. It encourages both parkour and driving to traverse larger areas. Though smaller than DL2’s map, it’s far more personal and atmospheric. Each zone feels unique, and the subtler design choices—like faint white hues instead of garish yellow highlights—create immersion without handholding. Sparse safe zones make death meaningful and exploration tense.
However, buildings often have only one arbitrary entry point, making rooftop exploration repetitive. Auto-opening doors also hurt immersion—missing the satisfying DL1 door-slam animation. The returning binoculars feel mostly redundant since the world’s size makes organic discovery easy. Overall, the map strikes a good balance: compact, dense, and filled with meaningful content instead of DL2’s bloated checklist.

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Parkour combines the best of both predecessors—DL1’s grounded physics with DL2’s fluid moves. Stamina no longer limits running or climbing, restoring fast, continuous flow. Many abilities are available early (thankfully, sliding is default). The grappling hook returns in its improved DL2 form—balanced, not overpowered like in DL1. Swinging from tree to tree is fun, though it would help if swing activation could be toggled rather than held.
The grappling hook’s introduction feels abrupt this time—it’s simply handed to you rather than built into a memorable sequence like DL2’s VNC Tower. Still, movement overall remains excellent, responsive, and satisfying. Hopefully, future updates expand the move set even more.

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Techland successfully recaptures DL1’s physics-based melee combat. While a few interactions (like kicking) still feel animation-driven, enemy reactions and ragdolls are vastly improved. Weapons can now be enhanced to scale with your level—a welcome addition that lets you keep favorites longer, though it turns rags into the rarest and most essential crafting resource.
Crafting largely mirrors DL2’s system, with fun new weapons like flamethrowers and grenade launchers. Melee combat feels weighty, with satisfying gore and dismemberment. “Opportunity” weapons like spears return but appear too rarely to matter.
Guns make a triumphant comeback—pistols to marksman rifles, each with distinct ammo types. Ammo is limited enough to encourage tactical use without removing the thrill of firearms. Human enemies can dodge again but are better balanced, forcing creative tactics or parkour-based attacks. Stealth is effective and often rewarding, giving combat variety and pacing.

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No new infected types appear, but old ones—Biters, Banshees, Chargers—return. Biters now lunge more aggressively, making exploration tense. Many feign death before grabbing you unexpectedly, creating great jump scares in dark interiors.
Nighttime is darker and more dangerous. Chases feel genuinely frightening as Volatiles relentlessly pursue you. Sparse safe zones and long escape routes make every nighttime venture a white-knuckle experience. Unlike DL2, where chases ended too soon, The Beast puts real effort into making them feel tense and difficult.

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Beast Mode is a fantastic addition, though its potential isn’t fully realized. Its unique skill tree is tied to the story, making progression linear and controlled. Early and mid-game, it feels powerful and exhilarating, but by late-game, modded weapons outclass it. It transitions from “instant win” to “temporary buff” status—still useful for stamina recovery and crowd control but not a game-changer.
The Z + X activation combo feels awkward in combat, and the persistent “Beast Mode available” screen effect quickly loses novelty. Despite flaws, the mechanic adds personality and variety, and its inclusion hints at exciting possibilities for future installments.

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Techland deserves real credit for The Beast’s quest design. The side missions are few but meaningful—creative, world-building, and sometimes deep enough to rival main story arcs. Gone are the filler fetch quests and repetitive “kill X” objectives; instead, you get memorable character moments and insights into the infection’s impact and Kyle Crane’s psyche.
The main narrative is refreshingly focused on the infection rather than human faction conflicts. Without spoiling anything, the final act sets up an intriguing continuation for the series.

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Random survivor encounters are worth doing now, often rewarding throwing knives that scale with your level. These knives are invaluable for stealth and crowd control, though crafting limitations are frustrating—you can still only make two at a time, regardless of blueprint upgrades. The same applies to medkits and other items; higher-level blueprints don’t increase crafting output.
Quick-crafting quirks remain irritating: using a lower-tier medkit defaults you to crafting that tier again, forcing menu navigation mid-combat. You also can’t hold the quick-craft button for batch crafting—a feature DL2 had. Similarly, arrows can’t be crafted on the fly, breaking immersion during ranged combat.
Stealth gameplay, while satisfying, misses one obvious feature: crouched takedowns. Being forced to stand before finishing off sleeping zombies feels awkward after countless repetitions. On the bright side, driving mechanics are straightforward and effective, offering an alternative traversal method that complements parkour rather than replacing it.

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After 33 hours completing all main and side content, Dying Light: The Beast left a strong impression. Its map is tighter and better crafted, parkour smoother than ever, and combat gratifyingly brutal. While some systems (crafting, Beast Mode progression) could use refinement, the overall experience easily surpasses DL2 in pacing, focus, and atmosphere.
It’s not perfect—there’s still some roughness in polish and UX—but it represents a confident return to what makes Dying Light special. If Techland keeps this direction, the franchise’s future looks bright.

Im a huge fan of the mobility and speed of this game, its extremely satisfying to master and the hardcore mode is an extremely fun and difficult challenge. I cannot recommend this game enough and the soundtrack is something you can listen to for hours

I recommend this game. Its gunplay is phenomenal and I love the movement. If you're a fan of either of those you can enjoy Beyond Citadel without much fuss.

Going more in depth of what this game has to offer I would like to first point out that playing the prequel (The Citadel) is not necessary to enjoy this game, as I find that the sequel improves on almost all aspects of its predecessor.

A new manual reloading, cocking and jamming mechanic makes its debut here. It is insanely satisfying to use once you get the hang of it and adds even more complexity to an already expansive amount of guns at your disposal which you will use to destroy a pretty varied amount of cute anime girls in various ways.
All of the weapons have a role to play and feel very good to shoot and this time a condition mechanic is introduced that makes your weapons more likely to jam the more you use them. Its one of the additions of all time since I could just buy a fresh copy of whatever low durability gun I needed to change due to the insane amount of gold I had (Pro Tip: Do the EX levels as soon as they are available).
One change that is a bit jarring from the previous game is that you can no longer swap freely between weapons of the same ammo and instead you can only equip one version at a time. (Pro Pro tip: be mindful when you set the game to zealot difficulty when playing for the first time, the weapon chest setting will cause you to miss out on weapons at the start)

Speaking of which, the gratuitous level of gore is nothing unusual for such a game, however the lewd aspect is one of the more unique features of Beyond Citadel. Underneath every fully armored enemy is a lovely sprite of an anime girl that is surprisingly susceptible to dismemberment and gore.
Its no secret that the author of this game is very much into guro but hey if thats what it takes to get these high quality sprites and smooth gunplay I cant fault him for following his weird ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up passion.

The story picks up from the previous game after killing The Sleeping God and now we are tasked with killing 7 Trumpeters of the Apocalypse instead of the 7 Angels of the previous game. The rest of the story is something that I recommend seeing for yourself as it is both a bit too confusing and strange for me to ever hope to explain here.
There are way more characters to talk to this time around and I find them all quite charming, I encourage you to enjoy their company at every opportunity,

The enemies are even more varied than before although here I would like to extend my first piece of criticism. Some enemies are nothing more than bullet sponges that dont do much except shoot a few random beams in your direction without requiring much besides just left clicking on their face a for a solid 5 seconds straight. Not to mention that ANNOYING hover sound from one of the enemies that can be heard as if they're playing that ♥♥♥♥ over a loudspeaker system. Not looking forward to their inclusion in any future games.
Other than that the enemies have tons of animations added compared to the last game and getting rid of them feels more satisfying than ever. The human enemies especially have lots of different ways to be unalived which is more than I can say than the floating orb enemies, those I didnt find particularly interesting from neither a design or gameplay standpoint.

The bossfights are pretty interesting because this time you are given a super duper cool weapon for a few encounters and there are a lot more enemies being spawned in big arenas so that helps them differentiate themselves from regular encounters although its still mostly just strafing around the boss and holding left click but the visuals are cool and I liked shooting the big shooter so I am not too bothered about that.

What I am bothered about quite a bit is the performance though. I dont mean to rain on a solo-dev's parade but the amount of frame drops I had during the more hectic sections of the game is not something I can overlook.
I have a mid range PC so while more powerful rig's might not suffer as much as I did I feel like this is a fair warning to give out to those with similar or worse setups. Watch yourself especially around the zombie enemies, those guys would kill my framerate as soon as I killed more than 1 of them at a time.

The levels are improved from the previous game but thats not a high bar to clear. The environment is still mostly just blue walls with huge cubes as arenas. I was a bit shocked that at first we are shown a very tesselated area yet afterwards all the levels are the same flat surface, However the insane amount of movement and freedom to go all over the level does help with traversing the levels quickly.
On another note the game plays very differently in the closed spaces of the first few stages compared to the wide open spaces of the later acts. The beginning is almost tactical whereas the end is strafing around a level where 20 or so goons pepper you with bullets constantly. Its a bit too much in my opinion to have every enemy instantly lock onto you as they sit on their Empire State Building-sized tower and shoot their guns at you as youre going around the level trying to figure out where the storm of bullets is coming from.

There are a few standout levels where you take control of various vehicles which help spice up the gameplay and I feel like if the game leaned a bit more into these it couldve made the game wouldve been even more memorable. So far I feel like the gunplay carries this game a lot and with some more effort in the level design department Im sure it would benefit a lot .

That being said I thoroughly enjoyed my time here and I cant wait to see what more is in store from our eccentric creator.

I have fulfilled my mandate, good luck in fulfilling yours.

More gameplay mechanics, more amazing music, more varied levels, more upgrades, more enemies and more fun. Great sequel

The bot problem seems to be fixed, its a step in the right direction

In a (not surprising) twist it seems that Arrowhead has dropped the ball, again .
I feel like negative reviews are the only way to get the devs to listen at this point.
The tank is pitifully armored, doing any operation above D4 is basically a waste of time, the spawn rates for the Vox Engine are out of control, important information is only accessible through datamining and most balancing is held back by "realism" even though our enemies have no such concerns.
I really hope the devs get their ♥♥♥♥ together soon so I can change this review into a positive one.

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I think the line above makes it quite obvious I enjoy this videogame 👍. The lines below are going to explain why I like it and what I don't like about it. (⌐■_■)
Obs: I've beaten both Lobotomy Corporation 🔬 and Library of Ruina 📕 so I write this review as someone that is familiar with the subject matter. 😎




This was and still remains the main reason why I stick with this game. Its a continued expansion of the Project Moon universe which we were introduced to in the previous two games, this time with the added benefit of a bigger budget thanks to the COOL AND GOOD GACHA SYSTEM™ (extra funds will go towards the anime). At the time of writing Canto 8 is still not out so we have 7️⃣ Cantos to work with.
The first 4 Cantos are a mixed bag with some standout moments here and there, meanwhile the last 3 are, from start to finish, really enjoyable 👌 and the production quality really shows. Maybe in the year 2050 we'll see the game to its conclusion 👴 but I'm sure the wait will be worth it.
There's also nice little ✨Intervallos✨ between each canto with some extra cool characters and events like Walpurgisnacht which is just fanservice on steroids for Lob Corp and LoR players. I find them enjoyable. 👍
The main cast is insanely fun and diverse and I am always excited to see them interact with each other and the world around them. The side characters are also interesting and the voice acting of all of them is on point.




The gameplay is simultaneously very similar to Library of Ruina and completely different from it. Its still a turn based brawler but that's where the similarities end. You now have auto targeting battles🎯, characters with predetermined abilities and passives amongst other things. Don't expect any significant help from the tutorial ❌ since the advice there ranges from surface level color matching 🧩 to utter disinformation campaigns 🗣. After triple digit hours of gameplay I can say that I got the gist of it but I highly recommend watching a tutorial if you're feeling an itch to know more about how the game's system works 🤓.
The good news is that for the first 2-3 Cantos you can basically just press the auto win button for 90% of the fights. Starting from Canto 4 its time to put on your big boy pants 👖 and start leveling up your Identities. Speaking of which...




You have 12 Sinners and they all have different versions of themselves called Identities🆔, these Identities (or ID's) can be rolled for on banners or earned through the battle pass or bought with in-game currency💰.
Now comes the funny part about this game. The GACHA system, the GAMBLING, the MONEY MAKER and the main source of how Limbus makes the company profitable 💵. And honestly is not that bad, if you buy the Battle Pass (15💲 every few months) and play semi regularly you'll have just about most of the ID's in the game.
Unlike in OTHER games you only need one copy of an Identity to unlock their full power and the way to level them up requires 2 very simple and easy to get resources so its a process that's very user friendly 🍟.




Play the game if you liked the previous 2 and if you're a completely new player maybe this game will convince you to dive🤿 deeper in the rest of Project Moon's🌕 list of games. It's free, it's got a good story, the gameplay is good, and the gacha system is player friendly. You got nothing to lose but 900 hours of your time.


Enjoy!

Amazing movement and satisfying gunplay. The game has a lot of secrets to uncover, each more interesting and suprising than the last. The lore hiding underneath the game is compelling and I cannot recommend this enough

Great sequel with lots of polish over the predecessor and a much more satisfying combat

Great horror game with satisfying combat and compelling worldbuilding