Dying Light - Hellraid (DLC)

Dying Light - Hellraid is a DLC mode that essentially smuggles a different game inside Dying Light's engine. Forget the Harran rooftops and infected hordes for a moment: here you are channeling a mysterious arcade cabinet that transports Crane into a grim, torch-lit dungeon full of skeletons, demons, and medieval weaponry. It is a sword-and-sorcery side story stitched onto a first-person parkour survival game, and whether that seam holds depends entirely on what you are hoping to get out of it. The combat is the headline. Hellraid introduces a dedicated set of fantasy weapons - longswords, axes, maces, staffs - each with their own feel and upgrade paths separate from the base game's crafting system. Blocking, parrying, and stamina management matter more here than in vanilla Dying Light, which skews toward bludgeoning zombie skulls with improvised tools. There is a light RPG layer on top: you earn souls-adjacent currency from kills and spend it on character progression tied to Warrior, Mage, and Rogue skill trees. None of these trees are deep enough to satisfy someone coming in expecting full build variety, but they do create meaningful early choices about playstyle, and the Mage path in particular makes the dungeon feel genuinely different on a second run. The dungeon itself is the DLC's biggest limitation. Hellraid launched as an ongoing live mode with Techland promising new content updates, and for a while those updates arrived - new maps, timed events, leaderboard challenges. The atmosphere inside those stone corridors is genuinely good: flickering torchlight, enemy placement that punishes button-mashing, environmental storytelling that hints at a larger dark-fantasy lore. But the map rotation is small. After a few hours the layouts become familiar to the point of tedium, and without the open-world freedom that makes the base Dying Light tick, the repetition lands harder. If you came hoping for a proper dungeon-crawler narrative with branching choices and meaningful character writing, you will be disappointed - the story framing is thin, almost perfunctory. Co-op is where Hellraid finds its second wind. Running the dungeon with two to four players smooths out the repetition considerably. Enemy scaling keeps the combat from becoming trivial, and the social dynamic of coordinating melee builds against a demon champion is legitimately fun. Solo play is serviceable but noticeably lonelier than the base game. The mode rewards players who already love Dying Light and want a palette-cleanser between story missions, not those who are hoping Hellraid will justify a Dying Light purchase on its own. As an RPG specialist I will be honest: the writing here is not the reason to play. There are no memorable characters, no choice-driven moments, no dialogue that rewards a second read. What Hellraid does earn is points for mechanical novelty and atmospheric craft on a limited budget. It is a decent fantasy combat sandbox grafted onto a great parkour game, and treated as exactly that - a bonus mode, not a standalone experience - it punches reasonably well.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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