Technologies

OnePlus 11 Review: It Works Hard to Earn Its Flagship Title

We reviewed the OnePlus 11 over three weeks. In our tests, the new flagship was powerful, but not perfect.

The OnePlus 11 is the company’s first true flagship to launch in 2023 and it offers plenty to get excited about. From its slick refreshed design, to its hyper-powerful processor and fast charging skills, this phone works hard to earn its flagship title.

But it’s not a massive overhaul from last year’s already excellent OnePlus 10 Pro. It’s similar in design, it’s got a hefty (arguably redundant) boost in power and the new camera setup, while good, isn’t a big leap forward. If you were hoping to see a radical new OnePlus phone, you may be disappointed. Owners of recent OnePlus devices shouldn’t consider upgrading.

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OnePlus 11

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Incredible performance for gaming
Slick, refreshed design
Hyper-fast charging
Five years of security support

Don’t Like

Cameras are good but not great
Better waterproofing on rivals

Price is certainly on its side. The $699 OnePlus 11 base model ( 729 or roughly AU$1,270) comes with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Even the higher-end review model I tested, with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, will only set you back $799 ( 799), undercutting its rivals by a decent chunk. The phone’s biggest competition comes from the superb Google Pixel 7 Pro, which at $899 isn’t a big step up in cost (it’s $999 for the equivalent 256GB model, although there’s no boost in power with the extra storage here).

The Pixel 7 Pro was one of our favorite phones of 2022, earning a coveted CNET Editors’ Choice award when it launched in October thanks to its superb cameras, slick interface and attractive design. It’s an amazing phone, and one of my favorite ways to experience Android 13.

Where the OnePlus 11 excels is in its raw power, offering blistering speeds for gaming and heavy multitasking. It charges quicker than Google’s phones, too. The Pixel’s Tensor G2 processor isn’t built for straight-line speed, but still handles anything you’ll find in the Play Store. The Pixel’s pure Android 13 software is clutter-free, and the cameras generally perform better — especially with the addition of the 5x optical zoom lens, which the OnePlus lacks.

Then there’s the new Samsung Galaxy S23, which starts at $800 and comes with a 6.1-inch display, a triple-camera setup, 8GB of RAM and the latest Qualcomm 8 Gen 2 processor. It’s the same chip you’ll find in the OnePlus 11, though it’s been customized for Samsung. With the S23 range going on sale on Feb. 17, we’ll have to wait and see how the new Samsung and OnePlus’ phones stack up against each other.

OnePlus 11: A refreshed design, now with added waterproofing

OnePlus’ flagship has arrived in 2023 with a fresh look, swapping out the square camera unit of the 10 Pro for a circular one, fringed with metal that curves gracefully to meet the edge of the phone. My review model’s green tone looks both stylish and smart, while the curving glass on both the front and back makes it satisfying to hold.

I love the phone’s look. It manages to appear different from its predecessors, while still looking familiar enough to feel part of the same family. The glass is toughened Gorilla Glass, so don’t worry too much about shattering it. The new phone one-ups the 10 Pro by coming with an IP64 rating for protection against water. The lack of waterproofing on most versions of the 10 Pro was annoying as it’s something we’ve come to expect on all flagships. So, it’s good to see more official protection here.

That said, IP64 only offers mild protection against water splashes while rivals — including the Pixel 7 Pro, iPhone 14 range and Galaxy S23 range — all have IP68 ratings which protect them from actual submersion in water for at least 30 minutes. IP64 is better than nothing though and will certainly help keep your phone safe when you take calls in the rain.

At 6.7 inches, the display is sizable enough to do justice to mobile games, while its maximum 3,216×1,440-pixel resolution makes everything look nice and crisp (you can opt for a lower resolution to help eke out the battery life). It’s a SuperAMOLED panel that supports Dolby Vision HDR and HDR 10 Plus, meaning it’s bright, bold and capable of properly showing off compatible HDR content.

Its adaptive frame rate can shoot up to 120Hz to provide a smooth experience for high-intensity tasks like gaming, but can dynamically drop to only 1Hz to save power for less demanding tasks like web browsing or showing the always-on display.

There’s an in-display fingerprint scanner, which works well. Longtime OnePlus fans will be pleased to see the alert slider on the right of the phone, which lets you instantly set the phone to silent or vibrate. The slider was notably absent on last year’s OnePlus 10T.

OnePlus 11: Potent power

Powering the phone is the aforementioned Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, backed up by a meaty 16GB of RAM (on my review model). It’s a potent chip that put in some seriously impressive scores on our suite of benchmark tests, landing it comfortably among the most powerful phones around.

Benchmarks don’t mean everything, of course, but rest assured that this phone will handle anything you care to throw at it. Its graphics performance is particularly strong. Demanding games like Genshin Impact, PUBG Mobile and Asphalt 9: Legends (all at max resolution) displayed at consistently high frame rates for smooth gameplay.

OnePlus touts the phone’s «optimized RAM allocation,» «hardware-accelerated ray tracing» in games and «best in class» lighting and illumination effects, which is all well and good, but there aren’t any games available on Android yet that support things like ray tracing. It’s like having a car capable of driving on MagLev tracks — amazing technology, sure, but no way of actually putting it to use just yet.

In the real world, all that power means the phone is swift to use. Simply navigating around the Android interface is fast, smooth and free of the lag or stutters that might signal poorly configured hardware. There’s little that can slow it down. It handled video streaming and photo editing perfectly well.

That swift experience is helped by the phone’s Oxygen 13 OS software. Based on Android 13, Oxygen OS is a lightweight Android skin with a clean look that’s easy to use. I liked it straight out-of-the-box, but you can customize the system fonts and the always-on display to give it a more personal touch.

OnePlus extended its support period to four years for Android updates and an additional fifth year for security updates. That’s the longest the company has ever supported a phone for and means that the OnePlus 11 will still be safe to use five years from now.

OnePlus 11: Cameras that could do better

There are three main cameras on the back of the OnePlus 11; a 50-megapixel main camera with an f/1.8 lens and optical image stabilization, a 48-megapixel ultra-wide camera with close focusing macro capabilities and a 32-megapixel portrait camera with a 2x optical zoom. It’s a fairly predictable triple-camera setup, but that portrait camera disappoints me.

That 2x zoom is a step down from the 3.3x zoom seen on the OnePlus 10 Pro and a big step down from the 5x telephoto zoom on the Pixel 7 Pro. Zoom skills might not seem like the most important feature, but if you want to take great images in any environment, a powerful zoom can be an invaluable tool.

Instead of using a wide lens and simply capturing everything in front of you in one image, a long zoom lens lets you find more interesting compositions within those scenes by cropping out distracting road signs, cars or crowds of people. A telephoto lens is typically part of any professional photographer’s kit bag (including my own) and I absolutely love using the zoom on the Pixel 7 Pro — and the whopping 10x optical zoom on the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. Even the 3x on the iPhone 14 Pro gives me more room to work with.

Not having a proper telephoto lens on the OnePlus 11 feels like I have to make compromises in my photography that I wouldn’t with other phones. It’s not as fully rounded of a photography package as a result.

OnePlus has again partnered with iconic camera maker Hasselblad, which has apparently calibrated the camera for better colors. However, I’m not sure it’s doing either company much good as the results are hit-and-miss. While some shots look true-to-life, with punchy colors and pleasing contrast, others look oversaturated, with heavy-handed HDR processing that lifts shadows and tones down highlights to an unrealistic degree.

Taken with the main camera, this image above is beautifully exposed, with warm colors and plenty of detail.

This shot above of a ruined cottage deep in the forest is vibrant and pin-sharp. It’s a great snap all-round.

The close-up shot above is absolutely packed with detail and the colors look spot-on. Nice work, OnePlus.

Vibrant blue sky, lovely detail on the building to the left and a lovely flash of color from the rainbow. The phone has captured this scene above well.

This scene doesn’t impress me though. The phone’s software has really gone hard on the HDR processing, lifting the shadows here to such an extent that the shot above looks unrealistic.

Taken on the iPhone 14 Pro, this comparison image above is darker, but the deeper shadows against that bright blue sky are much more realistic and this shot looks much more natural as a result.

The OnePlus 11’s main camera has again lifted the shadows quite a lot in the snap above. The sky has more of a teal tone to it, which doesn’t reflect reality.

The Pixel 7 Pro’s shot above has a deeper contrast and more natural color tones both on the buildings and in the sky.

Switching to the ultrawide camera, the OnePlus 11’s heavy-handed auto HDR resulted in the image above where the sky looks almost fake against the buildings. There’s also a noticeable color shift between the OnePlus 11’s main camera and ultrawide — a detail I’d noticed on the OnePlus 10 Pro, too.

By not reducing the brightness in the sky to the same extent, the Pixel 7 Pro’s shot above looks more authentic.

Using the macro mode on the ultrawide lens, the OnePlus 11 has delivered a great close-up shot above. I love the rich, vibrant green tones.

By comparison, the iPhone 14 Pro’s macro mode has produced the shot above where the green tones are quite washed out and yellow-ish. I don’t like it as much.

The OnePlus 11 Pro lacks the zoom prowess of some of its competitors, but its 2x lens does allow for decent portrait shots. The colors in the image above are a little cold, and there’s not a ton of detail on my face. But the blur effect is nice.

The iPhone 14 Pro’s 3x portrait mode has resulted in a closer-up portrait (it was shot from the same position), and I think there’s better background blur (known as bokeh) here. The details on my face are sharper too, and although the color tones give a warmer look to the image above. It’s a strong yellow effect that I don’t like any more than the cold look of the OnePlus 11’s shot.

There’s no question, though, that I’d miss having a larger zoom. Above is an image from the 2x zoom lens on the OnePlus 11.

The 5x optical zoom of the Pixel 7 Pro lets you get creative zoomed-in shots, like above, that are out of reach for the OnePlus.

As part of the Hasselblad partnership, the phone comes with a variety of color presets created by Hasselblad ‘Master’ photographers. Take a look above. I don’t really like them and would much prefer to simply edit images my own way using any of the very good photo editing apps on the Google Play store.

At night the camera performs very well however. I was impressed at the brightness it was able to achieve, delivering brighter images (see above) than even the iPhone 14 Pro, albeit with less detail.

The iPhone 14 Pro’s night mode shot above has a touch more detail on some of the distant buildings, but it’s not as bright as the shot from the OnePlus.

It’s brighter than night mode shots from the Pixel 7 Pro, too. See above.

It’ll shoot video at up to 8K resolution, but its standard 4K footage will be plenty for most, offering HDR footage that helps keep bright skies under control. Colors look good in videos and while the optical image stabilization helps smooth out shaky hands, it can result in upright objects in your footage (trees, for example) appearing wobbly as the sensor tries to correct the movement. Check out the video below for some clips recorded on the OnePlus 11.

The camera can take some great shots overall. If photography isn’t a huge focus for you, and you just want crisp, vibrant shots of your friends or your kids at the beach then you’ll be well served by the OnePlus 11 — particularly if you like taking photos at night. If you’re looking for a more well-rounded photography experience then look toward the Pixel 7 Pro.

OnePlus 11: Solid battery and fast charging

The phone runs on a 5,000mAh battery that’s capable of getting you through a full day of use, as long as you’re reasonably careful in how you use it. With the display set to its maximum 3,216×1,440-pixel resolution, at 120Hz refresh rate and with screen brightness on max, the battery dropped from full to 92% remaining after 1 hour of streaming a YouTube video. After the second hour it had dropped to only 85% remaining, which isn’t a great performance.

With the resolution dropped to 2,412×1,080 pixels and the refresh rate at a maximum of 60Hz, it didn’t even drop below 100% after an hour of YouTube streaming and only dropped to 95% after a second hour — not bad at all. But 30 minutes of gaming in Genshin Impact with all settings on max comfortably knocked 10% off the battery.

With more conservative settings you won’t need to worry too much about your phone dropping dead halfway through the afternoon, and you should still have plenty of juice remaining when you put it on charge at night. Demanding gamers can ramp up the settings when you want to enjoy every last detail, but make sure you’ve got your charger nearby.

Thankfully, even if you do drain the battery with gaming or YouTube streaming, getting the juice back in is a speedy process. The phone supports 100-watt fast charging in the UK (80W in the US) which will fill the battery from empty in only 25 minutes — or 27 minutes on the 80W model. That’s quicker than the 1 to 2 hours you can expect a full recharge of the Pixel 7 Pro to take.

OnePlus 11: Should you buy it?

If you’re looking for a high-performance phone to tackle gaming, video streaming and all of life’s essentials, the OnePlus 11 is an excellent phone to consider. It’s got power enough to tackle anything in the Google Play store, it looks great and its fast-charging means that battery life isn’t an issue. The five years of security support is a nice bonus, too.

And while the camera setup is far from the best around, it’s perfectly capable of taking shots of your kids on holiday you’ll be excited to share with your wider family and friends.

But it’s the price that stands out here, being one of the cheapest flagships you can buy, undercutting both the Pixel 7 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S23. If photography isn’t your top priority but you do want ultimate performance for gaming on the go, the OnePlus 11 is certainly worth your time.

How we test phones

Every phone tested by CNET’s reviews team is actually used in the real world. We test a phone’s features, play games and take photos. We examine the display to see if it’s bright, sharp and vibrant. We analyze the design and build to see how it is to hold and whether it has an IP-rating for water resistance. We push the processor’s performance to the extremes using both standardized benchmark tools like GeekBench and 3DMark, along with our own anecdotal observations navigating the interface, recording high-resolution videos and playing graphically intense games at high refresh rates.

All the cameras are tested in a variety of conditions from bright sunlight to dark indoor scenes. We try out special features like night mode and portrait mode and compare our findings against similarly priced competing phones. We also check out the battery life by using it daily as well as running a series of battery drain tests.

Technologies

Starlink Got Faster In the Past Two Years. It’s Still Not Regularly Meeting Broadband Speeds

Technologies

Alaska Airlines Flights Resume After IT Outage. What to Do if You Were Affected

The outage affected Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air flights for several hours on Sunday.

Alaska Airlines paused its operations for several hours late on July 20 due to what the company called, «a significant IT outage» that affected its operations.

About three hours later, flights resumed and the company posted on X: «Alaska Airlines has resolved its earlier IT outage and has resumed operations. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, and encourage guests to check your flight status before heading to the airport.»

The delays affected Alaska Air and Horizon Air flights at airports including Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where about 49 flights were canceled and 43 were delayed as of the moving of July 21, according to a local report.

In an email to CNET, Alaska Air gave more details about what caused the outage on Sunday. «A critical piece of multi-redundant hardware at our data centers, manufactured by a third-party, experienced an unexpected failure,» the company said in an email.

«When that happened, it impacted several of our key systems that enable us to run various operations, necessitating the implementation of a ground stop to keep aircraft in position. The safety of our flights was never compromised,» Alaska Air said. «We are currently working with our vendor to replace the hardware equipment at the data center.»

The company added the outages were not related to a cybersecurity incident that affected Hawaiian Airlines in June.

In total, more than 150 flights were canceled, including 64 cancelations on Monday. «Additional flight disruptions are likely as we reposition aircraft and crews throughout our network,» the company said.

What customers can do

If you were or continue to be impacted by the disruption, you’re probably wondering what to do next.

«We appreciate the patience of our guests whose travel plans have been disrupted,» said the airline. «We’re working to get them to their destinations as quickly as we can. Before heading to the airport, we encourage flyers to check their flight status.»

Last year, rules changed on what customers are entitled to when flights are canceled or delayed. Although airlines have tried to roll back those rules under a new presidential administration, they’re still in place.

Those changes to compensation called for automatic, prompt refunds for canceled or significantly delayed flights without requiring customers to jump through excessive hoops to get compensation. The determination for a refund often depends on whether a cancelation resulted in a wait time of three or more hours.

According to the Department of Transportation’s Airline Cancelation Delay Dashboard, Alaska Airlines has some of the more flexible customer policies regarding delays and cancelations,

Alaska’s customer service line is at 1-800-252-7522. They also offer a Help Center web page that includes an AI-powered chatbot called Ask Alaska.

Technologies

Dying Light: The Beast Hands-On: Brutal Survival in a Zombie-Ridden Forest

I got to preview Techland’s next entry in its Dying Light series, which brings the parkour zombie horror to the great outdoors.

Two hours into my gaming preview of Dying Light: The Beast, I was jogging through a beautiful woodland dotted with cabins and park benches — a spot that would make for a lovely vacation, if not for the hordes of zombies wandering all over. Despite stealthily creeping around, I was spotted by a large group and frantically fended them off with a shovel, growing more desperate and overwhelmed — until my rage meter maxed out and I became a beast. I roared and tore the zombies limb from limb until the red haze lifted from my vision, leaving me human again to continue my journey through the park.

At a preview event in Los Angeles, California, Polish studio Techland set me and other media members up to play the first few hours of Dying Light: The Beast. It’s the next entry in the beloved Dying Light series of games, which combine first-person parkour movement with zombie horror action. After the long gap between the 2015 original and its 2022 sequel Dying Light 2 Stay Human, the third game is coming out just three years later, with a release date of August 22, 2025. Dying Light: The Beast is a course correction that brings back more of the horror and vulnerability that made the first game so successful, Dying Light franchise director Tymon Smektala told me.

«Wtih Dying Light: The Beast, we want to recapture that fear, that horror, that tension that the first game had,» Smektala said. «Maybe it was beginner’s luck, but we actually managed to capture the atmosphere and the feel and the balance just right.»

Part of that is bringing back the first game’s protagonist, Kyle Crane, who has been locked away for a decade while the zombie plague he once tried to contain rampages across the world. After escaping an underground lab, Crane quickly discovers that years of experiments done on him have left him with bursts of strength and bloodlust, which comes in handy when he’s beset by mutated enemies — he becomes a monster to fight monsters.

Prior Dying Light games let players explore open-world cities with free-roaming parkour movement, leaping over railings and climbing up fire escapes. The Beast expands this to a seemingly less suitable environment: Castor Woods, a sprawling forest that feels like a national park, where players have to thread their way through woodlands, rivers, mountain paths and other terrain. Techland challenged itself to see if the series’ parkour movement to evade zombies rather than fight them all would work in different biomes, Smektala said — and he believes they’ve cooked up something unique that pushes players to change how they move and deal with the living and the dead.

«So you could say, ‘okay, maybe I can hide behind trees and try to use how dense the forest is to lose the chase,’ but on the other hand, you never really know what you can find behind that tree, what hides in those forests,» Smektala said. «We like the fact that there are places on the map where you basically feel weaker, where you feel more fragile.»

Swinging between fragility and «Beast Mode» revenge

In my handful of hours with The Beast, I frequently felt that sense of vulnerability, confidently taking on a couple zombies, only to get cornered by half a dozen more shambling up behind me. Combat feels slow and weighty, relying on timing to avoid exhausting myself. I had to circle enemies carefully and slip between their attacks as my melee swings gradually took them down one by one — with guns and bullets scarce, at least early on.

But when I’d hit (or had been hit) enough to fill my rage meter, the game’s unique mechanic, Beast Mode, activated turning me into a monstrous force of nature, battering zombies and ripping off their limbs (if not worse — the game’s brutal dismemberment isn’t for the weak-stomached). Beast Mode is a deliberate counterbalance for handling hordes and turning the tides in combat — partially inspired, surprisingly, by the classic game Pac-Man.

«Pac-Man, if you think about it, is actually also a survival game where you are chased by ghosts. You are super weak, just one touch and you die — but there are those power pellet moments, you grab them and suddenly you can start chasing ghosts,» Smektala said, comparing that «cathartic overpower state» to the new Dying Light’s Beast Mode.

To make sure these moments land when they’re most needed, Techland has made under-the-hood tweaks, including filling the Beast Mode meter faster when the player is surrounded by zombies or when being chased by an undead horde at night (more on that later). The game keeps these mechanics hidden, Smektala explained, to prevent players from gaming the system. They’re designed to heighten the thrill of pursuit and reversal — fine-tuned through extensive player testing.

«You really feel like these are your last moments, the zombies are coming at you … and they’re just about to grab you and suddenly you see that meter has been charged and then you can turn 180 and get that moment of resetting the situation,» Smektala said.

Beast Mode isn’t the only escape route. Unlike the second Dying Light game where players can paraglide between buildings, The Beast’s national park areas are too broad for aerial traversal — but I could jump into abandoned vehicles and drive away from sticky situations… at least until the gas ran out. (You can refuel at select spots and unlock skills to burn less fuel.)

Whether you’re smashing zombies with improvised weapons, tearing through them in Beast Mode or mowing them down in a car, the game’s brutality is unmistakable — and it’s been dialed up since the last Dying Light, thanks to further optimizations to Techland’s in-house C-Engine. For The Beast, the studio has doubled the number of possible wounds zombies can take, so whether you strike the head or midsection, you’ll see injuries that match.

Techland also went all-in on realistic blood spatters rendered by C-Engine: Artists ordered liters of fake blood and spent days creating real-life splats to digitize for the game.

«So if you enter a room [in the game] and you see blood dragging on the floor or a blood splat on the wall, actually there was an actor in our mock-up studio that was dragging his body on the floor to leave that mark, and then we just scanned it and put it into the game,» Smektala said.

Surviving the least relaxing vacation of your life

My preview started an hour or so into Dying Light: The Beast, after Crane escapes from the underground facility. He’s woken up in the territory of The Baron, a sadistic noble ruling over the national park-like territory in an unspecified European country — one inspired by Swiss landscapes, a Techland developer told me. His small army of soldiers roam the land doing his bidding, adding another hazard standing between Crane and escape, but they’re far from the worst things in this strange land.

After escaping the facility, Crane wanders down a mountain trail to find a monastery that he clears of zombies to turn into a safe house. But his final task is to face a mutated monstrosity with a gas mask — the game’s first boss. After putting it in the ground, a scientist named Olivia introduces herself and pledges to help Crane. She takes a blood sample from the creature and convinces Crane to administer it to himself, granting him the upgrade to his Beast Mode.

These monsters, which Olivia calls Chimeras, are the faulty results of The Baron’s experiments. They roam the woodlands and she urges Crane to hunt them down to grow stronger so he can defeat the psychopathic noble. Each new kill grants a point in the Beast Mode skill tree, unlocking bonuses and new abilities like a ground slam.

After that, the game opens up, allowing players to alternate between following the main story or side quests and engaging with the game’s open world — exploring territory, gathering supplies and weapons and establishing safe houses to rest and recover. The safe houses are key to waiting out the dangerous dark hours, as the day-night cycle from Dying Light’s earlier games returns. When the sun sets, powerful nocturnal ghouls called Volatiles emerge. If alerted, they’ll unleash zombie hordes in a chase sequence that only ends with clever evasion — or reaching a safe house.

While players can simply sleep through the night, certain treasure-laden zombies only emerge after twilight, and I imagine other incentives or missions will lure players out of their safe houses.

Nighttime also becomes more manageable as players get stronger, either through acquiring equipment or leveling up — killing enemies will give Crane a bit of experience, while finishing story missions will award a lot. Every level grants a skill point to improve Crane’s stealth, parkour or combat abilities, which are important to gather to handle some of the game’s tougher enemies, from zombies in combat armor to Chimeras encountered in the wild.

As players explore and fill in the map, they’ll find some areas have level thresholds. I was driving around when I spotted an intriguing building across the river — an abandoned mental hospital likely full of loot — but it was 8 or 9 levels above me, and I didn’t want to risk it. You can offset level gaps with gear: Weapons are scattered throughout the world, with rarer loot hidden in riskier spots — like the military convoy I cleared out to score higher-level equipment.

Other weapons must be crafted, and there’s a cornucopia of materials scattered around, some that you’ll pick up off the ground and others scavenged from defeated zombies. You’ll need blueprints to make key weapons — I found one for a bow in the starting monastery safe house — and yes, once I built it, I needed to craft the arrows, too.

Becoming your own Beast

With a sprawling map to explore, crafting and skill trees, Dying Light: The Beast felt like a familiar yet fun mashup of Far Cry and Mirror’s Edge, all set in lovely woodland scenery (as an outdoorsy person, I’m partial to the natural setting, though there is a town in the game to provide some urban parkouring). Combined with the day-night cycle and a story pitting survivors against the vicious Baron, open-world game fans have a lot to chew on in Techland’s upcoming game — especially those who want a bit more of a challenge in their combat.

To ameliorate that difficulty, The Beast offers co-op mode, letting players team up with up to three friends. But teaming up won’t make the game instantly easier, as Techland made sure to adjust the game’s challenge accordingly, from spawning more zombies and making them stronger to giving them area-of-attack swipes to hurt multiple teammates. The Chimeras will be especially beefed up — so much so that players may not be able to take them down solo when playing with others in a game session.

A couple hours into the preview, after taking down a pair of hulking Chimeras, I was tasked with chasing down a third in a swamp. This fiend was different — a spindly blood-soaked ghoul that reminded me of the fearsome Witch special enemy from the Left 4 Dead games. She dashed in and out of the foggy marshland, and I struggled to track her and land hits while dodging her own — barely eking out a win thanks to some clutch Beast Mode transformations.

When I next took on a hefty Chimera with a concrete slab for an arm that I encountered after delving into the train tunnels, it became clear Techland had designed each of these fights as its own unique arena brawl. I was down in the depths, hunting an especially lethal monster that had been terrorizing survivors, and that Chimera wasn’t it. After chasing down the culprit, I pulled back the hood to reveal a familiar face — Crane’s own. Another failed experiment, maybe? As my preview ended, I was left wondering what The Beast truly referred to.

As I stepped away, I could feel the game’s open-world hooks sinking in — I just wanted to craft one more weapon, secure one more safe house, hunt one more Chimera and push past the edge of my map.

Dying Light: The Beast launches on August 22 for PC, PS5 and Xbox One X/S.