I Am Your Beast is a first-person shooter focussed solely on fast-paced slaughter. Sure, you can sluggishly flail around with no clear plan like an Australian breakdancer at the Olympics and potentially still scrape your way through to each bite-sized level’s exit intact, but nailing the best completion time possible requires repeat runs to gradually carve out the most efficient killing paths. What ensues is a brisk, three-hour-long burst of cel-shaded bullets and blood spray that’s backed up by silky smooth controls and an addictive, skull-rattling soundtrack, with the only real downside being that its insatiable need for speed leaves little room for much in the way of interesting plot amidst the relentless volley of violent headshots.
The small amount of story there is channels the likes of Stallone’s First Blood and Schwarzenegger’s Commando: I Am Your Beast’s protagonist, Alphonse Harding, is summoned by his old military boss for one last job. When he stubbornly refuses to accept it, a chain of mini-sandbox shootouts is set off in which the hunted Harding must become the hunter against an increasingly agitated guerilla army. There are no real cutscenes to speak of – instead, each high-speed skirmish is bookended by tense radio chats that are presented via big blocks of text on screen, like a Metal Gear Solid Codec conversation that’s had the character faces cropped out.
These overly simple story moments at least gave me a few seconds to catch my breath and slow my hurried heart rate after a spree, but I can’t say that I felt particularly invested in the characters involved in the final showdown. That’s likely a result of their primitive presentation more than anything else – and that made its story’s conclusion feel a little anticlimactic.
It’s a good thing, then, that the 27 comic book-styled killing sprees that play out in between each placeholder piece of plot kept me on such a consistent high. I Am Your Beast’s frenzied form of fighting has no time for stopping to collect ammo or slowing down for stealth, and as a result there’s never a dull moment. Instead of painstakingly loading shells into your empty shotgun you just offload it by hurling it at an enemy to knock them onto their haunches before executing them with their own pistol, which they helpfully throw in your direction when hit (not unlike the enemies in Superhot). Rather than carefully setting a bear trap in a sentry’s path and lying in wait for it to trigger, you just instantly snap it shut around their skull and hurry along to your next kill. Weapons are quickly collected, used up, and tossed away as you scramble to make the most of every single-use assault rifle and combat knife you can get your hands on in each snow-swept hinterland hunting ground.
all about brutally blasting heads at blurry, breakneck speed. It’s all about brutally blasting heads at blurry, breakneck speed, and its reliably snappy set of controls make it a consistent pleasure to do so. The constantly sprinting Harding can scurry up and along rope lines before dropping down to crush a guard’s skull and catch their machine gun before their newly shortened corpse hits the ground. He can smoothly slide under fallen trees to break the line of sight for enemy snipers, or coolly shoot hornet’s nests off high branches to fall onto groups of guards and kill them in clusters to both save time and conserve ammo. Aside from the rarest of occasions in which I found myself stuck on a piece of scenery, I Am Your Beast remained mostly footloose and friction-free as I ran repeat laps through its brutal gauntlets attempting to shave seconds off my best times.
Although some of its short list of shootouts do feel a bit samey, they do introduce enough wrinkles into the mix to keep the bulk of its firefights feeling fresh for at least long enough for its short campaign to run its course. In one level Harding is injured and your health is gradually ebbing away, and so I was forced to blast the bad guys but also keep an eye out for medkits and medicinal plants along my path in order to briefly stem the bleeding, adding a heightened sense of urgency to my escape. In another, I had to sabotage a spread-out series of satellite dishes against the impending threat of an enemy airstrike, with each dish destroyed delaying the hail of hellfire by a handful of seconds at a time. Nothing puts a rocket up your backside like the threat of copping a literal rocket up your backside.
I Am Your Beast certainly stacks the odds against you over the course of its campaign, but it always feels achievable as long as you make the most of every available tool. In one incredibly fierce mid-game scrap I had to survive against overwhelming hordes of heavily armoured guards, dead-eyed snipers, and fatal bursts of high-caliber machine gun rounds from a swooping attack helicopter above. I probably would have gone from beast mode to rage quit after my first few repeated deaths if it wasn’t for the snappy instant level restarts that dropped me straight back into the action with no loading screens. However, as I began to memorise the placements of medkits and munitions and carefully prioritised my targets, I was soon able to survive and thrive throughout the encounter; my transformation from rambling fool to Rambo-like killing tool felt enormously satisfying when I finally blazed a killing trail from one end of the arena to the other.
My transformation from rambling fool to Rambo-like killing tool felt enormously satisfying. What I did find slightly unreasonable, however, was I Am Your Beast’s strict requirement to reach an S-tier ranking on one of its first 20 levels in order to unlock the last few stages of its campaign. It might not sound particularly intimidating, but while the difference between an A ranking and an S ranking may be only a matter of seconds, it took me dozens of repeat runs through its first and relatively easiest level in order to whittle down my trigger-happy tightrope walk and eventually grab the elusive S required in order to be able to complete the story – which seemed needlessly grindy. S ranks are supposed to be badges of honor for going above and beyond and mastering a game, not a requirement to progress!
It makes far more sense that further S-tier rankings are required to unlock I Am Your Beast’s dozen bonus levels that add another couple of hours to the package, in addition to completing the two bonus objectives found in each story level – some of which are more compelling than others. It’s certainly a thrill to clear an area strictly with only combat knife kills, for example, or to wipe out a certain number of soldiers using explosive barrels (which are certainly having a moment, between Star Wars Outlaws and Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 both being densely packed with them), but being tasked to power on a given number of laptops found around a level made me feel less like a bloodthirsty hellhound and more like someone from the IT help desk. Worse still, there’s seemingly no way to view these level-specific bonus objectives at a glance while you’re browsing through the list of levels. They’re only revealed to you once each level starts, which has meant I’ve had to hop in and quit out of each level looking for the objectives that seemed most interesting or attainable.
All that said, even though I Am Your Beast is a stimulating and replayable run-and-gun sprint overall, it does come up short in certain areas that prevent this Beast from becoming one of the best in its specific niche genre. The similarly lightning-fast first-person shooter Anger Foot which came out just a couple of months ago has a much more diverse roster of enemy types compared with I Am Your Beast’s army of indistinguishable grunts, for example. Equally, there’s a lack of a signature gameplay feature to set it apart from the rest of the pack – it’s basically Superhot if you stripped away the ingenious slow-motion shooting idea where time only progresses when you’re moving. Still a breathtaking blast to play, but not likely to stay in the memory for as long.
