I Am Your Beast is a first-person shooter focused solely on rapid-fire carnage. Sure, you can wave your hands around lazily without a clear plan like an Australian breakdancer at the Olympics and still potentially make it to the exit of each bite-sized level intact, but achieving the best possible completion time requires repetition to gradually map out the most effective kill paths. What follows is a fast-paced, three-hour round of cel-shaded bullets and blood splatter, backed by silky-smooth controls and an addictive, skull-shaking soundtrack, whose only real flaw is that its insatiable need for speed leaves little room for an intriguing story amidst the relentless barrage of brutal headshots.
What little story there is harks back to films like Stallone’s First Blood and Schwarzenegger’s Commando: I Am Your Beast . Protagonist Alphonse Harding is called in by his elderly military boss for one last job. When he stubbornly refuses the assignment, a series of mini-sandbox shootouts begin, with Harding forced to become a huntsman against an increasingly agitated guerrilla army. There are no real cutscenes here—instead, each quick skirmish is capped off by tense radio conversations that are presented via enormous blocks of text on the screen, like a Metal Gear Solid Codec conversation with the characters’ faces cut out.
These overly simplistic plot moments gave me at least a few seconds to catch my breath and sluggish my racing heart after the frenzied attack, but I can’t say I felt particularly invested in the characters involved in the final showdown. That’s probably a result of their crude presentation more than anything else—and it made the ending of the story feel a bit anticlimactic.
Hunting in a Winter Wonderland
It’s a good thing then that the 27 comic-book kill streaks that play out between each alternate plot point kept me on such a consistently high note. I Am Your Beast’s frantic combat has no time to stop for ammo or sluggish down to take cover, so there’s never a tedious moment. Instead of laboriously loading shells into an empty shotgun, you simply unload it, throwing it at an enemy to knock them to the ground before killing them with their own pistol, which they helpfully throw at you when you hit them (much like the enemies in Superhot). Instead of carefully placing a bear trap in the path of a sentry and waiting for it to go off, you simply snap it shut around his skull and rush to kill him again. You quickly collect, exploit, and discard weapons, trying to make the most of every disposable assault rifle and combat knife you can get your hands on in every snow-covered hunting ground in the backcountry.
It’s all about brutally smashing heads at a blurry, manic speed, and the reliably agile set of controls makes doing so consistently enjoyable. The constantly sprinting Harding can dash up and along ropes before swooping down to crush a guard’s skull and grab his machine gun before his newly shortened body hits the ground. He can glide smoothly under fallen trees to break the line of sight of enemy snipers, or calmly shoot hornet’s nests from high branches to swoop down on groups of guards and kill them in groups, saving time and ammo. Aside from the rarest of times I got stuck in a spot, I Am Your Beast remained mostly free-form and frictionless as I repeated laps through its brutal gauntlet, trying to shave seconds off my best times.
While some of its tiny list of shootouts feel a bit samey, they introduce enough of a wrinkle into the mix to make most of its shootouts feel fresh, at least long enough for its tiny campaign to play out. In one level, Harding gets wounded and your health gradually wanes, so I was forced to shoot bad guys but also watch out for health packs and healing plants in my path to briefly staunch the bleeding, adding a heightened sense of urgency to my escape. In another, I had to sabotage a scattering of satellite dishes from the approaching threat of an enemy airstrike, with each destroyed dish delaying the barrage of hellfire by a few seconds at a time. Nothing puts a rocket up your ass like the threat of literally getting a rocket up your ass.
The last but not the beast
I Am Your Beast certainly stacks the odds against you throughout the campaign, but it always feels achievable, as long as you make the most of every tool at your disposal. In one incredibly intense fight midway through the game, I had to survive against overwhelming hordes of heavily armored guards, dead-eyed snipers, and deadly bursts of high-caliber machine gun fire from a passing attack helicopter. I probably would have gone from beast mode to furious eject after my first few repeated deaths if it weren’t for the quick, instant level restarts that threw me right back into the action without loading screens. However, once I started memorizing the locations of health and ammo kits and carefully prioritizing targets, I soon found myself surviving and blossoming throughout the fights; my transformation from gibbering fool to Rambo-like killing tool was incredibly satisfying as I finally blazed a trail of death from one end of the arena to the other.
What I found a bit unwise, however, was I Am Your Beast’s strict requirement to achieve an S rank in one of the first 20 levels in order to unlock the final stages of the campaign. This may not sound particularly terrifying, but while the difference between an A and an S rank may be a matter of seconds, it took me dozens of replays of the first and relatively easiest level to sluggish down my ziplining and finally earn the elusive S required to complete the story – which felt needlessly tedious. S ranks are meant to be badges of honour for thinking outside the box and mastering the game, not requirements for progression!
It makes much more sense that there’s a dozen I Am Your Beast bonus levels to unlock, which add another few hours to the package, on top of completing the two bonus objectives found in each story level – some of which are more compelling than others, and it’s certainly exhilarating to clear an area solely through knife combat, for example, or to take out a set number of soldiers with explosive barrels (which certainly have their moment, between Star Wars Outlaws and Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, which are densely packed with them), but the task of turning on a set number of laptops found throughout the level made me feel less like a bloodthirsty hellhound and more like someone in IT support. Worse still, there’s apparently no way to see these level-specific bonus objectives at a glance by looking through the level list. They’re only revealed once you’ve started each level, which meant I had to jump in and out of each level, looking for the objectives that seemed most intriguing or achievable.
Still, while I Am Your Beast is generally a stimulating and repetitive run-and-gun game, it falls tiny in certain areas of Beast, preventing it from becoming one of the best in its niche genre. Similarly, the lightning-fast first-person shooter Anger Foot, which came out just a few months ago, has a much more diverse lineup of enemy types compared to I Am Your Beast’s army of indistinguishable soldiers. Similarly, it lacks a defining gameplay feature that sets it apart from the rest – it’s basically Superhot if you get rid of the ingenious idea of slow-motion shooting where time only moves when you move. Still a breathtaking explosion, but it’s unlikely to linger in the memory for as long.
