Review: I Am Your Beast – A Fast-Paced Gaming Experience Comparable to Rambo

H
arding and Birkin may sound like law firms, but these two have a long history in the battlefield. Harding was a brilliant special forces operative who could handle any job, no matter how bloody. Birkin was Harding’s handler, and now he’s trying to bring him back for one last job. Harding has long ago hidden away in the woods to start a new life, but can Birkin chase him out at gunpoint? How far will they go? And with the two lost in the wilderness together, who is really chasing who?

That’s the engrossingly sleazy premise of Strange Scaffold’s latest action game, I Am Your Beast. What follows is not so much Rambo as an exploration of the way he’s become ingrained in our memory – the trees, the traps, the body counts. Strange Scaffold is known for making hectic, unrelenting games at a hectic, unrelenting pace. I Am Your Beast is another masterpiece of agility and efficiency. Playable in three hours at a stretch, this first-person shooter finds you constantly outgunned with firearms, but with infinite wit. Even the longest of the game’s “micro-sandbox” missions is over in 90 seconds, and you’ll be done before you have time to acknowledge the fact that the level names all sound like Jack Reacher novels – Late Shift, Breakdown, On Your Six.

It all works extremely well: the beautifully streamlined design allows for fast first-person movement, having you ducking through roots one moment and leaping between the branches of a treetop canopy the next, while the sandbox approach to action sees you grabbing an enemy’s weapon, using it until it runs out of ammo, and hurling it at a nearby target to deliver the final blow, without having to be slowed down by tedious reloads.

There are elements of seminal first-person action games like Mirror’s Edge and SuperHot echoing this, but I Am Your Beast remains entirely its own thing. It has a speedrunner-like pacing, but the idea is that the simplest of mission structures, when combined with feel-good generic fiction, can really pump up the action. Simply fire up three laptops, target five satellite dishes, and kill everyone you come across. The objectives loop, but they add up to infinite lives in the game’s compact, complex arenas. A short health bar and a repetitive structure of attacking then disappearing behind the trees always make you feel like you’ve made a good getaway.

What makes I Am Your Beast thrilling is the vivid, well-chosen details. Grab the nearest herb and heal yourself on the spot. Let your enemy’s invincible attack helicopter wipe out hordes of enemies while sparing collateral damage. Kick people into ravines or jump on their heads to kill them. Every encounter is a chance to keep up the rhythm of carnage as inventively as possible, while increasingly frantic radio chatter from your enemies narrates the bloody and gore-splattered scenes as if they were commentating on a gruesome Olympics.

In fact, that emotion is at the heart of it all: Beneath the smoke and spent shells, I Am Your Beast is a reimagining of playground warfare as sport. On this forest battlefield, you perform deeds that are frighteningly good, and if you don’t get it right the first time, you’re one step closer to perfection.