I think it’s fair to say that a lot of the appeal in playing FPS games (or any action game) is the ability to feel like a badass. The power fantasy is super important to action games in particular, and while it can be great fun to be cast as the underdog trying to survive by any and all means, sometimes it’s really nice to have your enemies cower before you. Usually that feeling comes in the latter third of a game, when you’re fully levelled up or have unlocked all the weapons and gear. In I Am Your Beast from Strange Scaffold, this is how you feel from minute one.
Protagonist Harding is a John Wick-style bogeyman for his ex-employers, the COI. Attempting to live a quite life in the mountains, Harding’s peace is shattered when the COI send in a team of operatives to bring him in, hoping to coerce him into one last job. The premise is daft. Harding mows through so many COI soldiers that you wonder how they have the resources to spare for just one man. It would be easier and cheaper to just leave him alone and find another solution. The story is told in phone conversations over static screens, and manages to be fairly amusing most of the time. Everyone seems to know how absurd the concept is, and no one cares.
Playing as Harding is ridiculously satisfying. Each stage of the main campaign is a bit-sized flurry of precision violence, with shoot-outs that feel like movement puzzles, requiring fast reflexes, perfect aim, and lots of lightning-fast respawns. The campaign is only a few hours long, though you are encouraged to replay each mission to smash the letter grade you got last time.
A few other modes round out the experience a little, such as Cold Sweat, which offers brutally hard challenges that will test even the fastest fingers. The inclusion is a smart one, too, as for much of the campaign Harding feels almost untouchable. Sure you can die in one-hit just like the enemies, but because you respawn so fast and everything is fixed in place, you will very swiftly memorise the stages. Also, everyone is shit-scared of Harding, which magnifies the sense that it’s a walk in the park, even though it is actually pretty tough in places. One interesting addition is the COI Support mode, which adds extra missions as told through the eyes of Harding’s survivors.
Stage to stage, I Am Your Beast doesn’t really evolve much. Sure there are new weapons and enemy types, but it’s not a cerebral game. This is balls-out, ordered mayhem that puts every effort into making each kill feel satisfying, so you finish every stage with a smile on your face and a hunger for the next challenge. The stylised aesthetic has a comic book appearance, that works perfectly with the pulpy story and hardcore action. Additional objectives pop up throughout certain missions, which never really tax you but are their to add context or give you something to do besides kill everything that moves.
I Am Your Beast plays smoothly on PS5, with no noticeable difference to the experience as compared to the PC version. But then this is a game that runs like butter on the Steam Deck, so performance was never a concern on console. There’s a wonderful brutality to the combat in I Am Your Beast that develops its own rhythm, making each movement, dodge, headshot, or knife kill slot together like a well-choreographed dance routine, and it’s a feeling that’s really hard to fault. Obviously this is greatly helped by the pumping soundtrack that does its best to keep your heart-rate up.
With a mix of DNA spliced in from games like Superhot and XIII, I Am Your Beast is a fantastic, easy-to-swallow FPS that can be an absolute breeze or a hardcore challenge depending on the individual. Either way, it comes massively recommended for any fan of the genre.
