I Am Your Beast's quick and brutal firefights make it a must-play

I Am Your Beast (2024, Strange Scaffold)

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Happy Call of Duty Open Beta weekend to those who celebrate. I was intending to write something about the beta myself, but after two hours of play all I have for you is that the promised Omnimovement at the heart of the game is too damn fast, making me feel like an old man. The shooting is as good as ever, and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the game's campaign, where I can blast AI without worrying about getting taught a variety of unpleasant lessons by a procession of teenaged commandos from around the world.

I used to consider myself Quite Good at Call Of Duty but I think I have to accept that, as a perpetually tired 35 year old, those days are behind me.

Luckily, I was able to live out my power fantasy in Strange Scaffold's I Am Your Beast, which released yesterday. I've played it for a few hours over the last week and I'm enthralled at the way it takes the sort of short and snappy structure from Hotline Miami but makes it work in a vicious first-person shooter (FPS).

I Am Your Beast is the best action game of the year, so far. It's most compelling feature is the pace of it's engagements. Each of the game's bite-sized levels is a brutal time trial where as soon as the black ops goons hunting you make visual contact, you're on the clock. Clear the level fast and you can earn a high score, but run that time down and you'll fail.

As soon as combat starts, there's a tension that starts to build as enemies start to descend on you from all sides, but in reality you often have plenty of time, able to clear the primary objective of each encounter in just a few short minutes. It's mastery (and the optional objectives offered up upon completion) that's the true goal here and that require some serious skills.

You don't so much enter a level as eject yourself into it, often eviscerating your first goon within a few seconds. Recon by fire is the name of the game here, and I often found that rather than skulking around to try and catch the perfect path through a level, it was more time efficient and a lot more fun to just fail repeatedly until I found success.

I Am Your Beast (2024, Strange Scaffold)

The entire game is geared towards moving quickly - the aiming animations have you holding the gun at a canted angle, and it makes target acquisition feel snappy, even though I'm very rarely tapping my right mouse button to aim at all. Big red barrels make convenient explosion fodder, and hornets’ nests - hornets being one of nature’s true killing machines - fulfil the same purpose, killing everyone within a short distance of where the hive impacts.

I Am Your Beast is not a game about slowing down and thinking about your options. It is a celebration of taking a punt and seeing how far you get. The story supports this: while the radio conversations that black ops badass Alphonse Harding has with his pursuers and even unlikely allies are enjoyable, it's rare that these calls feel essential to understand the story. You can sum it up with just one sentence: Harding wants to retire from killing, and he's going to have to off a battalion of bad dudes to make that happen.

In combat, I particularly enjoy the way you can hurl your empty weapons at enemies, breaking it while also causing their gun or knife to fly through the air towards you. Get this right and you'll hurl your empty gun at the soldier ahead of you before catching theirs, allowing you to execute the helpless would-be pursuer while barely breaking your stride. It feels so simple and well executed in play, and there seems to be a commitment on the part of I Am Your Beast’s developers to make every player feel like the best there has ever been, the best there ever will be.

The weapons fulfil archetypes: a pistol, a shotgun, a bullet-spewing assault rifle. There are some fun quirks, like a bear trap you can use to trap enemies or throw into their face. The only outlier is the sniper rifle, too precise a tool for the chaos that I Am Your Beast is peddling.

Indeed, I first thought to describe I Am Your Beast like a kinetic ballet but that's not true. If I Am Your Beast is a dance, it's like staggering, sweaty and slightly exhausted, into the walls of a circle pit. There's very little finesse here, but it doesn't matter, so long as you keep moving. This is far from the precision of Hotline Miami – instead you'll be taking damage on all sides, clawing your way to the next health kit as quickly as you can to keep the fight rolling.

Strange Scaffold (and indeed founder Xalavier Nelson) has made some eclectic choices when it comes to games, but with I Am Their Beast and previous title El Paso, Elsewhere, it’s quickly establishing some action game credibility. It's also rare to find a shooter these days that's happy for you to blast through it once and move onto something else, so I'd suggest you do just that.

Disclosure: Xalavier Nelson is a good friend of mine and we regularly talk about game design and play shooters together. We once cleared an entire Hunt: Showdown lobby from the loft of an aged wooden building, holding off eldritch creatures and eagle-eyed players with alacrity. Dan Pearce also worked on the game. I pushed him off a bridge in For Honor once and the friendship has never been the same since.

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