Alphonse Harding isn’t a soldier; he’s a living weapon.
That’s by cruel design. The tortured hero of El Paso, Elsewhere developer Strange Scaffold’s latest game, the spectacular I Am Your Beast, was engineered to be a force of nature through a career of military service as a secret agent. Those years of bloodshed shaped him into something monstrous; he’s a mix of John Wick and Predator, wiping out entire squads with terrifying speed and efficiency. But there’s one thing that Harding isn’t: the military’s leashed pet. If it’s a beast they want, then it’s a beast they’ll get. Be careful what you wish for.
Over the course of its relentlessly energetic three-hour runtime, I Am Your Beast puts a military industrial complex that turns humans into war machines on trial. And it does that by giving agency back to those victims, with Harding gaining the power to be judge, jury, and executioner. That makes for one of the most thrilling first-person shooters I’ve played in years, and one that does the impossible: finding a way to square its political commentary with confidently fun ultraviolence.
War machine
Everything in I Am Your Beast happens at breakneck speed, including its story setup. Harding, who has been in retirement for six blissful years, finds himself sucked back in when his old general, Burkin, calls him back for “one more job.” Harding rejects the offer, so Burkin sends the full force of the Covert Operations Initiative — the same secret organization Harding served as a hired gun — after him. Unfortunately for Burkin, the COI trained Harding a little too well.
In between codex calls that push that story forward through stylish typography, Harding must eliminate COI squads and sabotage their operations. That happens via bite-sized combat encounters where players dash through compact levels and complete objectives like destroying satellites or simply wiping out everyone on the map. I Am Your Beast firmly belongs to a subgenre of action-puzzle hybrids like Hotline Miami, games that are as much about figuring out a perfect route through waves of enemies as they are shooting them down — and frankly, I Am Your Beast may be one of the best to ever do it.
Its secret weapon is fluidity. Combat is designed to always keep players moving and hitting buttons rather than hiding in the shadows. Gunplay itself is sickly satisfying thanks to some strong feedback, as red X’s flash over an enemy every time Harding lands a snappy headshot. Shooting is only one tool in Harding’s arsenal, though. When a gun’s clip is empty, he can toss it at an enemy to stun them and execute them with a stomp. He can nab a foe’s gun out of the air after it goes flying from their lifeless hand, immediately getting back into action without needing to loot a body. A fast dash button lets him scramble up trees, where he can jump down on a COI agent’s head like Mario and leave them in a bloody heap. Now imagine stringing all of those actions together, one after the other, over a whirlwind 60 seconds of violence.
While it took me a few levels to get the hang of it, I quickly found the flow of its first-person John Wick hook. I leap down onto an enemy to kill them and grab their knife, which I then toss at another agent to send their shotgun flying into my hands. It’s a juggling act, one that each level is expertly designed to take advantage of. Rather than giving players completely linear maps with one solution, many of the levels strategically lay weapons and environmental hazards out that push me to experiment. Maybe I’ll shoot down a beehive to kill two foes instead of wasting multiple bullets on them. And rather than trying to pick off a sniper from afar, maybe I’ll take a bot shot at an exploding red barrel near him. Each level is one big combat puzzle that can either be carefully plotted out or solved with on-the-fly thinking.
What especially impresses me, though, is that the satisfying action never feels at odds with its sharp critique of the military industrial complex. Games like Spec Ops: The Line have taken shots at the horrors of war before. But it still feels concerned with being entertaining — a sequence where players launch unlimited grenades out at enemies while they hang off the side of a truck feels hollow next to its sobering depiction of white phosphorous. It’s hard to make any effective statement about violence in a game that’s still trying to deliver “fun” action.
I Am Your Beast comes at that problem from a nuanced approach. Harding isn’t a tool for the government killing innocents for oil. Instead, he turns the tools of the trade back against the war machine. He’s only taking orders from himself, twisting the often-subservient setup of military action games and turning it into a revenge fantasy about tearing the system down through its own hubris. That’s still a little questionable (if Harding was a victim of the COI, then aren’t all of the agents he’s eagerly killing similarly innocent?), but it’s an effective way to spin military action hero propaganda on its head and turn it into cathartic retribution.
All of that happens in a whirlwind few hours that I won’t soon forget. I Am Your Beast is a true thrill from start to finish, from its cinematic-level set pieces like a climactic chopper battle to its pulse-pounding soundtrack. Big-budget video games have long tried to perfect the ultimate power fantasy, but Strange Scaffold pulls it off with a fraction of the budget. It’s a game where I truly do feel like a weapon of mass destruction — and, for once, my target deserves to be on the other end of that power.
I Am Your Beast is out now on PC.
