Harding and Burkin might sound like a law firm, but these two go way back on the battlefield. Harding was the brilliant spec ops guy who could get anything done, no matter how bloody. Burkin was Harding’s handler, and now he wants him back for one last job. Harding’s long since retreated to the woods to start a new life, so can Burkin flush him out at gunpoint? How far will each man go? And, lost in the wilderness together, who’s really hunting whom?
This is the deliriously pulpy premise of Strange Scaffold’s latest action game, I Am Your Beast. What follows is not Rambo so much as an exploration of the way that Rambo has settled in the memory, all trees and traps and body counts. Strange Scaffold is known for making hectic, relentless games at a hectic, relentless pace. I Am Your Beast is another masterwork of briskness and efficiency. Binged in three hours, it’s a first-person shooter in which you’re always outgunned but endlessly resourceful. Even the longest of the game’s “micro-sandbox” missions is over in 90 seconds, been and gone before you’ve had time to register the fact that the level names all sound like Jack Reacher novels: Late Shift, Breakdown, On Your Six.
Everything works very neatly. A beautifully pared-back design delivers swift first-person movement that sees you ducking under roots one minute and jumping between canopy branches the next. Meanwhile, the sandbox approach to action involves grabbing enemies’ weapons, using them until they’re out of bullets, then flinging them at any nearby targets for a final burst of damage instead of slowing things down with a boring old reload.
There are elements of inventive first-person action games such as Mirror’s Edge and SuperHot feeding into this, and yet I Am Your Beast remains entirely distinct. The speedrunner pace sets it apart, but there’s also a belief in the notion that the simplest mission structures, when allied with pleasingly generic fiction, will make the action sing. Activate three laptops, target five satellite dishes, simply kill everyone you encounter: objectives loop, but they bring endless life to the game’s snug yet complex arenas. Short health bars and the repeated structure of attacking and then disappearing back beyond the treeline means you’re always left feeling that you just got away with it.
I Am Your Beast thrills because the details are bright and well chosen. Patch yourself up on the fly by grabbing some nearby herbs. Let the enemy’s impregnable attack chopper take out groups of your enemies in helpful bursts of collateral damage. Kill people by booting them into ravines or even jumping on to their heads. Every encounter is a chance to keep the rhythm of carnage racing along as inventively as possible, while increasingly desperate radio chatter from your enemies narrates the bloodshed and splatter as if providing the commentary for a grisly Olympics.
That feeling’s at the heart of everything, in fact. Beneath the smoke and spent cartridges, I Am Your Beast is playground warfare retooled as a sport. In this forest, on this battlefield, you get to perform acts of gruesome excellence. And if you can’t get it right first time, you’re always just a restart away from perfection.
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