I Am Your Beast review – whiplash, short-form action with a surprising narrative heart

September 13, 2024
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Merciless. That’s what this man is. Every enemy you encounter – every identikit soldier in combat fatigues, their red, dead, bug-like masks obscuring the human faces beneath them – will succumb to the same fate as you slip past, corpses hitting the ground before they even realise they’re dead. Such is the life of a contract killer, I guess.

I Am Your Beast is glorious. Gloriously brutal and bloody and brash and intense in that Superhot, Children of the Sun way that means I can only play in fifteen-minute bursts for fear of giving myself an aneurysm. You barely have time to breathe as blood and bullets fly past, let alone carefully plot your route, which means much of your initial playthrough will be a panicked scramble as you shoot, punch, parkour, and plunder anything and everything that gets in the way between your position and the hatch that leads you the hell away from here. With even the longest level in the entire three-hour-ish playtime clocking in under two minutes, there’s no time for mistakes, either. Mistime, misthrow, or misfire anything, and it’s over. This time, anyway.

You fly through pulpy, comic-book shoot-em-up I Am Your Beast as Agent Alphonse Harding, an assassin born, and arguably broken, by the US military. Despite revelling in retirement – and by revelling, I mean embracing his hermit era out in a frozen forest in the middle of nowhere – handler Burkin asks you to do one last job one time too many. He doesn’t take kindly to your refusal, and you don’t take too kindly to that, either. To use his own expression, Harding “snaps”, and for the next three-ish hours, you’re on a one-man murder spree.

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