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At first glance, the FPS game is perhaps the simplest, most formulaic of all major videogame genres. Fundamentally, it makes only two demands of the player: successfully kill enemies while avoiding being killed yourself. Doom, Half-Life, Quake. In all of these progenitors of the modern FPS, there are no ‘builds,’ no stats, no leveling up – your input, so much as the behavior of a game player can be reduced to mere ‘input,’ is singular, straightforward. But it’s the solid foundations of the first-person shooter, the instantly intelligible base mechanics, that prime it for experimentation. Monolith’s Condemned turned the FPS experience inside out with melee combat. Mirror’s Edge expanded the horizontal plane with rapid free movement. And now, a new shooter takes the fundamentals of FPS games in new directions. Boasting almost spotless Steam reviews, this is I Am Your Beast.
Created by Strange Scaffold, the independent studio behind underexposed vampire blaster El Paso, Elsewhere, I Am Your Beast casts you as the Robert Ludlum-inspired Randolph Harding, a former special forces soldier and secret agent living a peaceful retirement in the Northern American wilderness. When your former commander tries to coerce you into taking one final job, and sends an expansive team of shock troops to kidnap you, it snaps your final nerve. You don’t want to do it, but these guys just won’t take no for an answer – it’s an FPS game where you use dead bodies to send a message.
Visually, I Am Your Beast immediately recalls XIII, the 2003 cel-shaded shooter built by Ubisoft. Combat, however, feels more like Superhot, albeit without the stop-start time freeze system. Instead, the trick is to move – almost dance, in fact – around enemies, using Harding’s preternatural physical strength to clamber up trees, leap over gaps, and sprint and slide through the undergrowth.
Guns are powerful but disposable – empty the clip into a team of commandos, and then throw the weapon at the final enemy’s head to knock him out. The faster you kill and the more fluidly you move, the higher your combo multiplier, and the bigger your final score.
It can be a little fussy, and I Am Your Beast’s demanding difficulty and insistence on precision doesn’t always match the setup: you’re the world’s most fearsome former soldier, renowned for almost supernatural ability, but you repeatedly fumble shots, get killed, and have to restart.
Nevertheless, Strange Scaffold’s latest is pleasingly different, a game with personality, individuality, and all the imperfections that attend – it’s not sanded and polished to frictionless ‘perfection,’ but that’s part of what makes it distinctive.
Released on Tuesday September 10, of the 227 Steam reviews that have been posted for I Am Your Beast so far, a huge 99% are positive. If you want to try it for yourself, it’s still available via an introductory 10% discount, for the price of $17.99 / £15.07. Just head here.
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