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

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.

I Am Your Beast - LAUNCH TRAILER

Quite why Burkin finds it necessary to sacrifice hundreds of soldiers and millions of dollars in government equipment in pursuit of one retiree, I'm still not sure. It's an interesting premise, not least because it's hard to imagine what the hell Burkin can do to handle Harding now that the latter – a soldier exposed to years of training, torture, combat, and sleep deprivation – has decided he no longer wishes to be handled. It's not a novel conceit, admittedly, but it's fascinating to me how one man's bruised ego leads to hundreds of deaths at the hands of another.

It's light-touch, though, this story. It only plays out via audio communications sandwiched between levels, and you don't need to follow or even care about it if you don't want to, because the frenzied action steams ever-onward anyway, and I Am Your Beast's deliciously satisfying combat and creative level design means you'll enjoy every second of it regardless. Sometimes, you'll need to take out satellites along the way. Other times, you'll need to activate laptops, survive waves of foes, or simply kill every soul you see. Mostly, however, it's a scramble for the exit. Harding's training means he moves seamlessly through the terrain, giving you an immersive-sim-esque vibe that if you can see it – a tree here, a red barrel there, and do you reckon that hornet's nest may offer a distraction? – you can probably use it to your advantage.

Like the parkour, the gunplay is delightful. You use what you can when you can, repurposing enemy weapons, exhausting all rounds, throwing pistols at heads when they're empty, kicking skulls in when you're out of ammo. The fighting is weighty and varied enough that despite its stylised presentation, each round feels different even if it doesn't look it, and the desire to retry – that is, go back in with a different route or strat and secure that S-rank – is strong. Just don't stand still. You won't survive the onslaught.

It's often difficult to see what the hell is going on, though. A dark palette, stylised graphics, and a screen that shakes every time you're hit means you often don't know what's happened until it's already over. The fluid gameplay means this doesn't get in the way quite as often as you'd think, but as someone who usually agonises over the MO and prefers creeping around a camp or outpost to silently take enemies down, one by one, this was quite the adjustment. Not least because sometimes the only way to learn a map is to keep reliving it like a bloody Groundhog Day, playing over and over until you memorise the locations of everything.

And, look, I could stop this review here. I could leave you with the knowledge that it's a funky, furious, fantastic shooter that's sure to scratch an itch, and that would be enough. But even though some may see the revenge tale as merely the vehicle on which Strange Scaffold attaches its otherwise outrageous pulpy shooter, I was absolutely invested in Harding's story, too.

Although we never see him, Harding is authentic and sympathetic, a man forced into an impossible situation that will likely only end with his death... and he knows it. We kind of get the sense that he's been conditioned to push it all down – the pain, the trauma, the everything – but he's not a machine. Occasionally, in between levels, we'll hear him groan in pain, and a little after halfway through, he starts to really hurt, his injuries severely impacting his ability to recover between battles.

Inconveniently for us, this knocks your starting health way down and prevents you from ever fully recovering, and Harding's panic is palpable. "That's so much blood. That's so much blood", he mutters, screaming as he rips out the branches that have impaled him. Just this little dialogue alone – there are no cinematics whatsoever – humanises a soldier we never see, cementing the realisation that there's a chance he may not survive this. And even if he does… well, what the hell would his life even look like afterwards?

It's this, along with the familial relationship Burkin used to share with his ward, that fostered my curiosity about how it would all end. Throw in an additional wrinkle of an errant soldier unwilling to die for Burkin's unfathomable deadly pursuit, and I found myself caring about what happens – to all of them. Which is quite a feat, really, given I'm not typically thinking of very much at all when I'm running around with an assault rifle murdering stuff. The voice acting is some of the best I've heard for some time, masterfully bringing to life what could have otherwise been a very forgettable, perfunctory cast of characters.

But that's the magic of I Am Your Beast, I guess. Despite a schlocky – and shocking – presentation, this action-shooter is exactly what I needed it to be, which is a delightfully bombastic experience that neither outstays its welcome nor feels unjustly punishing. Stapled to a blisteringly powerful soundtrack, this is a trim, frenetic, thoughtful shooter that stayed with me far longer than its truncated playtime.

A copy of I Am Your Beast was provided for review by Strange Scaffold.