All Harding wants to do is enjoy his quiet life living in the forest, but in I Am You Beast, General Burke has other ideas. He wants Harding to come back to do one last mission, a demand that quickly escalates when Harding refuses the offer by mercilessly killing the soldiers Burke sends in to retrieve him.
I Am Your Beast is a fast-paced first person shooter with a comic book style that makes it feel like a cross between XIII, Rambo and Doom. Split into short missions across four different modes – Story, Challenge, COI Support Group, and Cold Sweat – Harding has to deal with different objectives which includes killing all enemies, surviving enemy waves, destroying satellite uplinks, and using laptops. Each mission gives you a rating at the end with your score dependant on how quickly you beat a level (apart from the wave missions), and the style in which you kill enemies. You will be ranked from a low D to a high S.There are also bonus objectives which unlock after you first complete a mission, and these can be things like using certain weapons to kill or doing a no kill run.
You have a plethora of options for taking out enemies. Harding can be like Mario and jump on an enemy’s head to decapitates them, or use tree bark to hit them. A combat knife can be thrown to instantly kill, or you can use pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, snipers to shoot at your enemies. Run out of ammo? You can throw weapons at enemies to knock them down and stomp on them as well. In some missions you get access to claymore mines and RPGs too, allowing you to take out groups of enemies in a satisfying explosion. Not that you need RPGs most of the time, when missions are stacked with red barrels to make go boom – it can get very loud.
The fast-paced nature of I Am Your Beast provides a good portion of the game’s challenge. You need to be moving constantly using your reflexes to quickly dispatch enemies, pick up weapons, fire them, chuck them, and pick up something else. You are doing all of this while working out the best route on the fly to kill enemies, or avoid them, and then finding the exit. There are times where things can be slightly overwhelming, especially if you get put in a tight spot, and there were some visibility issues when it came to the nighttime missions, making it harder to see the paths you can take. There were also a couple of moments where my momentum came to a halt because of minor obstacles in the environment getting the way.
What I Am Your Beast does very well is tell its story. There are cutscenes between each mission which consist of nothing but characters talking to each other, but the acting is great and the humour throughout is very good. In missions, soldiers will talk to each other and some of the conversations are funny, while others show some of the fear these soldiers have of Harding. Outside of the main story mode, the COI Support group has missions which are told from the perspective of the soldiers that survive the hunt for Harding, and you also have Cold Sweat, which provides the toughest missions in the game. These challenge mode missions are not canon to the plot of I Am Your Beast, but a fun aside.
The soundtrack is excellent with thumping mix of synths and guitars all coming together for some hard hitting beats. The visual design of I Am Your Beast is kind of comic book like and it looks very good. There is a lot of detail in the environments while enemies have slightly different looks to them depending on their strength. Like I mentioned earlier, the night levels could have been a little brighter as it can be tough to see where to go.