I Am Your Beast review

Every once in awhile a game will come out of nowhere and really knock you off your feet. I Am Your Beast, the latest title from Strange Scaffold, is very much this kind of game. Although best enjoyed with a controller (a nagging detriment for so many console/PC ports that come to iOS), this stylish, clever, and speedy first-person game is too special to pass up.

I Am Your Beast puts you in the shoes of a retired special agent named Alphonse Harding. In an attempt to escape his dark past, Harding resides in a remote forest. Escaping his past is easier said than done, though, as the game opens with a sudden appearance of his old colleagues showing up to try and pull him back in for "one last job."

Alphonse's response to this is violence, and the core of I Am Your Beast is a series of escalating encounters where you learn just how adept Alphonse is at turning his skills against his former employer. Every level is a bite-sized playground that routinely has you dispatching a dozen or more people in about a minute or less.

Controlling Alphonse has such a sense of speed and expertise to it that you truly feel like a killing machine even if first-person games are not your forte. Headshots happen with a surprising amount of ease and there's room for a ton of other action movie maneuvers like jumping down to crush agents, shooting down wasp nests, thrown bear traps, and even throwing firearms to take out your enemies.

This all feels better with a controller in hand--of course--but also aiding to this feel is the sense of brutal efficiency that runs throughout the entire game. Cutscenes are simple-looking but elegant kinetic typography (with superb voice acting, by the way), the soundtrack is fast and relentless, objectives never get too complicated, and combat isn't balanced around the difficulty of mechanics so much as it is racing against time. All of these things combine to give you a sense of white-knuckle action even when the reality of I Am Your Beast's combat does not present a real sense of danger, tension, or difficulty.

I Am Your Beast is not a long game, but I definitely consider that a positive quality. Its tightness also plays into the entire game's efficient design, and it makes it so no level concepts ever really wear out their welcome. A big part of the fun in I Am Your Beast also comes from seeing just how efficient you can be in each level, as the game keeps detailed stats on your completion time, the kinds of maneuvers you employ on a run, and even going so far as to provide a little mini-map overview of your violence at the end of each stage. If that weren't enough, each level in the game also has additional challenges to complete, making repeated play feel even more worthwhile.

As for this mobile port specifically, outside of the controller recommendation I experienced virtually no issues with the game, performance or otherwise. I also have to commend whoever made the decision to release I Am Your Beast as a free download with an option to purchase the full experience for $ 9.99, allowing folks who may be wary of playing a fast-paced game on mobile a chance to try it out without paying an upfront cost.

I have a hard time thinking of a more compelling action experience than I Am Your Beast, on mobile or elsewhere. Every aspect of it is so tightly wound and propulsive that it makes you want to churn through it just as quickly as Alphonse kills people, and--trust me--that is a good thing.