I Am Your Beast is the best action game of the year

Alphonse Harding isn’t a soldier; he’s a living weapon.

That’s by cruel design. The tortured hero of El Paso, Elsewhere developer Strange Scaffold’s latest game, the spectacularI Am Your Beast, was engineered to be a force of nature through a career of military service as a secret agent. Those years of bloodshed shaped him into something monstrous; he’s a mix of John Wick and Predator, wiping out entire squads with terrifying speed and efficiency. But there’s one thing that Harding isn’t: the military’s leashed pet. If it’s a beast they want, then it’s a beast they’ll get. Be careful what you wish for.

Over the course of its relentlessly energetic three-hour runtime,I Am Your Beast puts a military industrial complex that turns humans into war machines on trial. And it does that by giving agency back to those victims, with Harding gaining the power to be judge, jury, and executioner. That makes for one of the most thrilling first-person shooters I’ve played in years, and one that does the impossible: finding a way to square its political commentary with confidently fun ultraviolence.

War machine

Everything in I Am Your Beast happens at breakneck speed, including its story setup. Harding, who has been in retirement for six blissful years, finds himself sucked back in when his old general, Burkin, calls him back for “one more job.” Harding rejects the offer, so Burkin sends the full force of the Covert Operations Initiative — the same secret organization Harding served as a hired gun — after him. Unfortunately for Burkin, the COI trained Harding a little too well.

In between codex calls that push that story forward through stylish typography, Harding must eliminate COI squads and sabotage their operations. That happens via bite-sized combat encounters where players dash through compact levels and complete objectives like destroying satellites or simply wiping out everyone on the map. I Am Your Beast firmly belongs to a subgenre of action-puzzle hybrids like Hotline