izigame.me

Deliciously bloody adrenaline-inducing shooter. Snappy, hard-hitting, and brutally stylish.

I watched the 10 minute demo gameplay by ABG, and as soon as I saw the tutorial, I was hooked. I played the demo, finished it, immediately wishlisted. Release date came, and I ran through the story like a madman, and replayed it 3 times more only to stream it to all my friends (and flaunt some of my skill issue while I was at that). Hoped to write a review after getting platinum, but the mission failed spectacularly. It’s just that good not to write a review as soon as possible.
It is a disgustingly beautiful, jaw-dropping endless kill spree, and damn, it feels so cathartic. The military machine grinded your soul to the pulp and now asks for another bite? Why not break its jaw while you blast and stomp through your former colleagues. Well, never should have shot that bird in the first place .
But that’s not all to I AM YOUR BEAST. This game is a masterclass in how less makes so, so much more. Its brevity and snappines shows how restrictions make room for creativity and uniqueness. And the depth this game achieves in so many of its aspects and systems is way more than many AAA projects aspire to get with all their details and vastness.
Let me explain why, beat by beat:
Visuals is what gets you first. Typical comic style with heavy stylisation: saturated blood, angular muzzle flashes, red crosses to mark a landed hit. Limited color palette, sharp shadows, thin lines. The artstyle sets everything happening in place, gives actions and objects priority, accentuating elements meticulously and setting its own rhythm. It stimulates, and it eases your eyes, never letting you tire of an endless bloodbath.
How can you possibly tire of it, when the core loop is so addictive in its feverish speed? “An adventure for 10 seconds, here and there, in and out, coming in!” . The devil lies in the details: the enemy is overwhelming, but the player character is so much more savvy and skilled, yet not invincible. The controls are snappy and so smooth. It feels amazing to quick-press them in succession. Fling a branch towards an enemy, stomp their head while grabbing their gun on the fly, then land several headshots while running for your life. It seems the enemy agents too just can’t get enough of Harding’s skill, sometimes all they can do is shout in awe and disbelief: “HARDING’S THROWIN’ SH-”, “HE’S DOING PARKOUR?!”
Every level is ranked, and the rank depends on your speed and style. The snappier and faster you play and the closer the seconds spend on the level to none, the higher the rank you get. Due to the brevity of every hand-crafted level, you don’t seem to notice failure. The learning curve is so smooth, you feel inclined to polish every level before you move on to the next. You just do it again, and again, and again, all the while experimenting with your approach. Just to shave off some of the seconds on the timer, even if the S-rank has already been reached 2, 3 or 4 hours ago. It is the most addicting thing, and I just can’t get enough of it.
And it is hard to notice that you’ve been beating your own record for hours non-stop. And it is increasingly hard, when the soundtrack is so adrenaline-pumping and keeps progressing with every try, keeps escalating, and escalating. Until you become one with it and the game becomes a rhythm-shooter, and the S-rank is underway, and you’ve beat your own record for 0,24 seconds, then 1,76, then whole 3,41 past last rank.
The soundtrack is hard to describe. It’s nostalgic and modern in a way, as if a beatmaker sampled old arcades on a track, and then a rave DJ splashed some tecnomantic experimental scratching into the mix. It is stylish, it is ideal for chaotic combat, and very clever in its progression. Every track puts you into combat flow immediately, but stays in your memory for long.
The soundtrack accompanies not only the combat levels, but also the hard-hitting intermissions. Every story level is split up by radio banter. Nothing extra: no portraits, no animated scenes. Only plain background and bold text appearing word by word in rhythm with the voiced lines. And the voice acting is magnificent, one of the best in action game history to date.
The writing itself is matching the voice acting. Everything most delicious, witty and sharp from the thriller genre is compressed into every line spoken. It’s down to earth, but highly quotable. And extremely soulful. You feel for Harding. His humor is dry and deadpan. Its delivery is spontaneous and sudden, but very welcome. And while his boss may talk like your stereotypical thriller antagonist, with the monologues about “honor” and “duty” and whatnot, the confrontation with him doesn’t feel like it. No, it feels more personal. As if you’re talking to your ass-of-a-superior, who wants you to work on your sick leave without pay. “We went fishing together!” or “You’ve held my son” and other types of gaslighting, guilttripping and gatekeeping (no girlbossing though) you into working overtime so that he can earn a dime more for your hard work.
The strength of the narrative is not only in the confrontations. Every scene and story beat just hit the right mark in their brevity and cleanliness. Be it a sudden contact with a promising ally, who’s yet to become your mole in the ranks of the agency, or the scene of Harding painfully hitting rock bottom (quite literally). Not only that, every dialogue feels fresh and surprising.
The context is just barely enough. The small details and tidbits are sparse and always in their place. We are plunged into the scene fast, and abruptly taken out with just enough new information to keep yearning for more. Nothing extra is given, so when some detail slips from characters’ tongues, you feel as if you’ve just experienced a new and exiting twist. And all of that happens in two-or-three brief lines. You can’t even feel that most of the characters don't subvert their tropes. And that doesn’t matter, because when the only subversion turns into a twist, it feels like a slap on the face. Well, the good kind of a slap.
Because it’s gut-wrenching, heart-stopping and so full of life. It’s nervous, it’s filled with sudden realization, then helplessness, then hope, then denial… And relief. You don’t even know what to do, when the hardest hitting line comes to the screen:
. . .
. . .
And it’s genius in how long it might fill your screen. Just long enough for you to feel the need to act, and then stay confused that if you do, then… the only course of action is… something you cannot fathom to do, something… Might this work? Oh.
And the whole arc of revenge culminates spectacularly. As cathartically, as it felt throughout the whole gameplay.
And only with the aftertaste the realization comes, in how witty and clever the story is in what is left unsaid, unnoticed at first. How the metaphor of a Beast gradually becomes so much more to only be fitting the conventions of the thriller genre. So much fuller, so much deeper, so much more close to your heart than it is comfortable. So much more than the addictive gameplay and killer of a story. So much more than the characters that are so typical yet so alive.
It will come off as cheesy, but… This game is not about a retired spy dismantling the whole spy agency anymore. It is about the Beast within, the Beast that loves watching birds, that loves whittling figurines, and loves running through the forest like a child, forgetting that this slide sure will rip its clothes. The Beast within that knows exactly what it is and what it is not. The Beast that can bite and claw and hate almost as much as it can love and forgive. Almost as much. Because the Beast only needed one thing. Acceptance, and the freedom it gives.
Good times… babe.