One of the year’s most intense games just got an update that promises to turn it into an even more frantic first-person shooter. Developer Strange Scaffold’s I Am Your Beast added nine new levels in a free expansion called Support Group, which turns the game’s original protagonist into a mythical figure of controlled carnage.
The Support Group DLC is an epilogue to the original campaign of I Am Your Beast. It centers around stories told by members of the Covert Operations Initiative — the game’s enemies — after the events of the base game. In the campfire tales they tell each other, protagonist Alphonse Harding morphs into a supernatural figure even more terrifying than he is in reality. That manifests in new abilities for Harding, plus levels more over-the-top than the fast-paced shooter featured at launch earlier this year.
The update makes this the perfect time to return to I Am Your Beast, or try it for the first time if you missed it earlier this year. Even before the expansion, its blistering pace made for one of the most thrilling games of the year. The game kicks off with Harding, a former COI operative, being called in for one last job — again. Sick of being pulled out of retirement to fight his employer’s battles, Harding goes on the offensive, turning the tables on the COI soldiers who are sent to bring him in.
Unfortunately for those nameless soldiers, Harding is good at his job. Really good. Doing away with the usual first-person shooter flow of carefully managing ammo and using cover to keep yourself safe, I Am Your Beast instead turns the playing into a tornado of destruction. The goal of each level is to take out all of its guards as quickly as possible, giving it a speed and flow something like a hyper-violent version of Neon White. If you’re out of bullets, instead of stopping to scrounge for more ammo, you just throw your weapon at an enemy and catch the one they conveniently drop before it hits the ground.
I Am Your Beast is a focused experience where every move you make counts and everything in the game is useful in some way. Every tree is a place to get the high ground on your enemies, every explosive barrel or hornets’ nest is another tool in your arsenal. Movement is likewise smooth and efficient, without a single wasted step or unnecessary ability in your kit. Despite its stripped-down simplicity, changing mission objectives and terrain keep each level feeling unique, and Support Group’s amplification of both environments and Harding’s skills promise even more variety in the game’s simple premise.
Support Group also leans more heavily into the game’s narrative. Not enough to slow the action down, but enough to give a bit more weight to both Harding and the COI soldiers he cuts down by the dozen. Running through I Am Your Beast is a compelling but thin narrative of a man pushed to his limits, fighting his own guilt for having been made into a weapon and harnessing his rage at the people giving him orders. It’s not the game’s focus, taking up much more space than its frenetic action, but its inclusion helps make I Am Your Beast a little more than just a score attack shooter.
All told, you can tear through I Am Your Beast in just a couple hours — though you can eat up considerably more time going back to earn the highest ranking for each mission. Its brevity is definitely a strength, but the opportunity to get just a little more of its particular brand of speedy strategic action is more than welcome.
