I Am Your Beast VR Review-In-Progress: I Am A Speedrunning Badass

I Am Your Beast VR is a thrilling, time-limited series of micro-sandbox combat scenarios that tests your patience and reflexes in equal measure. This comes with some VR-specific sacrifices that may be off-putting for players who prefer more physics-based combat mechanics.

This game is the second release, after FlatOut 4: Total Insanity VR, from the Flat2VR Spark program. Spark is an initiative pairing developers (Strange Scaffold in this case) with experienced VR modders to do an official VR port. Based on what I have played of I Am Your Beast thus far, the Spark program is batting a thousand.

You play as Alphonse Harding, a retired secret agent asked by your former employer, the Covert Operations Initiative (COI), to return for the proverbial "one last job," a notion that Harding rejects while hilariously pointing out that there have already been several "one last jobs" in the past. Your handler drops the "you're not being a team player" guilt-trip of a line anyone who has worked in the service industry has heard before sending a death squad of COI agents to take you out.

What follows is a series of over twenty missions comprised of contained, objective-focused sandbox combat scenarios. Objectives are typically fairly straightforward (kill all the enemies, destroy satellites, find the escape point) and each mission has a time limit. Speed and efficiency are at the core of I Am Your Beast's gameplay, very similar to Innerspace's Spymaster, but with more brutal combat. Every mission is graded from D to S-rank based on your time, with time being shaved off for things like head shots and completing optional objectives.

The action here is absolutely stellar and after understanding and scheming the ideal path, it feels fast and fluid as you tear through enemies on the way to your mission-ending escape hatch. For example, there is no reloading in this game. When a weapon runs out of ammo, simply chuck it at an enemy so it still has some use, pick up their dropped weapon, and keep it moving.

Between missions, you listen to recorded conversations in what is presumably Harding's bunker, with subtitles displayed over a video of the wilderness the game is set in. This brings up the conundrum of playing a VR game that was ported from flatscreen. After playing, I watched a YouTube video to see how these interludes were delivered in the original game and the only difference in VR was the bunker. If I were playing a native VR game, this is something I would bristle at, as I did in Discovery: Rogue Planet, because it is a poor use of the VR medium. Being a port of a flatscreen game, it is adapted well enough by putting the player in an actual virtual space instead of a black void, but if anything bears a reimagining for VR rather than a one-to-one adaption, it is these moments. Something as simple as picking up a walkie-talkie to have the conversation could have helped.

Extend that conundrum to the interactions. I Am Your Beast is not a very tactile game, which may turn away players who champion a heavy dose of VR interactions and physics-based systems. To climb, even though clear grab points are on trees and rock walls, you simply press up on your analog stick. The only things you truly touch are weapons whereas things like health refills and laptops are activated by hitting grab when your hand brushes over them. All of that works though because you are constantly racing against the clock. Physics inevitably introduces jank and jank would absolutely slow this game down and hurt your mission times. I did not mind this one bit, but it should be noted for players who deeply care about such things.

You can fail a mission if you take too long. There is an option to turn this off and make each run a no-fail mission, but you get points counted off for the assist and likely end up with a D rank. That rank is important because later missions are unlocked based on your performance in previous missions. For instance, one mission only unlocks when you get a ranking of B in a previous one. It's not a mechanic I care for as it artificially extends a presumably short game (and I stink at speedruns), but again, this is a faithful carryover from the source material. So that's a personal issue with the game itself and not necessarily the porting work done by Spark. Without the ranking system and missions being locked by rank and performance, this game would be done in less than an hour. None of the individual missions I have completed thus far have been challenging, but completing them quickly and efficiently is.

Visually, I Am Your Beast has a heavily cel-shaded art style that I think looks great in the headset. This comes at the cost of detailed environments, but I did not really care how intricate the foliage and weapons looked once the clock started ticking and the excellent in-your-face pulse-pounding musical score kicks in. It could benefit from some stronger work with haptic feedback in the controller to pair with the musical score, but the overall presentation still works.

I Am Your Beast VR – Current Verdict

I Am Your Beast VR is gleefully entertaining with a specific action thriller vibe that everything in terms of visuals, music, level design and interactions plays into. That said, it feels more like a very strong VR mod than a native VR game and its general lack of some VR-specific mechanics will likely turn some players away. I will apply a final score when I complete the game, but from where I am now, I would happily recommend it to action junkie VR gamers, particularly those who enjoy a short-form, roguelike-style gameplay loop.

UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines. As a review-in-progress, this is currently unscored, and we'll revisit this review at full release.