I put a little time into Beast at the weekend, the latest offering from Apple Arcade. It wasn’t long until I had four heroes with different skills unlocked. Covering medium and short ranged attacks, defensive blasts, healing, airstrikes, gatling guns. Then I put even more time into it (maybe too much) and unlocked an owl sniper, a melee mech with a sword, and a dragon with flamethrowers. It’s a pretty good range of abilities so far. Plenty of team options.
My first impressions of Beast are good. It plays smoothly, has all the thrills of combat, the heroes are full of character. It’s trying to appeal to all ages with a look and feel not dissimilar to the recent Sonic Dream Team. I’d also compare the overall tone to Splatoon. The gameplay has some clear influence from Team Fortress 2 and the like.
The core of the game, which I spent most time playing, is the 3v3 death match. A symmetrical arena, first team to get 15 kills wins. The map is colourful, with high and low areas. Over time heroes fill a power bar and when full can put on their mech suit for more powerful attacks. The mech also acts as a second health bar that needs to be defeated before knocking out the pilot. Mechs can only walk on the arena floor, with the exception of one that hovers, and heroes can (and should) utilise the high ground and jumping pads.
Beast is tailored to work on phones, so the shooting is largely automatic. Just get ’em in the crossfire and wait for the reload. Although some do have an optional zoomed aim which fires on release. So it can be a bit manual. Took me a while to discover that so maybe some addition to the tutorial or character info would help. The heroes are all based on animals; starting as a cat named Clyde with a rapid fire blaster. Then unlocking a boar, bear, owl, even a unicorn.
If you want to dominate, use the mouse. I tried it a couple of times but changed back to controller because it’s good enough (probably better than phone controls) and more comfy for me. I imagine using Nyx’s sniper shots on mouse is kinda OP. There was a match where all three opponents chose Nyx and they controlled the whole game from the far end of the map. A good team could counter them, but we weren’t that team.
The hero I find most interesting to play is Nova, whose weapon can heal or harm depending on the target. The mech special can do both simultaneously, creating the most strategic support role. Nova is a more valuable team member than may be expected at first glance. Team matches can be more strategic or degenerate into chaotic brawls. Both are fine by me.
Other game modes are a free-for-all with no teams, capturing and keeping crystals (which favours those who can stay alive longest), and a get the payload to it’s destination first competition. Each game mode has it’s own map at the moment.
Progression is tailored like a free to play game with season style rewards structure. Daily missions get you XP to unlock stuff; heroes, skins, other cosmetics. Each match rewards different play styles through recognition of damage, defence, healing, etc, which is turned into more XP. It’s good design that helped me to try everything out and see the benefits of characters I may not have used much otherwise. My only concern is it may be a bit of a grind to unlock later heroes, when I impatiently would like to try them sooner.
The only communication between players is through a few expressive faces, that I’ve not seen used much as yet. It’s my preferred system for most multiplayer games with strangers. Keeps a lid on the worst sorts of people. There’s also the option to only play with friends or practice with bots.
It’s fair to warn that there are some teething problems. Typical bugs that need patching. The game crashed on me a couple of times, requiring a restart. Annoying, but not enough to put me off. I’ve played it a lot, up to level 60, so it’s not that frequent. The devs are interacting with players in the usual spaces. Now that the game is getting a proper stress test I’m hopeful these things will be fixed soon enough. There are also content updates on the way. A new hero and a new map confirmed. More maps would be the priority for me.
Last time I checked the leaderboard had well over 30k players and it’s rising fast. Not bad for an often overlooked subscription service. Bots are used to fill matches when necessary. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. Not because they’re good, more because it’s surprising how strangely some real people play. And what even stranger names they choose. I would like a way to tell if a match contains bots, simply by showing them as unranked or something.
Beyond first impressions I think this is a great addition to Arcade. A simple concept with good execution. Definitely has that ‘one more go’ feel. The matches may be 4 minutes but I can see myself sat there 4 hours later.
Available from Apple Arcade
mishmash 