Somewhere in the middle of a city block lies a sleeping kaiju, and you’re running flat out toward it, serum injector in hand, praying none of the other 31 players on the map beats you to it.
Welcome to BeastLink: a third-person shooter chasing Battlefield’s sense of scale and Pacific Rim’s city-crushing chaos inside a single, fully destructible sandbox.
The game is available now in Early Access on Steam at $19.99, with an Xbox version on the way.
Nobody else is trying this
Battlefield’s ambitions — and the sheer absurdity of the scale it hands to players — are so outsized that virtually nobody attempts an imitation. Pacific Rim and Godzilla occupy the same untouched space. Apart from a handful of licensed titles that flopped, colossal monsters leveling colossal cities has remained the domain of film.
That’s unfortunate, since both concepts are tailor-made for players hungry for immersion on an enormous scale.
Then one developer got tired of waiting.
What you actually do
The loop sends you across a sprawling city map that crumbles beneath your feet while you search for a serum capable of linking you to the dormant kaiju littered around it. Find one, seize control of it, and take over the battlefield.
You get solo play and multiplayer alike, plus a story campaign built around a character you customize. Vehicles push the Battlefield resemblance further, destruction is physics-driven, and a single map holds as many as 32 players.
As it stands, the build ships with three maps, a small set of story missions, multiplayer modes playable solo and offline, and four of the title’s namesake beasts to inhabit.
The Grove Street Games problem
Being an early build, it comes with exactly the bugs you’d anticipate — and the game’s reviews say as much.
There’s also the matter of the developer: Grove Street Games, the same studio responsible for the calamitous GTA: The Trilogy remaster. It would be silly to pretend that elephant isn’t in the room.
Play it, though, and something different starts to register.
Somebody clearly cared
Only a team truly invested in a pretty ridiculous premise could have produced BeastLink. Look at the mountain of gameplay features. The offline modes, a rarity these days. The updates it has promised.
Every bit of that cuts against the grain of the design-by-committee multiplayer titles currently hitting shelves.
The concept by itself earns a shot. It’s the passion underneath that leaves you rooting for where it heads next.
Where it stands right now
Set the jank and bugs aside and BeastLink is already a good time, with genuine headroom for improvement. Early Access leaves it plenty of runway.
Anyone craving tense boots-on-the-ground gunfights beneath skyscraper-sized monsters — or anyone who has simply concluded Battlefield’s era has passed — is the exact target here.
What you hope for is that Grove Street Games sticks with the idea all the way to 1.0. At $19.99 on Steam, you can see for yourself whether that sleeping kaiju is yours before the other 31 players get there.