Beast of Reincarnation review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

Game Freak’s a company known for effectively just the Pokémon franchise, so seeing something new from that studio was an incredible surprise. Beast of Reincarnation’s announcement shocked basically everybody, especially those familiar with the company’s previous works. It gave off some real Sekiro-adjacent vibes with a cool wolf companion that aided you in combat. Unfortunately, as seems to be the case with Game Freak titles, it really isn’t as much as it could be.

Starting off there’s a pretty big elephant in the room and that’s that Beast of Reincarnation is a more realistic looking game built in Unreal Engine 5 compared to the Pokémon games. The art direction of the game is pretty good, especially in areas that are clearly minor outposts post-apocalypse. The environments themselves look good, thanks to the fidelity that UE5 offers (despite the typical Unreal 5 hiccups you get). I did run into quite a bunch of visual glitches from flickering lights on grass, general environment lighting not being correct and changing on a whim, and in some cases environment objects losing color and becoming very gray tinted. It’s still a pretty game, but Emma (your main character) stands out fairly noticeably compared to the area around her in a lot of the more grass-heavy zones.

It’s rather unfortunate that, despite looking pretty alright, the areas don’t really change much. The starting zone is a field with forestry all over with some settlements scattered throughout full of robot enemies. I hope you really like this environment because while there are some breaks from the same scene, you won’t really get a meaningful change. You might enter a forest with a big chasm in the middle or a forest with a big wall and sewer you need to explore, but it remains a forest for basically most of the experience. It’s honestly disappointing because I liked the art direction.

To break up the exploration, you’ll be faced with a couple different kinds of mechanical enemies and wildlife. The robots themselves will attack you with bows or various melee weapons, but they don’t really change much so you’ll be memorizing their combat patterns pretty quickly. The combat is enjoyable despite the monotony you’ll likely feel after several hours from the enemies.

Koo, your dog companion, makes mixing things up fresh enough to keep you going. From AoE stuns to various statuses and elemental abilities, he’ll assist you in whatever way you need in any situation. He’ll even heal you if you find yourself overwhelmed in one of the many, many group encounters you’ll find yourself in.

The bosses suffer from a similar problem of being almost too same-y in their attack patterns. By the third boss I realized pretty quickly they all have had the same swipe left-to-right and vice versa attack that you’d parry into a stun for a decent damage window. They do each have their gimmicks, but it’s a lot of running away and shooting something at you while you wait for the back and forth swipe combo for your retaliation. It’s not bad by any stretch, but it does get stale when you realize the enemies don’t vary very much beyond what you see in the first two or so hours and the bosses all being the same fight with a different projectile every time. This is even worse when a section has you fight the exact same boss three separate times.

While what I’ve said before stands promptly in the middle of “it’s not bad, but it’s not exactly great”, the story and its delivery stand more on the lesser side of that scale. From the start of the game you’re told that you are a Purifier that has to deal with these big beasts in these different areas culminating in your confrontation with the Beast of Reincarnation. You get a couple flashbacks here and there effectively only showing you a tiny bit more about Emma, your protagonist, but otherwise it just leads you on with that premise for a stupidly large portion of the game. By the time I had hit the two-thirds mark, I had several characters deliver lines about how things in the narrative were actually much bigger and to trust them, but they simply refused to explain them.

Playing a game for two dozen hours and being strung along with vague statements and a whole lot of “but I’m not gonna tell you” dialogue is genuinely frustrating and is a really big “push me away from your game” factor. I don’t know if it was because they thought it was cool and secretive or just genuinely tried to mask a lack of deeper writing. Either way, please do not tell a story in this manner, please.

As a full package, Beast of Reincarnation is…fine. It’s not a bad game, but it certainly won’t be up there for games I’ll remember as some big blowout hit. It’s a step out of the norm for Game Freak, which is nice to see, but they still just seem to struggle with a complete package. If you’re looking for an action game and don’t mind something that isn’t mind blowing while still being relatively unique, it’s an option you might find similar to other games you’ve enjoyed. It’s a title I think would genuinely benefit from a sequel or another attempt in another setting to make use of any lessons learned from this game’s development, but doesn’t particularly stand out as is.

Note: Fictions provided us with a Beast of Reincarnation code for review purposes.

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