So after finally completing Beast Of Reincarnation, this game barely and i mean BARELY gets a positive rating. Steam has no inbetween rating so I want to make it clear this game is directly smack in the middle in terms of a rating. Let me explain.
Pros:
Graphics: The game is very nice looking. It has its moments where it has weird texture glitches and looks a little blurry, but overall its a very nice looking game. Nothing super exceptional, but definitely not anything bad. The world itself is interesting to look at and explore, beautiful buildings, nature etc.
Music: The music in the game is pretty good. Its pretty obvious they are going for the stellar blade vibe with the sound track, especially the camp music and overall world ambience. You will notice it almost immediately. The battle music is very good and overall its pretty decent soundtrack.
Gameplay: This game takes a long time to ramp up and unlock a bunch of stuff, but once you do it is very very good. The battle system is well done, multiple enemy weaknesses to exploit and strategize around. Different combos and skills similiar to DMC to unlock and use that all do different things. Once you unlock a lot of the skills combat really gets fantastic. Koo provides some extra strategizing, using koo's abilities with your own to create combos and openings to exploit. Theres weapon upgrades, both ranged and melee, food cooking etc. The gameplay is solid, it just takes a while to get there, which is why this review is a middle review.
Weapons: There is a ton of weapons/swords in this game. Gamefreak essentially took their elemental system behind pokemon and instead of multiple pokemon of different types, you get multiple swords of different types. Lightning, fire, poison, etc. Each with their pros and cons. Some swords even combine "types", very similiar to multi type pokemon. You can see the inspiration.
Cons:
Very little enemy variety: I am not kidding when I say you will be fighting the same enemies the entire game. There is so few enemy variety, you can see gamefreak decided to utilize their famous copy and paste skills here. It gets extremely boring very quickly. What makes it worse, is these enemies do the same moves over and over. Different melee enemies? All pretty much have the same mechanics. You memorize all of it very quickly and before you know it, enemies become a joke very early on.
Repeat Bosses: The bosses in this game are a joke. When you have other games like stellar blade, souls games, even the recent mortal shell 2...all these bosses are epic, with varied different skill sets and THIS game bosses do the SAME ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MOVES over and over. And when i say moves, i am saying 1 or 2 moves max for most of them. Not only that, they want to extend the nushi bosses as much as possible, so alot of them run when you first fight them, making you have to fight them again. New round? Nothing changes. Same moves. One nushi I fought, I am not kidding, did the same tail swipe and ONLY the same tail swipe, the ENTIRE fight. The SAME ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ TAIL SWIPE. Over and over and over and over, till it died. These nushi are basically bigger versions of regular mobs. It is so uninspired, so boring and overall extremely disappointing. The games story bosses, based on characters in the game, are way better done HOWEVER, are still bosses that repeat the same 2-3 moves over and over and over again until death. It was a massive let down. These bosses are some of the most pathetic designed bosses Ive ever seen for a game like this.
Extremely stiff movement: This game has extremely stiff movement to the point where you can literally feel how trapped you are. It is not smooth whatsoever. When you explore the world the amount of times you are caught on terrain, glitch moving after landing because you hit a corner, its pretty bad. Stellar blade had stiff movement, but nowhere near like this.
Camera pre patch: The game released with one of the worst cameras ive seen for a game like this. They finally somewhat fixed it in a recent patch, but releasing the game with a super zoomed in camera like they did, with the speed this game is trying to achieve, was a massive design overlook and im glad they somewhat addressed it. It's not perfect, but the patch did help.
Random Puddle Deaths: The game has very shallow creeks and such in the world to explore, but apparently stepping in random parts of those creeks, means you fall into the atlantic ocean apparently and die/reset....yeah i dont get it.
Story: The game has very interesting premises and a pretty interesting world building that happens over 13 chapters. However, it takes extremely long for it to get anywhere (I wasnt interested till chapter 9) and then once it finally starts to get interesting, it falls on its face at the end as to the reasoning why all of this is happening. I just kind of face palmed at that point.
Overall Beast Of Reincarnation is a extremely mid experience that barely gets a pass into positive due to the late game combat, builds and experience overall. I am extremely disappointed in this game and really felt like it could have been so much better, This is a literal 5/10 for me. Extremely mid and extremely average with just enough to say on steams review rating "yes", but with a extreme caveat of...wait for a mega sale on this game and then your money will be worth it.
Thanks for reading.
