Beast of Reincarnation review

This isn’t one of my fully edited reviews, mainly because I’m not feeling Beast of Reincarnation 100%. I liked parts of it, but there are some things that really needed fixing for it to be a good game. Where I’ve landed: it’s an OK action game. It has fun combat and real potential, wrapped around a story and structure that let it down.

I played it on Xbox, and I recorded the entire playthrough. One quick note on length: the in-game timer says my first run took 53 hours, which isn’t accurate. It seems to keep counting while the game sits in Xbox rest mode if you don’t back out to the main menu. My real playtime, going by the Xbox itself and my recordings, was more like 25 to 30 hours.

It’s not a Soulslike

There’s been a lot of confusion online about this. Beast of Reincarnation was never advertised as a Soulslike, but people saw giant bosses, challenging-looking combat and a parry system and slapped the label on it anyway.

It isn’t one. You don’t lose anything when you die. There’s very little leveling or build control compared to a Souls game: three stats to level, skill trees that branch out from them, and combo-based attacks for you and your wolf companion. It’s an action game, and it’s best judged as one.

The story: big idea, convoluted payoff

You travel the world in the Walker, a giant vehicle that looks a lot like something out of Star Wars, hunting huge beasts called Nushi. These are animals infected by the blight, a root-like, flowering contagion that’s taking over the world and killing anyone it infects.

You play a vessel: someone without a soul, with no real history, shunned by everyone. Alongside you is your wolf, one of the Malefacts, animals touched by the blight that become companions. Your job is to hunt down the Nushi, absorb their power, and reach the capital, where the Beast of Reincarnation is expected to return. Every hundred years it destroys the world and restarts everything, and you’re one of the only people who can stop it.

That’s a strong setup. Unfortunately, the story gets very convoluted later on. Without spoiling it, it turns into a very meta concept that’s hard to follow, especially with the spirit, Violet, who’s somehow connected to the Beast and stays beside you the whole time. The payoff just isn’t great.

It doesn’t help that you can’t skip a lot of the story, and there’s a lot of it: long stretches of characters talking to each other. The voice acting is very wooden. That’s partly on purpose, since your character is supposed to be a soulless vessel that everyone treats badly, but the other characters are just as wooden, so it comes across as cold and it’s hard to care about anyone.

Combat: the reason to play

Combat is why I put 25 to 30 hours in and enjoyed most of my playthrough. It’s fluid, it’s smooth, and you can do a lot.

• Parrying is everything. The parry window is very forgiving, which makes sense, because you basically can’t fight without parrying constantly. There’s also a dodge and a perfect dodge.
• The gauge. Parries and hits fill a gauge along the bottom of the screen. It powers special moves, lets you slow down time, and fuels your wolf’s specials.
• Your wolf companion. He has his own skills you can unlock and mix and match. Calling on him plays out almost like a quick-time event: he does his move, then you follow up with yours.
• More tools. Your character can attack with her hair and use it to float, plus a bow and a crossbow for ranged attacks. There’s an emergency kit for healing.

Builds and skill trees

At camps, the game’s version of bonfires, you level three attributes: strength, vitality and fluorescence (projectiles, sneaking and more). I focused on strength and vitality for myself. For the wolf, I went with fluorescence and health for more special moves and better support.

The skill tree is genuinely cool. It’s mostly combo-based: you unlock moves and then add range and speed to them, with enhancements branching off each attribute. There’s even a new skill that only unlocks after you beat the game.

You only get one weapon type, a sword, but you can build around elements. I ran a fire build for most of the game. My wolf threw oil on enemies, then my flaming sword made them burn harder, with gear like Infernal End making burning enemies explode when they die. Thunder is probably the strongest build. The wolf’s Resurrection skill, which gives you an extra life, got a lot of use from me.

Two downsides: there’s no way to save build loadouts, so you have to remember what you had equipped, and by the end you get so powerful that your choices don’t matter much.

The big problem: variety

The game starts out really impressive. The first two chapters are semi-open, with interesting enemies, secret areas underground, and golems who give you hints and push the story along.

But the enemies you meet in those first two or three zones are the only enemies you’ll see for the whole game. There are maybe half a dozen Malefact animals (a deer, a boar, a bear and a couple of others). Everything else is a golem, a robot with a human soul inside. The corrupt ones use either swords or arrows, and that’s it.

The bosses are worse. One boss and his Malefact beast you fight three full times, then you chase and fight that beast another five or six times. The story at least explains that one, but the game does it with other bosses too. You fight the big deer again, and a bull-like boss at least twice. Most of the bosses that are different still share almost the same move sets. They look cool, but they’re not hard. Playing on Normal, I only died a few times in the whole game.

The world also shrinks as you go. Areas get smaller, there’s less to find, and I finished each of the last three chapters in under an hour. They’re incredibly linear, as if the game is rushing toward a big climax that doesn’t pay off. That, plus the enemy variety, is why I probably won’t keep going in New Game Plus.

Verdict: an OK action game

Beast of Reincarnation is polished, looks good and plays well. Its problems are the story, the enemy variety and especially the boss variety. With more variety, more exploration, and less of a rush to the ending, it would have scored a lot higher for me.

I also think some people are being a little too harsh. It comes from the studio best known for Pokémon, and some players wrote it off for that alone. It has real potential, and I’d like to see a sequel that builds on what’s here.

It’s not the best thing out there, but it’s better than some of the games we’ve had recently. If you can get past the storytelling and the repeated bosses, it’s a fun, straightforward action game that’s worth a playthrough. Don’t let negative reviews scare you off before you’ve really sunk your teeth into it.