Beast of Reincarnation Review: Repetitive & Broken — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] Manscaped and their allnew Beard Hedger Plus. Visit manscape.com and use offer code skill up at checkout to get 15% off plus free shipping. More details after the whole time I was playing Beast of

[00:12] Freak makes off Pokémon. Where does it go? Pokémon is the single most profitable IP in the history of the human species. Literally, nothing makes it all go? We know it's not going into the Pokémon games. We can tell that just

[00:25] Beast of Reincarnation, it's pretty clear that money wasn't flowing into is a big disappointment. I say that as someone who was really interested in release, I've been tracking it since its initial reveal. I'm a bit of a sucker

[00:39] for near sloth, near automa, stellar blade, anime waifuss kicking the [ __ ] I'm also into this aesthetic and setting. What if the post-apocalypse, wasteland, nature had reclaimed the world? I love that idea. It's cool. It's

[00:53] interesting. But Beast of Reincarnation doesn't come anywhere near realizing the trailers are the best possible glimpse of this game. The reality is very understand about Beast of Reincarnation is that it actually wouldn't be so bad

[01:07] themselves to the 10 hours of content they had rather than trying to stretch it out over 20 hours. There's a decent enough game here, but it's stretched out and doled out in the slowest, most painful peacemeal way imaginable,

[01:20] enemy encounters to pat out the runtime. Bosses are the perfect example. You play into new bosses at the end of each level. It would surprise you to learn that the entire middle stretch of the game. A good four to five hours is just

[01:33] spent clearing new areas only to arrive at bosses that you've already killed. Just higher level versions of them with exactly the same move sets, the same have to do it all over again. Progression is another one. You

[01:45] around about the halfway point of the game. like how far you can level a weapon, the armor you found, the mod slots for that armor, most of your core rest of the game ignoring the item economy and progression systems because

[01:57] with them. The situation with environments is similarly bleak. Most of least the first three quarters of the game. They all look far too similar. back quarter, but you're just swapping out an overgrown forest for a vacant

[02:11] design, all of it is victim to this game's runtime, which forces both repetition and half-baked offerings. Dowled out over a really tight 10 hours, decent enough video game doled out like this, though it's painful. And that's

[02:25] setting aside the issues with the fundamentals of these things. There are incredibly simple, limited, and repetitive. Once you nail their two to phase 2 evolutions offer precious little variation. The progression tree does

[02:38] because the suite of enemies is so limited, there's no real incentive to you solve new problems thrown up by the combat puzzle because the combat puzzle never evolves. You basically seen it all within the first hour or two. The level

[02:52] forcing you to jump into all of these empty pockets of space to collect things walls because Game Freak weren't thorough enough in their level design. But the weirdest part of this package has got to be the visuals. It's just so

[03:05] ugly and blurry. I don't know how you get a game that looks like this in 2026, that has the infinite money glitch enabled. This whole thing just feels year of development time to really tighten the screws on all of it to get

[03:18] combat feeling right, get traversal feeling right, iron out the level new stuff, punch up the storytelling so Another year and maybe it would have had a shot, but it didn't get that. And as a

[03:31] disappointing, shallow, repetitive experience. And I can't recommend now or in the future, cuz I don't think patches are the cure for what hells this game. It's deeply unfinished and more terminally deeply uninteresting.

[03:43] >> She certainly seems [music] happy to be by your side.

[03:55] there is good enough. That's certainly not the case on lower-end machines, you'll see loads of performance complaints there. It reportedly runs okay on PS5, but around launch on Xbox, it was essentially unplayable with frame

[04:08] That's apparently been fixed with a recent patch. But it's pretty ridiculous that the game shipped in that state on Xbox and that reviewers were playing example of how thrown together all of this feels. On visuals, I will say that

[04:21] is really going to change depending on which exact frame you are looking at and the circumstances of that frame. I can show you any frame from like God of War matter what. There's consistency to the art design and the image quality. Not so

[04:36] with Beast of Reincarnation. The art design is a very strange patchwork. Industrial wasteland and factories and automatons smashed together with natural overlaid on top of all of that is this massive overgrown shrubbery. It's a

[04:50] messy concoction that could have come together but just doesn't here. When the game leans into a single aesthetic, it kind of works. A properly designed of the internal industrial spaces can look really good. It's when you get to

[05:03] the outdoor areas where it tries to mix all three of these aesthetics, that's and the game just looks bad. These visual styles haven't been cohesively woven together. All of that's made significantly worse by this blur. I wish

[05:16] Halo Campaign Evolved, the blur is largely caused by film grain and chromatic aberration. This here is way, way worse, and it's something else, feels like the resolution scale of the distant areas is much lower than the

[05:30] because sometimes everything looks blurry, foreground and background. I look at some scenes and I think, what's going on here? How has this happened? out of these scenes so often because I'm not thinking about the natural beauty of

[05:44] this weird muddy image wondering to myself, what's gone wrong in the computer to make it look like this. It's especially bad with lighting. The lighting engine is completely cooked. Lighting is either on or off. A good

[05:57] are meant to be coming through. You can see how much they blast out here with no rays coming down. You can see how noisy often you'll be exploring a space in the daytime because there is actually a

[06:10] dayight cycle here and you simply can't see what's in front of you because of terrible. It's rare these days to look at a modern game and genuinely have to critique its ability to generate a quality image. We touched on it a little

[06:22] settings obstructing the image. Take those settings off and it will look fix here. This is much more deeply baked in and I don't think one or two or even on here. There are other technical issues too, but the most disruptive

[06:37] issue I faced is the camera during combat, which is horrendous. It centering, no way to clearly frame the action. You're constantly surrounded by enemies, and the camera makes no effort to show you all of that action. On top

[06:50] same stick that controls target lock on selection, and you can't change that trying to move the camera often just results in you accidentally targeting an enemy that you didn't want to target. Fundamentally, this just means that most

[07:03] That's particularly bad in this boss fight where a number of small enemies spawn alongside a boss with a massive hitbox. I swear to God, the only thing camera. And it's a twofold problem because not only do these little robots

[07:16] make target locking annoying, but the lock on also targets the head of the boss, and you can't really pull it off there. So, it's very easy to take big swings at the air because the lock on hasn't been properly calibrated, and the

[07:28] hitbox isn't right. It is incredibly frustrating to dump your cooldowns and then get massively screwed by both camera and enemy hitbox issues. I hated camera and enemy hitbox issues. I hated this boss so much.

[07:46] unpolished games I've reviewed in quite some time. You could fix some of it with big deal. And getting rid of this blurriness is going to be a very big the overall art design either. Just a very incomplete, disappointing technical

[08:00] And I don't see a quick turnaround. These issues are going to be here for quite some time. I think

[08:17] Reincarnation. It's not an open world game. It's a level-based game where you world hubs. The first one you get to is quite deceptive in that it's fairly freedom to explore in different directions and there's an incentive to

[08:30] do that exploration early on because the progression systems are firing on all seems promising, but it's a promise thoroughly broken as you get later into the game and realize that that level was an anomaly because the vast majority of

[08:42] They're very linear levels dressed up as semi-openworld explorable spaces. Imagine really wide but linear canyons or quaries or factories that might give you a small branch left or right, but

[08:55] that's about it. You're being shuttled down these fairly linear spaces most of paths in games like this to offer up some variety. Some puzzles, some different enemy encounters, some side quests offering unique story vignettes,

[09:08] anything like that. Think of a river with a small creek veering off to the side. The creek's function is the exact same as the rivers, just on a smaller scale. These offshoot areas are just little creeks. They offer the same thing

[09:21] the main path does, only less of it. And they almost exclusively reward you with useful to you in the first half of the game, after which point they stop being they provide to you, so you have no incentive to even pick this stuff up.

[09:34] exploring these levels because of the way that the level design works and the be very vertical spaces, and you've got to grapple. you can use to pull up to certain places, but the grapple point only appears in very specific places,

[09:48] of secrets hidden high up, so you're expected to kind of jump around the geometry to reach them. And most of the geometry is just empty shelving. It's I've never encountered another game with the same approach to level design, but

[10:01] it mostly just results in you feeling like you're exploring unfinished levels. Like, there should be more stuff around you, more enemies, more structures, more anything. But it's all just empty except for the one shining collectible waiting

[10:14] when you pick it up, you realize you didn't need it anyway. All of this is awkward. Your jump sort of fires roots out underneath you to carry you forward. momentum and it feels very unpleasant to use. So the levels are ugly and weird

[10:29] and not fun, and they all kind of feel the same, and they aren't rewarding, and believe it or not, it actually gets worse because as you approach the back gives up on the illusion of interesting spaces and just starts shuttling you

[10:42] later in the game where you see this huge expansive level in front of you, and you think that there must be a lot to explore here. But in reality, you're standing on top of a cable car that runs for like 3,000 m. It's a long ride where

[10:55] you just stand there doing nothing and all the geometry underneath you is look down on while you cruise over it on your gondola. Quite a few of the later actually, where you see a map and you think there must be a lot to it, and

[11:08] realize that most of it is empty space that's about getting you to the next reused boss encounter as quickly as possible.

[11:30] aspects, but generally speaking, your appreciation for them gets worn down by the camera and how disruptive it is during combat. There are plenty of other issues, too. Perhaps the biggest one is enemy variety, which is extremely

[11:42] limited. They're really only three to four robotic type enemies and three to four animal type enemies. To be fair, there are technically more than this, infrequently that it ultimately feels like you're fighting the same three or

[11:55] Within those enemies, there isn't nearly enough variation in what they are and contribute to the battlefield. There's essentially an archer type robot and a melee sword robot. And everything really is just variations on the sword robot.

[12:09] One is just a fod type enemy that goes down really easily. One is a big looking you up if you aren't paying attention. One dual wields katanas and he will some other subtle variations, but ultimately it feels like you're fighting

[12:22] You might hope some identity would come through in the beastial enemies, but it attack patterns are quite similar to one another, and they're very telegraphed. on, so once you learn their attack patterns within the first hour or two,

[12:36] repeating that throughout the rest of your playthrough. As repetitive as the worse. They're almost all bigger variations of the smaller beastial do have expanded move sets, though. They're not one to one. You're really

[12:50] bosses down. You can learn them within the first one to two wipes, then rinse which is meant to be them going Super Saiyan and really changing things up, their attacks are repeated, so it feels like you're doing the same fight twice,

[13:04] but you're not just doing it twice. You're probably doing it four, maybe even six times depending on the enemy because towards the midpoint of the game, it completely gives up on introducing new boss types and literally

[13:17] before. I couldn't believe it the first time this happened. And I cleared an boss. And when I got there, I saw one I'd already killed. I was like, "Okay, new capabilities, new moves, new animations, etc." No, he was exactly the

[13:30] same, right down to the phase 2 transformation animation, and I had to levels after this where I had to do exactly the same thing, killing bosses another level after that where I had to kill the same identical boss twice in a

[13:43] row. And that's on top of one recurring enemy who keeps turning up with a beast like three times and it's the same fight every single time. Oh, and this game is also the master of that annoying thing where you win a battle but lose the

[13:56] cutscene. It happens so much here. I wanted to throw the controller at the screen at one point. You beat this guy in this really long drawn out fight, rolls and all of a sudden you're basically dead and the guy runs away.

[14:08] design is not good. It's too simplistic and the copy and pasting of previously defeated bosses is egregious, especially when they don't gain new capabilities obvious padding. You can absolutely tell that Game Freak made X amount of content

[14:22] get the runtime up. And this was the proposal to do it. Build really generic feeling empty levels with reused enemies and reused boss encounters at the end. quarter of this game and absolutely nothing of value would have been lost.

[14:35] shortfall, progression. There are functioning itemization and ability these systems weren't aligned to the increased artificially inflated runtime. have been the right length, which is why you max out many of your progression

[14:50] game. By around the halfway point, you get the most meaningful upgrades on your character sheet, and you've got most of upgrades for your dog companion similarly max out very early. I was

[15:03] new progression systems would open up, but they didn't. This has an important knock-on impact. Combat never becomes more interesting after that point. Very combat sandbox, and the weapons you get don't evolve it at all. The skill tree

[15:16] crucially, because the enemies don't change in the later part of the game, utility. They're not solving any new problem because you already know how to doing it the whole game, and there are no new enemies giving you new

[15:31] are ultimately just pointless. Oh, and one little nitpick. When you get new armor, it actually doesn't show up on your character. You'll see the icon in Emma will wear exactly the same outfit throughout the entire game's duration.

[15:44] No change. I imagine this was to reduce the need to, you know, change cutscene appearances or something. I don't know. But it feels incredibly disappointing, you know, an evolving wardrobe is really the least you can hope for. On the

[15:58] really nice and it's very satisfying when it lands. After that, the rest of really just spamming your one attack button most of the time and chaining it on the X button. The aerial stuff that you're seeing here kind of happens on

[16:11] its own. And when you do try any more ambitious aerial stuff, it often is more trouble than it's worth because enemies track you in the air really effectively while you're up there because you can't block or parry in the air. It's actually

[16:24] the time, especially against bosses. The combat really doesn't feel great in this series of parries land and the animation flashiness is genuinely good. You might pretty cool." And you'd be right. It does look pretty cool. Playing it is a

[16:39] very different story. It is far too easy, far too repetitive. The enemy too recycled. And overall, it's just not a worthwhile experience for people who enjoy character action games or near automata or stellar blade, I think

[16:53] they're going to find themselves really disappointed with this one. disappointed with this one. [music] >> Try to give Emma some space on it. I probably would have been sort of okay

[17:08] with a lot of this stuff if the story really hit. Look at something like Near ever made. Its visuals are pretty basic. Its enemy variety is pretty limited. That story line, those characters, that

[17:20] music, that was generational, man. If you can get one thing really right in a ought to get your story right. Unfortunately, the story here is not great, but the way it's told is truly awful. To this point, I described a game

[17:33] stretched out over 20. The clearest example of that is the reused bosses. approach to storytelling. The main character, Emma, is this vacant girl who some sort of synthetic and the whole time she's kind of like, "Oh, kindness.

[17:48] What does kind mean friends? What does friend mean? The ocean? I've never heard and over again at this point is so of the games that clearly inspire this one. All of the storytelling is in that

[18:02] group of companions around you and one of them is a small girl who cooks for feels like this. >> She's strong and her hair is long.

[18:15] >> She's strong and her hair is long. >> Wow. I wonder just how strong she is. Her hair's long. Maybe I should grown mine out, too.

[18:33] there. It's obviously intended to slowly eek out a feeling of affection and breaking down the barrier of awkwardness, dripfed over 20 hours, so ever become anything other than really

[18:46] you're thinking, "What's it going to be this time?" and it's always some stupid dinner with a friend or something. The story line does go somewhere in the end, massive whiff. She's obviously that, you know, Eve/2B style character meant to go

[19:02] becoming more human and understanding the nature of her own humanity and free choice and so on. It does all the things you'd expect, but you've seen it before and it doesn't really land here because Emma stays so vacant and vacuous the

[19:14] emotional breakthroughs, she's just boring. The whole cast is boring. They moments in this game storytelling, and had they been delivered at a steady Instead, I came to truly resent the fade to black that precages yet another slow,

[19:29] dull, drawn out cutscene that is clearly meant to serve as padding before the meant to serve as padding before the next actual interesting thing happens.

[19:51] combat can be pretty good at times. The parry feels nice, and when you string a enemy to a big attack, and it really lands with all the animations flying and the levels are also nice to look at. That beginning part of the game and its

[20:05] pretty solid. And the progression systems at the front end are working. stronger, gaining new capabilities, really seen the best of what this game has to offer in the first hour or two

[20:18] because after that, it's just repeating it over and over and over again. Repetitive level design, repetitive and drawn out storytelling, repetitive enemy progression systems that become redundant at the halfway point cuz

[20:31] wears out its welcome, and that's if you can get past the technical issues like can definitely see how this might land with some people. I've already seen some of that sentiment, people accepting it for what it is, which is clearly a very

[20:44] certain vibe. On that basis, if you want to imagine that the vacant look in you can certainly imprint some significance onto the story yourself. If the level design that worked for you and ignore the rest, you can. And if you

[20:58] flashiness of the animations, you can certainly do that, too. I'm not saying saying that on balance, there's not enough of it. And what little there is over a 20-hour period when had it been smartly portioned and delivered inside

[21:12] enough to squeak by. Ultimately, this is just a real bummer. We like to make this was their chance to redeploy their considerable resources towards something. And this just feels really rushed and ironically enough, lowbudget.

[21:26] shoestring, except it's actually being made by literally the most profitable studio on the planet. I think it was from this, but in the end, it delivers very little. And what little it does

[21:39] reserves of your patience and goodwill are thoroughly spent. I do not recommend are thoroughly spent. I do not recommend this.

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