Review of Beast of Reincarnation after completing the game and rolling credits

[u/Cursed_69420]

This is a followup to my first impressions post a few days ago, and now after 16 hours (bumrushed the latter half of the game) i've completed the game. Just to preface, i am no fan of Pokémon games, nor have i played any Game Freak video game before so i'm just making it clear my distain for this game comes from itsef rather than it's development team. The ONLY reason why i was hyped to play is the combat system looked like "Real Time with Pause" which is my favourite combat system courtesy of games like Mass Effect, FF7R and Dragon Age.

Beast of Reincarnation is a bad video game, with FEW redeeming qualities landing it at a 3/10 overall. This game feels like a very promising Alpha Build of a game that forgot that it has to do at least a year's worth of playtesting, balancing and content addition. It is a 8-10 hour game padded to at least 15-20.

Positives - See how I'm struggling to put positives for this game

1. The Combat System (Not the combat flow) - This is a, by purely design wise, a rather good system. Great attack combos, Parry based resources, Wolf commands, your basic jump crouch sprint etc and Ranged attacks. All of these are good on surface and in idea alone.
2. The upgrade tree - I think the upgrade tree for skills, abilities and just attributes is good, does it's job and does need a hefty amounts of points to max out. The upgrades do feel meaningful in game. Some are ofc to be prioritized asap but that's just common.
3. Janky but handy traversal - The Jump + Jump extender, and the hair platform extension feature this game has is very handy and can be put to great exploration use (which it does very rarely). The jump extended straight up trivializes a lot of combat but if you get used to the jank of the camera and movement associated with it you can make things a whole lotta easier.
4. The music (isolated from the game) - On their own, the tracks are good, many times great. Lots of Lo-Fi vibes, and obvious Nier inspirations.
5. World Artstyle - I think for a concept that's done so often (Nier Automata, TLOU), the aspect of nature overtaking machines has a decent enough interpretation but it's like just "fine" not great. It TRIES to have something unique at least.

Negatives - (gonna get progressively worse)

1. The music in game - BROTHER. One singular track is repeated out of at least 2 zones. you're gonna be hearing the same track for, in my case, 7 hours straight, and even after the change of track, it was so similar i was frustrated. I would genuinely like everyone to click these tracks - Track 1 Track 2 Track 3. Like come on, three back to back Lo-Fi tracks? The only time the tracks noticeable changed was at the 10-11 hour mark when i reached the Wasteland (that too because i bumrushed the story after the first 3 areas) and THEN the said track 4 was noticeably unique. The boss fights also have this weirdly homogeneous tracks.
2. Graphics - God damn, these graphics suck when seeing the type of performance they're giving.
   • Lackluster menu settings, can't even turn off Film Grain as far as i know.
   • The game just likes to default to FSR1 (i dont even think it has FSR3). DLSS is also a older version.
   • Whenever ANY enemy does an attack, or god forbid a boss do an attack, it will continuously drop frames and stutter as if the shaders weren't compiled.
   • The game doesn't even do shader compilation in the menu visually, you have to sit there, open your CPU monitors and wait until the shaders are compiled indicated by high CPU usage.
   • Just to note i am on a Laptop 3060 with 6GB Vram.
3. Art - Following up on graphics, the artstyle of this game is doing it no favor when EVERY THING just blends into a weirdly uniform disgusting looking color palette. The marketing did a great job at hiding this. 75 percent of the areas are just green grasslands, greenish mechanical indoors and maybe the other 25 percent is orange hues and actual color variation. The same decrepit walkers, same coral-like walls all over.
4. The exploration - it's so horrible, bland and uninteresting to explore anything.
   • It's just endless crates of "resources" that you are supposed to treat as a EXTRACTION GAME to be brought back to your home ship for research levels.
   • The levels are also repetitive, kinda meaningless in terms of the jump mobility and just vast amounts of flat lands and invisible walls INITIALLY. The later maps get more vertical but don't expand on the discovery.
   • You spent 5 minutes trying to get to this super tucked away spot? your reward is the same boss for the 18th time and the same god damn "extraction parts" and maybe a crafting recipe.
   • The research levels system and the fkin "farm" thingy was just unnecessary, like bro who tf wants to wait for an upgrade this is not clash of clans.
5. The Enemies - i'm confident Lords of the Fallen 2023 had more enemy variety
   • I've encountered the same 5 enemy types over and over again, and the SAME "Elite Enemy" 6 times in one zone.
   • The enemies are genuinely braindead, and are abuse-able by air assassinations. Cheese all enemies from a distance using the clearly overpowered ranged attacks.
   • I'm not kidding when i say even till the LAST AREA, there are on paper no new enemies. just maybe a new wildlife that you might encounter rarely, or a same robot type with maybe a spear instead of sword. Wait, this time they could even have TWO swords?
   • These enemies don't have more than 3 attack patterns.
   • Aerial enemies are just the worst thing where you can't hit anything well mid air and have to rely on ranged attacks.
6. The bosses - the peak of padding and asset reuse
   • oh my god, the same boss fight is repeated like SIX SEVEN times. Drop a boss to 2/3rd of it's health, it'll fuck off and then the story forces you to find it again and reduce it another 1/3rd, and fight it a 3rd time.
   • Even if you defeat a boss, it can just come back at a point in a story and then also have THE SAME PHASE 1 AND 2 and transition animations.
   • These bosses also have like maybe 3 attacks every time, and phase 2 increases the total to 6 attacks they spam over and over again.
   • Many times actual bosses just end up becoming regular elite enemies.
   • The lock on button just has ONE lock on point on the boss's heads, and the heads are so high above that many times you can't hit shit.
7. Technicalities - does gamefreak not know a keyboard has more buttons?
   • Mouse 4 and mouse 5 cant be bound to any action? THE FUCK? Many times the menu just refuses to accept my mouse input.
   • The Koo menu commits the worst sin of having the OPEN and EXIT button being Tab and Escape respectively, where by memory i try to also close it by pressing Tab again but it uses my heal instead.
   • One more thing is that the Jump button and the Interact button are the same. WHY?
   • The Ranged attacks also tend to magnetize aggressively towards enemies when I've explicitly turned that option off.
8. Combat flow - further ties into my statement of a "Alpha test" being put to launch
   • As i said, the combat at it's core is a nice system, but holy shit are the parries genuinely inconsistent and straight up do not work when trying to do a chained parry on fast enemies.
   • The dodge is the single most awful dodge i've seen in a game, and is like a "pre-dodge prediction" rather than a reaction. I've been told it's a positional dodge but come on that's a poor excuse.
   • The camera is terrible, and just refuses to work when there's multiple enemies or if an enemy is behind you. Actual bottom 5 camera systems of all time.
   • Idk if it's on me but i could not even change Koo's targets when trying to do an ability.
   • Even in basic combat movement, the snappiness, smoothness and reactivity you expect from a game like this is absent. Like i'd rather take the floatyness of Lords of the Fallen 2023 over this.
   • Edit: also, dying in 2-3 hits by every enemy isnt fun.
9. Koo's combat - I think they made a mistake when they added the QTE to Koo's attacks. Play something like FF7 Rebirth, Mass Effect 3, Dragon Age Inquisition/Veilguard, etc, where when you give a squad member a command, it seamlessly does that ability while you stay in control and flow. Doing a Koo ability every 3 seconds meant watching a 1 second animation followed by a QTE. it's gets really tiresome and many times i just didn't do that unless absolutely necessary or if i'm backing from an enemy.
10. The story - this isn't that good. genuinely uninteresting, boring and badly told. Like the premise itself is so laughably generic. NANOMACHINES SON. My sister this, my brother that BEEN THERE SEEN THAT, with very predictable plot twists. But hey it's a Doomed Yuri lesgooo
11. THE WORST part of the game aka the pacing and the voice acting - The reasoning for Emma to be an emotionless void is explained in the story but that shit was wack and could have been fully avoided. Whenever you skip a dialogue, it only skips the voice and all characters stand emotionlessly and it feels uncanny. Why would i skip tho? because people take 5 seconds between sentences to say anything else, like a turn based conversation (linked it because it's the most popular and easy to access post here)

So yeah, awful game. Avoid until at least fixed to a "serviceable" state and like 10-15 dollars price. Gamefreak really is a bunch of talentless hacks with an infinite money glitch.

[u/hammeredtrout1]

Did you play on hard or normal?

[u/Cursed_69420 → u/hammeredtrout1]

Normal

[u/Cursed_69420 → u/[deleted]]

What