Beast of Reincarnation

Game Freak makes Pokémon. That's been the entire sentence for close to three decades, so a brand-new action RPG under its own name — no monster-catching, no Nintendo, a wolf companion instead of a partner creature — was always going to be read as a statement. Two days after launch, 1,280 Steam reviews have weighed in, and the score sitting at 54% Mixed is less interesting than what the two halves of that split actually say, because they mostly agree.

What both sides praise

Read the top positive and top negative reviews side by side and the same two things come up constantly, regardless of the thumbs-up or thumbs-down attached. Koo, the wolf companion who gives the game its "one-person, one-dog" structure, gets singled out by name in review after review as a genuine highlight — one player still finishing their first session simply calls him "best boi" and moves on. And the hair-based traversal — using it to lift yourself vertically or extend your reach horizontally — is the mechanic reviewers reach for when they want to describe something the game does that nothing else quite does.

Visually, the comparisons cluster around the same handful of touchstones: Nier: Automata, Horizon Zero Dawn, Stellar Blade, occasionally Sekiro for the combat rhythm it's aiming at. One reviewer put it bluntly — "someone at Game Freak played Stellar Blade, liked it, and it really shows" — and meant it as praise, not a knock. Nobody in the sample calls the presentation cheap.

Where it comes apart

The complaints are just as consistent, and they cluster in two places.

Combat feel. The single most-repeated line across the negative reviews, in slightly different words each time, is that the combat is floaty and doesn't respond the way the animations promise. Guards and parries are called inconsistent. One reviewer with under two hours played summarised it as a game that "looks far more ambitious than it actually plays" — striking at native 4K with ray tracing on, unconvincing the moment a sword connects. A bug report from launch day describes an elite enemy healing back to full health after being thrown by one of Koo's abilities mid-fight, which is the kind of thing that reads less like difficulty and more like an unfinished interaction.

PC display options. This is the complaint with the most independent confirmations. Multiple reviewers report no ultrawide support, a resolution ceiling below native 4K, a cutscene-framerate default locked at 24fps that looks broken until you find the separate toggle for it, and display settings that reportedly reset each other — turn on V-Sync, the resolution silently drops. None of this touches the game's design; all of it is the kind of launch-week rough edge a well-resourced studio typically fixes inside a patch or two, and worth knowing about now rather than assuming away.

There is a third thread worth naming honestly rather than ignoring: a handful of reviewers on both sides accuse the other side of "review bombing" — negative reviewers pointing at a leak that let some players access the game before the official simultaneous unlock, positive reviewers dismissing technical complaints as bad-faith piling-on. Reading the actual complaints rather than the accusations, the negative reviews are substantive and specific — settings menus, combat feel, a reproducible bug — not a coordinated score-tank over an unrelated grievance. Treat the "review bombing" framing as noise around a Mixed score that the substance of the reviews justifies on its own.

Why this reads as a snapshot, not a verdict

Every review in the sample used for this piece was posted within a day or two of launch, because the game is two days old. The achievement data makes that concrete: the earliest story milestones sit near 80-100% completion and everything past the opening hours drops to a fraction of a percent — not because players are quitting in droves, but because almost nobody has had the time to get that far yet. None of the usual tools for reading a mature review corpus — a settled achievement curve, a recent-versus-lifetime sentiment gap, a multi-year negative-review timeline — exist for this game yet. What exists is a single, unusually candid launch-day reaction, split almost exactly down the middle.

That's genuinely informative on its own terms. It tells you what the game gets right immediately (Koo, traversal, art direction) and what's frustrating immediately (combat feel, PC settings), and a fast, competent patch cycle would plausibly fix most of the second list without touching the first. It just isn't the same thing as knowing where Beast of Reincarnation lands once the initial reaction settles.

6 out of 10, as a launch-week score. Beast of Reincarnation is a genuinely ambitious first swing at a new IP, with a real visual identity and at least two mechanical ideas — Koo and the hair traversal — that reviewers on both sides of the split want more of. It's held back right now by combat that multiple independent players describe the same way, a stack of missing or broken PC display options that shouldn't have shipped in 2026, and an asking price that reviewers keep measuring against AAA expectations it doesn't yet meet. Wait for the first patch notes before paying full price, and expect this score to move once the game has more than two days of reviews behind it.