REINCARNAGE Review

A Free Boomer Shooter With Teeth

REINCARNAGE, released August 31, 2026 by solo developer and publisher CUPPAKILL, is a hand-drawn first-person arena shooter set in the same "Xentiverse" as the studio's earlier bullet-hell game INCARNAGE, once again following the gore-soaked antihero Nilus. It's completely free, and its seventeen English-language reviews are unanimously positive, with the comparisons reviewers reach for telling their own story: DOOM Eternal and Ultrakill come up again and again, unprompted, as the closest reference points for what CUPPAKILL has built here.

No Reloading, Just Juggling

The core combat idea is simple and mean: guns don't reload, they run dry and get discarded, which means every fight is really a scramble to keep a fresh weapon in hand by looting corpses or throwing an empty gun straight into an enemy's face for extra damage. "The gun play felt good and the gun throw was always satisfying to hit," one reviewer writes, and another singles out "using finishers to zip over to some poor soul on the floor above" as their favorite thing the game lets them do. That finisher-to-heal loop, execute an enemy up close to top off health and dash across the arena, is the game's other pillar, and it's the mechanic reviewers cite most often when explaining why REINCARNAGE feels distinct from a straightforward corridor shooter despite its clear DOOM Eternal DNA. One reviewer frames it almost as a compliment to the genre's best recent entry: "very obviously inspired by DOOM Eternal as it plays very similarly to that, so if you enjoyed DOOM Eternal do give this game a whirl."

Short, Sharp, And Built To Be Replayed As A Puzzle

Multiple reviewers describe finishing the game quickly, one clocks it at "an extremely solid 90 min game," but nobody in the pool treats that brevity as a flaw given the price. What's more interesting is a smaller thread of reviewers who describe replaying levels not as a shooter but as something closer to a puzzle: "As someone who likes to run around trying to figure out levels like puzzles, I love this kinda stuff!! Plus if I'm in the mood to play it 'normally' as an actual shooter, it's super fun like that too!!!" That dual read, a level either sprinted through with guns blazing or picked apart more carefully for efficient enemy chains, suggests the level design has more going on beneath the surface than the runtime alone implies, even if the story and progression stay deliberately minimal.

A Couple Of Small, Uncorroborated Wishes

The complaints in this review pool are notably mild and don't overlap much between reviewers, which is itself a sign of how little there is to actually dislike. One reviewer wished for a difficulty select option; another found it "both difficult and unnecessary" to tell similar-looking guns apart at a glance and wanted small visual or effect differences to distinguish them. Neither complaint is echoed by a second reviewer, so they read as individual nitpicks rather than a pattern worth weighing heavily, but they're worth naming since they're the only friction anyone in the pool bothered to mention at all. Set against that is unreserved praise for the hand-drawn art direction specifically: "the hand drawn aspect and the art is AMAZING," one reviewer writes, and another calls the whole package "peak human creativity" for its brutal finisher animations.

A Developer Still Showing Up

CUPPAKILL didn't launch and vanish. The ISteamNews history shows a v1.1 "Post-Launch Tweak" just three days after release, a soundtrack release on YouTube a week later, and a second update titled "v1.2 - Rags of Ponos" ten days after launch, a rapid cadence for a completely free, solo-developed game. One reviewer also flags a paid "supporter DLC" attached to the free base game, framing it as the right way to put money toward a project this generous: "This game should not be free... it's a good thing the game has a supporter DLC at least, try the game, buy the dlc if ya liked what ya played." That's a value proposition that costs a player nothing to test and gives them an obvious, low-pressure way to pay CUPPAKILL back if REINCARNAGE lands.

Verdict

REINCARNAGE doesn't try to reinvent the boomer-shooter revival so much as sharpen one specific idea inside it, no reloading, just looting and throwing, and build a tight, free, hand-drawn arena shooter around that single hook. The DOOM Eternal and Ultrakill comparisons are earned rather than lazy, the finisher-to-heal loop gives fights a real rhythm, and the two mild complaints on record don't corroborate into anything larger than personal preference. Progression and structure stay thin, this is closer to a focused arcade experience than a long campaign, which is the fair trade-off for something this short and this free.

What ultimately separates REINCARNAGE from the glut of other free Steam shooters chasing the same DOOM Eternal high is how specific its influences feel once you look past the surface-level speed and gore. The gun-discard loop isn't just a reload skip, it's a resource-management decision made in real time, under pressure, with every corpse on the floor a potential answer to running dry. CUPPAKILL clearly understands that a boomer shooter lives or dies on its verbs, and gave players exactly enough of them, loot, throw, finish, dash, to make ninety minutes feel dense rather than padded. For a genre this crowded, that kind of restraint is a rarer skill than raw scale, and it's the reason this free release is worth a look even for players who think they've already had their fill of DOOM Eternal clones this year.