Beast of Reincarnation Is Out, and Game Freak's Swing at a Soulslike Mostly Connects

Game Freak spent 30 years making you catch monsters. Today it asks you to fight them instead. Beast of Reincarnation is out now on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, and it is a day-one Game Pass title if you would rather not pay up front to find out how it plays.

Short version: the fighting is the good bit, and the rest is patchy. It sits around 76 on OpenCritic and 73 on Metacritic as I write this, which is roughly where the reviews land in the mouth too. Plenty to like, a few things that get in the way.

How it plays

You are Emma, picking through a rotted, spore-choked version of Japan with a dog called Koo at your side. The combat is built around parrying, not dodging. Reviewers keep making the same point: dodge is for repositioning, but the parry is the engine. Land one and you fill an enemy's stagger meter, then cash it in for a big hit. Koo is not decoration either. His skills stack stagger fast, and you are juggling his commands mid-fight while you keep Emma alive. When it clicks, Push Square reckons it is nearly in full bloom. When it does not, you are fighting the camera as much as the beast.

The catch: it runs rough

Here is the honest part. Even on PS5, the recommended platform going by launch reports, the frame rate wobbles. TechTimes and others flag pop-in and drops in Performance mode, and Graphics mode is close to unplayable. For a studio making its first big-budget action RPG outside Pokemon, some of that is understandable. It is still not what you want on day one.

The story gets a similar shrug. The world is gorgeous and the mood lands, but the plot does not keep up with it, per CGMagazine. Mood wins, story wobbles.

Worth it?

If the combat loop I described sounds like your thing, and you have Game Pass, this is an easy afternoon to spend. If a shaky frame rate is a dealbreaker for you, it might be worth waiting for the first patch. Either way, the good news is that the actual game underneath the performance issues is one people want to keep playing, which is more than a lot of launches manage.