Beast of Reincarnation's Steam page currently tells two different stories depending on when you loaded it. Its storefront widget still shows 51% positive across 864 reviews, a snapshot from earlier in launch week. The actual live tally has already moved past it: 1,199 reviews, 659 positive, 540 negative, landing the game in Steam's "Mixed" band at 55% positive. That gap between the number on the page and the number underneath it is its own small story: this is a launch reception still very much in motion, and it's moving the way a lot of AAA-adjacent action RPGs move in their first days, praise for ambition running headfirst into complaints about how the thing actually plays.
What people like
Praise clusters around specifics, not vibes. Reviewers keep reaching for the same comparisons: Sekiro crossed with modern Final Fantasy for the combat's rhythm, NieR: Automata and Horizon Zero Dawn for tone, Princess Mononoke for the post-apocalyptic Japan setting the game calls "Year 4026." The traversal system built around Emma's hair, which extends to work as a bridge or a lift depending on the terrain, gets singled out repeatedly as the thing that makes exploration feel distinct. Koo, the dog companion whose turn-based support abilities recharge off successful parries, draws similar credit for tying the game's two combat halves, real-time and turn-based, into something that actually talks to itself. On the technical side, players report clean 4K60 performance with ray tracing on, a cinematic frame-rate toggle for cutscenes that some found a nice touch, and mostly smooth Steam Deck performance outside of cutscene stutter. One pre-release reviewer captured that split directly, praising the Sekiro/Final Fantasy hybrid feel while noting native resolution played like console performance mode until ray tracing pushed frame rates past 100fps on UE5.
Where it falls apart
The complaints are just as specific, and they cluster hard around the first hours, the exact stretch where a new action RPG needs to close the sale on its combat feel before a player decides whether to keep going. Reviewers repeatedly call the combat "unrewarding," "floaty," and "repetitive," with parrying and guarding described as inconsistent enough to undercut the Sekiro comparison the same reviews are making a paragraph earlier. One negative review that otherwise liked the hair traversal and Koo's parry-based support system still landed on "floaty" as the word for combat, calling the game a 6/10 that could have been polished to a 9.
Camera control draws specific frustration: zoomed in tight with no FOV slider to open it up. One reported bug has a player using Koo's ability mid-fight against an elite enemy, only to get launched across the map while the boss fully heals. Elite encounters more broadly get flagged for repeating identical movesets.
Settings menus take their own share of the blame. Cinematic Mode defaults to locking cutscenes at 24fps, with an easy-to-miss toggle to turn it off. The default Depth of Field setting produces visible artifacts. There's no ultrawide support out of the box, and some players report display settings changing themselves, enabling V-sync has reportedly dropped resolution from 4K to 1080p without warning. Voice-over defaults to Japanese and can only be changed from the main menu, not from in-game settings, a small friction point that keeps showing up in longer reviews as one more thing standing between the player and the game underneath.
The trailer question
A handful of reviewers raise a separate issue entirely: that the shipped game "doesn't look like the trailers." Others push back on the negative wave altogether, pointing to a pre-release delay and a game leak as fuel for review-bombing rather than genuine dissatisfaction. Both camps, tellingly, tend to agree on the underlying diagnosis even when they disagree on motive: strong art direction, real ambition, undercut by combat feel and settings issues that several reviewers explicitly suggest waiting out for patches, and a price cut, to resolve. One widely-marked-funny negative review put it more bluntly, calling the game "a TEMU Stellar Blade for a AAA price."
Follow the original reporting as this develops.