Two years ago a trailer was shown off for a PSVR game called Reborn: A Samurai Awakens. The trailer showed fast paced VR combat and a variety of enemies. Since that trailer was first shown we hadn’t seen much from the game until recently, when another trailer was shown and the release date was revealed. So now that it’s out, is Reborn: A Samurai Awakens any good?
Reborn: A Samurai Awakens is a PSVR action game that has you going level by level defeating waves of enemies. The game has a story, but it doesn’t go in depth and is hard to understand because of text issues. The game’s story is all given through text that appears on screen, there is no voice acting. And the text has a few grammatical issues and sometimes moves way too fast to read. But the story is definitely not the focus of this game.
The gameplay is combat focused. You have both a lightsaber and a gun that you can swap between at any time for both hands. And you also have a gravity pull that allows you to pull droids towards you and also teleport to unreachable areas. The game has you moving from one area to the next as you fight enemies and try to get to the end of the level, there aren’t any puzzles or challenges in the game, it’s just combat. There are two different types of enemies in the game, ones that fight you up close, and ones that attack you from far away. I thought the enemy variety was pretty lacking, as I was often seeing the same enemies in across every level I played. The gun combat works well when fighting against enemies, but the lightsaber combat is atrocious.
The lightsaber can be used to block enemies attacks and to fight enemies, sadly neither of those work very well. When blocking enemy attacks it almost never worked and was really annoying to deal with. It got to the point where I just stopped trying to block at all, as it was more efficient to just attack. The attacks work better but often I found my attacks were not landing on the enemy or dealing any damage. The sword combat is just broken and really needs to be fixed. There is also a dodge mechanic which is used for avoiding lasers, and luckily that works perfectly, but it didn’t really make the game any more enjoyable for me.
When fighting enemies all I did was just slash my sabers up and down until they were dead, there was no strategy to it. And it doesn’t help that the enemies don’t work very well either. The ranged enemies are fine, but the other enemies just aren’t fun to fight and take a while to kill. The animations for the enemies also weren’t fluid and often their animations were getting interrupted by other animations.
Besides the combat all you’ll be doing is moving from one area to the other, and since the combat doesn’t work very well there just isn’t any fun to the game. The only good thing I found about the game was that some of the environments looked cool. But even then a lot of the textures throughout the game were low quality, and many areas looked blurry.
The game also has several glitches in it. One time in the middle of a level the game crashed and I lost all of progress in that level. And another time an enemy kept repeating the same animation and was invulnerable to my attacks. The game just doesn’t work very well and is very repetitive and boring to play.
So overall, Reborn: A Samurai Awakens isn’t a good game. To make a game like this that is combat focused, you need to nail the combat and make it fun enough to keep the players engaged through the entire game. But the combat just doesn’t work here and it’s just not enjoyable to play. Levels feel really long because of repeated enemies coming after you wave after wave, and there isn’t anything else to change up the gameplay. It’s also not a difficult game because enemies don’t do much damage and there are health items given to you constantly. The game needs a lot of major fixes and redesigns for it to be even somewhat enjoyable. So at it’s current state, I just can’t recommend it.
