There've been many gaming surprises over the years and to me one of the biggest surprises has to be Remnant: From The Ashes back in 2019. A third person co-op shooter with soulslike elements and made by the same studio that made Darksiders 3, those being Gunfire Games. It was aiming to combine the ideas of multiple games at once, but in doing so it made it confusing to determine who exactly this game was made for. Is it made for people who enjoy apocalyptic settings? No, because it's incredibly action heavy and takes a sharp turn after the first world. Was it made for the Souls crowd for how hardcore it is and the many aspects it drew from Souls games? No, as even though there are Souls elements it is very hard to classify it as a soulslike. Is it for people who really enjoy looter shooter titles like Borderlands and Warframe? Absolutely not, because loot is not dropping every single second and the arsenal of weapons is pretty condensed. This is a game no one was really expecting to be good and the advertisement wasn’t really doing it a service. Then the strangest thing happened. People started playing Remnant: From The Ashes and overtime it started to hook them in. Recommendations went around and Remnant blew up.
Remnant: From The Ashes isn’t aspiring to do something incredible for any genre, but it manages to achieve a lot of things. Compared to most Souls games, multiplayer is actually well accounted for as the game was designed around it. Nothing better than you and your buds working through tough areas, coming up with strategies, builds to support each other, and trying to bring down the next boss. The game wasn’t apocalyptic, but rather an odyssey across different dimensions each with their own cultures and mysteries. Loot wasn’t being dropped every second, but each gun is carefully handcrafted and different from one another. It also had a procedural generation element where different bosses and weapons could be encountered each playthrough. Adding a butt load of replay value to what was a pretty condensed game, and the amount of content stretched further with two expansion packs. Remnant: From The Ashes blew up bigger than Gunfire expected and honestly they deserve the love they have been getting. It’s one of my favorite shooters and even though it does have some problems it’s one of few shooters I went back to replay. The game did so well that it garnered a sequel which came out midway this year.
The team really went all out with the sequel as Remnant 2 is a huge step up from the first. Where the first game set up the foundation Remnant 2 ran, and boy did it run far. There are actual builds now in the form of archetypes, the ability to mix two together, better multiplayer as now there are incentives for players to specialize in specific builds, more content, more interesting worlds to explore, better exploration, and the list goes on. Remnant 2 is considered one of the underdogs of 2023, and just like the first game it deserves every ounce of praise it has been getting. It was one of my more anticipated games of 2023 and it lives up to the hype. Remnant 2 is my favorite shooter of 2023, it's setting a new bar for what developers should do with multiplayer shooters, and it’s definitely going on my game of the year list. It’s not perfect, but man does it do a lot right. Let's talk about Remnant 2 and why it deserves your attention.
Story
The plot takes place decades after the events of From The Ashes. The hero of the first game tried to journey to a lighthouse with a mysterious glow. The lighthouse was said to be where the Root, a species of demonic tree creatures that took over earth, were coming from and the hero wanted to bring peace to a now destroyed world. A storm causes them to sail off course, but with the aid of residents from Ward 13 and a mystical crystal that allows them to travel across dimensions they eventually find a way to get to the lighthouse and destroy whatever was spawning the Root. That did not mean the Root was purged from existence as the Root spread so much that they were able to repopulate on earth and continue terrorizing people. The hero was praised for their actions and the residents of Ward 13 slowly made an inhabitable camp above ground, but Root monsters were still out there. This is where you come along. You, a traveler, and your best friend Cass are venturing through the streets of a ruined city hoping to find a place to settle down. You are ambushed by the Root, but are saved by the residents of Ward 13. One of them being a magic using an individual named Clementine. You venture back to Ward 13 where you meet Ford, the founder and leader of the encampment. Ford welcomes you and Cass with open arms, and soon enough you both settle down. Making new lives for yourselves.
Sooner later Ford asks you to accompany him with a task. You venture down to the depths of the ward, otherwise the former encampment from the first game, and there you reactivate the crystal used to travel across dimensions. Ford, realizing it’s intact, asks you to help him destroy it before it brings upon new dangers. He gets sucked and Clemenetine, who moments before told him not to go down there, chases after and gets sucked in too. This sends the inhabitants of the ward to dismay, and you build up the guts to jump into the gateway after them. This leads you to one of three dimensions far from our own. A forest of tribals and beasts, a glistening kingdom where the hierarchy has gone totally mad, and an alien world where the dominant species has gone almost completely extinct. Your goal is to explore these worlds, figure out where Ford and Clementine have gone. and maybe purge the Root forever.
Gameplay
Remnant 2 almost identically to the first, but a few changes have been made to make it feels like a refreshing new experience. Once you beat the tutorial you are given three archetypes to choose from. Whereas the first game asked you which weapons and armor set you wanted, here there are actual builds and classes to rock on. You can unlock new archetypes through discovery, and later you gain the ability to utilize a second archetype. Basically you equip two of them at once and get to use perks and skills across both. This adds a wide amount of build variety for the game and rewards you for fine tuning your playstyle. For example, I started off as a hunter who is good at dealing heavy damage from a long range and more so by hits on weak spots. I then unlocked the gunslinger archetype which is a playstyle that rewards you for playing aggressively, actively, and switching between your two guns. Each class can level up ten times and experience is gained the more you down foes. You can also unlock traits by defeating bosses, and these traits can be level up using Tomes of Knowledge found throughout the game. They grant you skill points and they allow you to invest in these traits. Stuff like maximum health increase, stamina increase, recoil reduction, damage resistance, and special stuff like gaining health back when dealing damage. It feels more like an RPG now and I appreciate them for taking the effort to make each one.
Combat is very much the same where you are bombarded by a horde of enemies and have to use your guns to fend off. You have two guns equipped at all times, a rifle and a handgun, and they come in a variety of flavors. From shotguns, long guns, assault rifles, heavy artillery, revolvers, and much more. New guns can be purchased as well as found through exploration. They can then be upgraded using iron, this game’s upgrade material, and doing so will increase the damage of your shots. If you don’t like a specific weapon and would rather respec into another one you can refund all the iron and half the cash you spent to invest into something else. There are also gun mods and mutators to equip. Mods will grant special abilities to use during combat and mutators will add passive buffs and perks. I had a Repeater Pistol and the coll skill I gave it was this echo shot that blast away foes when they were bundled up together. Very useful when rooms got too crowded and too stressful. Two bars you’ll be managing are the health and stamina bar. Health determines how many hits you can take before death and stamina dictates what actions you can do, mainly dodging and running. Health can be replenished using certain consumables, but it’ll mainly be refilled using the Dragon Heart. It’s basically the Estus Flask of this game and it can be upgraded if you happen to find a rare material known as Simulacrum.
During your adventure you will run into side quests, puzzles, and random encounters and they’ll usually reward you with good loot. Bosses are gonna mainly be the thing standing between you and progression. They have a large health pool, numerous skills, and do whatever it takes to send you towards your grave quickly. It’s gonna take skill, reflexes, and a ton of bullets until you down the goliaths. Bosses will usually drop a special material that can be used to craft either a special weapon skill or gun that cannot be picked up anywhere else in the game. If you want to gain stuff you missed without having to reset your campaign progression you can always go into adventure mode which allows you to freely explore and fight new bosses without doing things that may affect the story. I should probably mention this game encourages playing with friends, even though I never played with any. Having a friend can make things a lot easier, and they can revive you during combat at the cost of using one of their DragonHeart charges. Maybe a support character like a medic or handler can be really useful, and certain party compositions can help you get farther much more easily. Remnant 2 is just a fun game to play. It does the same thing over and over, but the core gameplay loop is solid. Hopefully you can find your lost friends, find out how to stop the Root, and save humanity and all the troubled dimensions.
Thoughts
Remnant 2 is gonna feel like more of the same for some players, but to me it was an outstanding sequel that made enough quality of life improvements and changes to make it feel well worth the sixteen or so hours I pumped into it. The combat loop is still solid as it rewards you for playing aggressively while also being careful. Running into a fight will most likely get you killed, and if you are not good with the weapons you have you’ll most likely have an even worse time. It’s by taking the time to master your tools, learn, and come prepared is what makes fights manageable. Every gun is fun to wield, packs a punch, and at least there’s no stat requirement when it comes to finding a new gun, Meaning you can immediately try it out at a firing range and see if you want to use it more in the future. Speaking of which, there's a firing range now is something the first game needed. Ward 13 feels more like an actual homebase now with facilities, different types of merchants, and citizens wandering about. Some of them you can even have fun banters with and even unlock secret classes.
I love the addition of archetypes and actual classes, because it gives the player build variety and incentive to see what class synergies work best. Exploration is much better in Remnant 2 as there are a lot of side dungeons and secrets lying around. Most of which will hide new gear, upgrade materials, and much more which gives you incentive to go and explore these areas. One problem it manages to avoid is not making the player confused on where to go. Passageways to new areas will be marked with symbols telling you whether it’s the path leading further into the main story, an optional area you can explore, and if you fully explored that optional area. Unlocking traits is fun and you really feel strong by the end as you rack up a ton of skill points and specialize in the stuff that will drastically help your character. Bosses are fun to fight, but I will say a few of them kind of suck. There’s one fight that is quite literally a puzzle and it’s gonna take a lot of trial and error until you get it right. There’s a fight involving a blob that flies around and you have to hop across platforms to get a good view of it. Some bosses you encounter during exploration are just normal foes given a beefy health bar, and while they aren’t overly utilized or recycled it does feel a bit lazy. Difficulty is mostly well balanced, and I say that because I don’t know whether to call this game fully fair. Some fights feel really well designed, level design accommodates fights pretty well, and at least you have ranged weapons to pick off foes from afar.
Yet, the difficulty tends to spike randomly and it’s not always for the best. Sometimes the game will have random ambushes where they throw a group of foes or one miniboss enemy down your way. An audio cue plays signaling when this happens so at least you can quickly react, but then you have moments where you are being swarmed from all sides and being kicked when you are down. Checkpoints are spread far apart and even though you don’t lose anything upon death it is annoying to backtrack long stretches again. I was watching a Ratatoskr review on this game and one thing he brings up is how difficulty is somewhat determined by how much you upgrade your guns. The more you upgrade the more health and damage enemies deal, and this can discourage you from trying out different weapons, However, in between the time of his review they added the ability to respec upgrade materials so this isn’t too much of a problem now. The game also has three different difficulty options, and I am gonna admit I played on the Survivor difficulty, which is the lowest. I will say though this is a Souls inspired game I’m fine with having multiple difficulty options, because it's a shooter where bullets are flying everywhere and they obviously intended the higher difficulties to be played with friends. One thing I also really liked is how the reroll system works where you get to restart the campaign but keep all your gear and upgrades. It makes the early moments of a new run much easier especially since you can start in one of the three major worlds. If one is too hard at first then start again.
Reroll is great, but adventure is probably the greatest feature of Remnant 2. Being able to freely explore, find things you may have missed, or things that may not have been given since Remnant uses procedural generation. You can also hop on over to your friend’s game and uncover new loot but still keep the campaign progress you have personally made. I know I played by myself and the best multiplayer game of the year is probably Baldur’s Gate 3, but Remnant 2 has some of the best multiplayer I’ve seen in a longtime. It’s not a requirement, but it’s handled well as you and some buds work together in what is a really hard game. Graphically Remnant 2 is a lunge forward from the first. In the first game humans had this cartoonish look to them, but now they actually look like people. The environments and worlds are stunning with my favorite probably being the glistening kingdom as it reminded me somewhat of Anor Londo but better. One aspect I’ve been putting off for the entirety of this review is the story, and the reason why is because it's not very good. The main plot feels a bit cliche at times and a lot of the main characters aren’t all that interesting. The ending is baffling to me, and I would say it’s worse and less satisfying than the first game.
However, it’s the journey that makes Remnant 2 redeemable. The places you end up going to and the side stories that hide within the three dimensions you hop into. Discovering what happened to a once prosperous alien world, or how a royal hierarchy fell apart within due to a spy and false king as they let the lower class die out in the streets. It’s great stuff, and you can tell because it feels like the writers ignored the main story just to focus on these dimension tales. Which does explain a lot when it comes to the quality of the main story. Remnant 2 is just brilliant overall. It improves, expands, and delivers a much grander experience. I strongly recommend it to anyone who likes a good challenging third person shooter or wants to see a unique take on the soulslike formula. One of the best soulslikes alongside Lies of P, and it’s easily one of the best of 2023. In the end I’m going to give Remnant 2 a 9.5/10 for excellence at best.
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