Remnant 2: Rising Well Beyond the Ashes

Imagine if you will a simple concept: What if you had Dark Souls but with guns? Remnant: From the Ashes took a bit longer than I would’ve liked, but I did feel it finally click in, and for all the dying I wound up doing, I still walked away pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed my time there. Remnant 2 though? Well, I understood why people liked the Souls-like genre early on. I see now why people really get into these games. While I argue Remnant has gone beyond the Dark Souls formula a bit to become its own thing, I would be grossly representing Remnant 2 if I said it didn’t have me hook, line, and sinker from the get-go regardless.

Root Cause

You can almost taste the neurotoxin! Seriously though, I saw more puking here than the entirety of my time in college.

Remnant: From The Ashes started off quite a harrowing plot, introducing what may be the most pissed-off ents that you’ve ever seen. This Root as it’s called is an invading species that only desires to devour and plod onwards, with the first game focused on reclaiming some ground lost to the Root, particularly around Ward 13, a bunker that acts as a safehouse from this scourge. Come Remnant 2, the world is six years ahead from the first game’s events, with the player character of the first game being considered a legend for the things they’ve done to help humanity push back the Root. You begin as a humble explorer that gets swept up in the madness when the old leader of Ward 13 and a young woman named Clementine suddenly gets slurped up and teleported by a big red crystal capable of interplanetary travel. You’ve got a purpose, according to the folks at Ward 13, and that purpose now is fishing your friends out of whatever realms they’ve been dropped off in. The lore is surprisingly in-depth, with little nuggets of information scattered amongst examination text and books laying around. Not all of it has a deeper meaning, with good amounts of examination text just pointing out basic stuff, but it all fleshes out a surprisingly well-thought-out world.

What really tethers the story together though is the world-building beside it, something that occurs through interplanetary travel more than anything. Each world you go to has its own stories, characters, fates, and endings, all seen in full and interacted with in full by the player themselves. Fairy mirror worlds accidentally smashed into ye olde London-esque streets, zombified colony ships that made some mistakes attempting travel via a black hole, and even blocky stonework mazes that defy physics await in the world of Remnant 2. There’s lore detailing vast amounts of these worlds, and it’s done in a tastefully succinct fashion that you probably won’t mind at all being told mostly through notes since it’s not overloading the player with lore and is pretty well harmless to skip anyways.

A How-To Guide For Alien Tree Trimming

Because when the garden shears ain’t cuttin’ it, you go get the gilded Fae railgun.

There is a degree of randomness to getting around in the world of Remnant 2, what with it being something of a roguelite. The world you start off in is randomized, the parts of the world you’ll have access to are randomized, and even the mini-bosses and some loot is randomized. Can this lead to a beginner run getting horribly ruined by some unfortunate luck? You bet your ass it can. It’s unfortunate, but some areas are easier to deal with than others, something that does indeed tend to crop up in this genre. I don’t throw the Souls-like tag on here lightly, you can absolutely get destroyed by even basic enemies if you aren’t keeping a close eye on your health and ammo.  It’s a hard swallow for some, no question about it, but the rewards often far outweigh some of the potential hell you’ll go through to get them. Thankfully, if you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed, you can have up to two extra friends along for the ride, albeit at the cost of enemies taking a bit more damage and dealing a bit more of it out. There’s also a total of four difficulty levels, so those that aren’t feeling punished enough can get some more challenge in their runs.

You’re gonna want to pay attention to the mods you pick up, the materials you get, and the weapons you intend to upgrade if you’re going to last out there. Builds are 100% viable here – you can spec into a lot of different types of builds and still do fine for the most part. There’s always going to be some exception to the rules, and Remnant 2 is no different, but for all intents and purposes, if you want to make a shock build or a crit build or even a melee build, you have more than enough tools to do that. The Trait system that helps set up passive stat buffs is in-depth, and finding new Trait cards either by levelling your archetype or finding them out in the wild will help with that. That said, there’s more to making builds in Remnant 2 thanks to the wide array of things you can find. You’ll start the game with one archetype that will cement in what kind of playstyle you’ll want to go with, from dog-focused support classes to crit-focused rifleman classes, and that’s not even going into the sub-archetypes that you can get. Some of those sub-archetypes are well hidden, and the one I went with, the Engineer, required me to slurp up some tasty neurotoxin to even get to.

A Beautiful Day For Some Gardening

Yup, if it glimmers like gold and has spires touching the sky, it’s gotta be some derivitive of elves. Or fairies. Or whatever they’re called now.

Already, I could tell that there were some solid upgrades to the visuals. I won’t lie, there were quite a few stutters getting all that pretty scenery to safely load up (more on this later), but it looked damn decent in the little shanty town set up just above Ward 13, in an abandoned shipyard that’s actually doing pretty well in terms of being a stable, functioning little haven for humans. Where Remnant 2 really started showing off was when I got my first interaction with this series’ favourite: giant red crystals. These giant red Jolly Ranchers are the key to literal planetary travel, and your first world is not guaranteed. See, Remnant likes to randomize things up a bit and throw in a bit of roguelike to their worlds, meaning you’ll be starting somewhere different more often than not.

I myself got thrown into the world of Losomn, but in a completely different spot than either of my friends did. See, that world’s a bit wonky, it’s actually two worlds colliding together, which, by the way, made the place pretty freakin’ big. I got plopped off in the Palace Court, a towering palace gilded with gold, dyed in a faint autumn hue from the browning trees. I made my way through gaping halls and bountiful libraries, all still decorated in gold and slick marble, gawking and wondering where in the absolute hell I was. And there it was: That mystique, the fascination, the utter primal unga-bunga desire to get in this sprawling mess of opulence and grandeur and explore the hell out of it. This whole world was smashed together, with one side being a palace with its own mirror world where the two sides war endlessly, and the other side is what I can only describe as diet Yharnam from Bloodborne, filled with vertically-challenged patchwork roads and a London-streets gaslight atmosphere.

Both sides feature entirely different enemies (though they can cross over into other areas) and their own unique puzzles and lore. Stuff like clock towers that literally control the flow of time, a jester that frequently helps you along the palace, and quill pens that help fill in magic doors leading to smaller dungeons. The more I messed around in these radical worlds, the more I was endlessly fascinated by them and what strange wonders they’ll have next. The best way to enjoy Remnant is to treat it just as much of a game of exploration as a game of combat, and the worlds built here do just that.

Needs A Bit of Pruning Here and There

Believe me when I say you’re probably going to wind up hating this thing just as much as I did.

I’ll admit, immersing myself in this world as thoroughly as I have, I’ve seen just as much extremely good as harrowingly bad. I know some of this is stuff that will likely be fixed as patches go out, but there are a few that are gameplay mechanic focused and they did not go over well with me, or any of the others I was playing with.

We’ll start with the bosses here because they’re notorious for having difficulty levels literally all over the place. One boss by the name of the Labyrinth Sentinel is pretty well a puzzle boss, and its mechanics are rather simple. You are in a tiny maze of stompy and floating cubes, with the stompy cubes patrolling the walkable parts of the labyrinth and the floating cubes hanging out above. The stompy and floaty giant cubes all have white spots you shoot to make holes in them and, after you blow up all the white spots, will lose their purple glow and show the damage via the boss’ overall health bar. What makes this heinous is the fact that if you get flattened by these cubes, it’s a one-hit death. Add in multiple gaps in the floor that will also kill you, and floaty cubes launching projectiles and AOEs, and you have a recipe for absolute misery. That was bar none the most taxing boss I had to deal with, with no other boss showing its ass quite like that one. I would’ve been fine with even chunking off half my health per screw-up, that’s fine, but a one-hit death that awaits if you misstep even once as a rapidly marching death cube pins you to the ground? Never. Again.

Something else I catch the brunt of often is constant general instability. This thing crashes often, with Unreal Engine spitting out damn near the same code every time. Now, I’ll be the first to admit my rig is getting a bit older. The 1080 Ti doesn’t quite march like she used to, but I know it isn’t just old hardware doing this. I get frame drops, sure, but nothing that doesn’t smooth back over after a few minutes, nothing to be really that concerned about considering the age of my rig. Then there are the straight-up lock-ups that essentially mean it’s done and going to crash. I really hope there will be some stability patches down the road because there are few things more infuriating than finally getting the edge on a frustrating boss just to have the whole game crap the bed.

There are a few minor bits here and there that kinda sour the deal, like the fact that you can’t upgrade armour anymore, nor does it have set bonuses. I admit, I do like that I don’t have to deal with the entirety of a set I don’t like, whether that be appearance or stat, just to get the set bonus, but I would’ve liked at least something more to show that the armour matters. It’s so sharply detailed and interesting to look at, so seeing it neutered like this makes it seem like a waste. I can live without upgrading it, God knows I chew through upgrade materials like nobody’s business as is, but at least give a set bonus that stacks depending on how many corresponding pieces you’re wearing.

Rooted In Success

Remnant 2 captures that sense of wonder and mystery that drives the feeling of exploration; the kind that rewards players who sink their teeth into the world around them. It feels like I’m always spotting something new, even after resetting the worlds, and I cannot emphasize enough what a great gameplay loop it provides. Sure, not every boss is fun, and there’s plenty I straight-up hate, and yet I keep on coming back for more. There are so many builds you can mess with, so many weird and wild guns, and a very solid blend of RPG elements and roguelite elements. The gunplay feels great, and while the difficulty can be challenging, you’re given more than enough tools to conquer these randomized worlds. With so much to explore, Remnant 2 will have you rooted in your seat for many hours to come.

Final Verdict: 4.5/5

Available on: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC (Reviewed); Publisher: Gearbox Publishing; Developer: Gunfire Games; Number of Players: 1 – 3; Release Date: July 25, 2023; MSRP: $49.99

Disclaimer: A copy of Remnant 2 was obtained by the reviewer