Remnant 2 Review

Overview

Remnant 2 is often described as Dark Souls with guns, and that’s an accurate surface-level assessment. However, it’s a rather inadequate explanation of what makes Remnant 2 a compelling choice amid the souls-like genre.

In addition to all the hallmarks you would find in a Souls game, Remnant 2 has a high emphasis on replayability, and character builds. Its procedural generation is done in such a fantastic way that it’s best not to look at Remnant 2 like a one-and-done campaign game and more of an ongoing adventure. It manages to capture the satisfying feelings of both, a rogue-lite game and a looter shooter. Without ever coming close to being either one.

You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!

Another notch on Remnant 2’s belt is the fact that several of its features feel like a straight upgrade over its soul-like cousins. The ability to play the entire game co-op, for example, rather than a wonky summoning system. As well as the fact that it features difficulty settings that somehow do what you expect them to do, without compromising the spirit of the game.

I mean Remnant 2 is a challenging game, regardless of difficulty. Its ongoing replayable nature means it’s perfectly reasonable to start on the lower end of the difficulty scale and then climb upwards as you gear up, gain access to different types of character builds, and improve at the game.

That’s not to say that Remnant 2 is perfect. It definitely has its own flavor of strange baggage that often leaves me baffled at what the developers were thinking.

Gideon’s Bias	Remnant 2 Information
Review Copy Used: No	Publisher: Gearbox Publishing
Hours Played: 100+	Type: Full Game
Reviewed On: Xbox Series X	Platforms: PC, Xbox Serious X/S, and PlayStation 5
Fan of Genre: Yes	Genre: Souls-Like Third Person Shooter
Mode Played: Veteran & Nightmare (Normal & Hard)	Price: $49.99

Soul Calibers

The strength of Remnant 2’s combat isn’t immediately obvious and is somewhat difficult to fully grasp until it’s in your hands. I could mention common buzzwords, such as tight controls, and deliberate animations, and I’d be speaking the truth. But a large part of what makes Remnant’s combat great is its sense of physical weight and the feedback that’s sent to the player.

Most enemies react to your attacks by being staggered or knocked down. You can shoot an oncoming Dran villager in the leg, and they will trip. While a well-aimed shot will take their head off their shoulders. The degree to which an enemy is affected by your gunfire greatly depends on what the enemy is and what weapon you’re using. This makes an assault rifle feel very different in your hands compared to a shotgun.

The boss fights are a little less reactive but offer satisfaction in other ways. Mainly in the large variety of epic and challenging fights, most of which have their own quirks. They range from a maze of rolling cubes trying to crush you flat, a behemoth smashing the cliffside you’re fighting on, or a creepy ghost diving at you from the walls of an asylum.

You switch between gunplay and melee combat fluidly. Simply pulling the right trigger without aiming allows you to swing a melee weapon, while holding the left trigger aims your ranged weapon. Each class, of which you can have two at a time has a variety of powers you can employ from healing circles to automated turrets.

Some special weapons have powers of their own, and you can craft mods to attach to others. The term mod really means spell. They can be as simple as making your weapon temporarily deal fire damage, to more fantastical effects such as placing force fields or summoning tentacles. The sheer variety of strange weaponry and powers adds a lot to the experience.

It all combines to form a very satisfying and fun combat system that never gets stale during the long-haul style of play that Remnant 2 really shines with.

I only really have one complaint, and it’s with some of the button mappings. The button you use to heal yourself using your limited, but rechargeable relics, is the same button you HOLD in order to activate your various abilities. Even after 100 hours, I still end up accidentally wasting a relic when I’m trying to use an ability instead.

An Unending Adventure

Remnant 2 has a starting and ending point. But it’s not a game you get the most out of by stopping when you see the credits roll. In fact, I’m perfectly comfortable steering you away from it if that’s what you want to do because you wouldn’t be getting the most out of the game.

Remnant 2’s procedural generation helps keep the game replayable, but it’s the structure surrounding its procedural generation that matters.

You won’t see every dungeon, boss, or weapon on your first playthrough, or even several playthroughs. Three of the five worlds have two main storylines, and only one shows up at a time. Those storylines end with a boss that grants one of two unique items depending on how you dispatched them.

Beyond that, those worlds are littered with dungeons, secrets, bosses, and loot that varies from playthrough to playthrough. The layouts are random, but much of their contents are not.

For example, a given dungeon has items, bosses, and puzzles that can only be found in that dungeon, in addition to some random goodies. But that dungeon is pulled from a list of possible dungeons when the world is generated. After playing for over 100 hours. I’m still encountering things I’ve never seen before.

That said, you aren’t required to replay an entire campaign. You can simply generate new versions of the worlds you have already completed. The point is, there is a lot more to do and see after what would be the end of any other game. You can keep the same character too, that’s actually half the point. In fact, the game doesn’t recommend starting on Nightmare, the game’s hard mode difficulty, without gearing up on a lower one first.

The unique way Remnant 2 uses its procedural generation makes each playthrough unpredictable to a degree, and the hunt for secrets and items you’re missing is exciting. That hunt matters because another large part of Remnant 2 is character-building.

Character Building

Remnant 2’s character building is exceptionally deep and varied. But it’s not something you will really even think about for several hours, or perhaps at all during your first playthrough. This is part of the game’s charm. Remnant 2 isn’t a looter shooter, but it still grants you the excitement and satisfaction of every piece of loot you find. Because every piece matters.

Loot comes at you slowly. By exploring each world, defeating bosses, and uncovering secrets you unlock a variety of new rings, weapons, amulets, mods, and traits. By combining these together with two classes, (that you can switch at any time once you unlock them) you have a massive variety of builds at your disposal. But you hunt for the parts you need slowly over time.

It makes every piece of gear or new power you find exciting, and a post-release patch even made it far easier to actually switch playstyles at any time. So you’re never locked into any one build. You can naturally make tanky characters, glass cannons, healers, and whatnot. But how you accomplish those tasks is a bit more interesting.

For example, what if you have a mutator that makes a gun fire faster the longer it shoots, and place it on a large machine gun while also equipping items and traits that give you life steal? There are a ton of combos like that, and half the fun is figuring out what you can come up with.

In addition to loot, there are several classes (called Archetypes). You have to unlock most of them, but each one has a very different playstyle. They include a healing medic, a tanky engineer who can summon turrets, a damage-dealing gunslinger, and more. One neat aspect that further expands the character building is each class has a core trait that they automatically gain points in as they level.

The kicker is, if you fully level a class, you can keep that trait without using that class. You just have to distribute points into it yourself. That gives you a bunch of flexibility in your theory crafting. The game really shines in co-op too due to how each class and character build synergizes with each other.

There’s a bit of a catch, however. I’d say that pretty much every character build is viable, but definitely not optimal, and it’s something you will painfully notice at times. For example, the Handler class has this whole schtick about having a dog. The dog is awesome. It fights enemies, draws attention, buffs you and your friends, and can even revive you if you get downed. But it’s also incredibly useless against half of the game’s bosses and enemies because it can’t reach them.

Melee builds face a similar issue. They can be very powerful and they feel awesome, but there are many zones and boss fights where you will feel completely useless, and may have to temporarily switch your build in order to get past them. I don’t think every build idea should be amazing in every circumstance. But having a good portion of the game invalidate your playstyle entirely feels pretty bad.

Secret Secrecy

Last year I played multiple popular titles where the game straight up told me the solution to a puzzle within a minute of finding it. While that’s fine as an accessibility option, it’s terrible game design if you can’t toggle it off.

Remnant 2 on the other hand, is a massive overcorrection in the other direction. I love finding secrets and solving things on my own. But I have to have a reasonable chance to do so. Remnant 2’s secrets are so obscure, that your chances of finding them organically are slim to none.

Illusionary walls with absolutely no world-building hints that they are there. Complex chains of events that you would have no idea how to do without being told. Obscure hidden passages that you only find by looking them up, or accidentally stumbling into them.

The thing is, these aren’t easter eggs. They hold entire weapons, and nearly every class in the game is hidden this way. For example, one world is covered in poison gas around the edge of the map. In one particular zone beyond the edge of that gas is an important thing to unlock. You can’t see it from the edge. There is no way to organically ever know it’s there.

No one and I mean no one, is going to map out the entire edge of the map by going into the poison fog and dying over and over again. Without knowing that something is there. Even once you look it up and know what you’re looking for, it’s still difficult to find.

Even worse. One particular class requires such a precise combination of items and events done in such a specific way that the only way anyone could have ever known the class exists is through Data Miners, and that’s literally how developers intended people to learn about it.

It’s really fun to discover something on your own, and considerably less fun to stop playing and pull up Google to find out how to acquire something. Yet that’s precisely how you should play, especially when it comes to unlocking new classes. Because short of wasting your time doing things like attacking every single wall in the game. You simply aren’t going to find half of the game’s loot.

Verdict

Remnant 2 is a pretty incredible game. It’s highly replayable, partially due to the clever way its procedural generation is structured as well as the fact that the combat never gets old. Every weapon, mod, and ability feels fun to use. And there are just so many cool things to see and acquire. Every new weapon or power feels impactful because while there is a lot of it, you aren’t bombarded with it all at once.

A really cool new bow with an awesome new power is exciting to play with because I didn’t just toss away 10 other bows right before acquiring that one. Every boss and dungeon is interesting, and each of the five worlds in Remnant 2 has its own unique flavor. From a corrupted jungle, a labyrinth floating through the void, the streets of a Victorian-era city, or a high-tech spaceship, it’s all flavorful with its own enemies and environment to consider.

Co-op works exceptionally well, and I love that the entire game is playable in co-op, start to finish.

Remnant 2 is definitely one of my favorite games of last year. But it’s going to fall short of my Golden Shield award. I simply wouldn’t have enjoyed the game as much as I do if I had never acquired the unlockable classes and hidden loot. To acquire them I was forced to seek knowledge outside of the game, not because I needed help. But because those secrets have no reasonable chance of being found just by playing.

If I’m forced to get information about your game from a third party, it’s a serious design sin in my book. It robs me of the satisfaction of discovering those elements on my own, and without giving me a reasonable ability to do so, I don’t have much of a choice but to spoil it for myself.

Remnant 2’s story is as obtuse as the secrets it keeps. But from a pure gameplay standpoint, it’s a phenomenal game and incredibly replayable whether you’re flying solo or with a couple of friends. It’s just a shame that so many of the game’s secrets were designed to be solved by a Google Search rather than the player.