A couple years back, I reviewed Chronos: Before The Ashes, a prequel to Gunfire Games’ Remnant: From The Ashes. At the time, I had pretty mixed feelings about it. It looked amazing, but the actual experience felt pretty thin. Despite that, and despite only minimal exposure to Remnant, I found myself looking forward to Remnant II on the strength of its reveal trailer. I’d suspected there was a lot of potential still to explore based off Chronos, and it would seem my suspicions were correct. But even my suspicions ran afoul of some hard evidence.
Remnant II puts you in the shoes of an unnamed survivor of the apocalyptic “Root,” a semi-intelligent pseudofloral organism reminiscent of kudzu that creates massive structures and various organisms to maintain it. On your way to a rumored safe haven, you and a companion are attacked by the Root and rescued by residents of Ward 13, the safe zone you’ve been trying to find. Of course, it doesn’t stop there. Taken aside by a man named “Founder” Ford, you learn about the mysterious Worldstones (from the previous games) and the existence of other realities. Ford uses the Worldstone and disappears, followed shortly by one of your rescuers, a young woman named Clementine who displays incredible powers. Clementine’s entry into the Worldstone isn’t voluntary, and since you seem to be the best equipped, you’re nominated to go rescue her. You’ll travel through strange realms, meet interesting types of “people,” and spend a lot of time cutting a bloody swath through them to reach Clementine.
Remnant II looks utterly gorgeous. In each world you visit, you’re treated to incredible vistas, culturally significant structures, distinctive lifeforms, and tremendous fine details from subtle bio-luminescence to particle effects which evoke the feeling of spores or sparks as appropriate. Creature designs are wonderfully varied and thematically appropriate for each environment you visit. Backgrounds have that “I wanna go see that!” quality that not only attracts the eye but stirs the soul, putting players in the mood to explore and discover.
Weapons and armor are intricate without being busy, having a visual weight to them that doesn’t generally show up in the genre. And with the way mods and mutators work, even the homeliest of weapons can get a powerful visual upgrade just by socketing in new functionality. If anything, I wish we had ways to customize armor, similar to Destiny 2‘s shaders. But at the same time, I’m glad we don’t have that option, since I’m reasonably certain there would be some absolutely eye-mugging color combinations out there when grouping up with friends. The art team at Gunfire Games absolutely deserves kudos for taking Unreal Engine 5 and delivering one of the best looking games of 2023, and that’s with stiff competition from titles like Horizon Forbidden West and Diablo IV.
The sound and music in Remnant II is phenomenal. Each zone has its own score, and each one fits entirely appropriately. Exploration music helps complement the mood established by the visual aspects of the environment. The combat music does get a little repetitive if you stop to listen to it, but since you’re tied up with fighting for your life, you don’t really get much chance to soak it in. My only complaint on the music front comes from the final biome, where you don’t have any music so much as dissonant droning which gets aggravating very quickly. It’s one of the few times where Gunfire Games probably could have gone with “less is more” and tried to keep the gain just below the player’s perceptive threshold in order to help evoke uneasiness withhold making you want to puncture your eardrums. Audio “stings” help let you know when the fight is on and when its escalating with appearance of various “elite”-type enemies (harder than mooks, less than a mini-boss). The sound effects are just as well crafted as the visuals. Different weapons making distinctive firing sounds, with special abilities from mods carrying their own unique notes.
Environmental sounds further establish the feel of a particular location, from the chirps and chitters of forest creatures in Yaesha to the squelching and robotic clanks of N’erud. The voice acting is pretty good, and arguably better in the cutscenes and conversation options than anywhere else. Character barks going into and coming out of combat tend to get kind of repetitive, as well as the death screams when you get downed for whatever reason, but you tend to overlook them. Vendor barks are likewise repetitive at times, but like the character barks, they sorta blend into the background. As for those cutscenes and conversations, they’re well voiced and certainly help advance the story. Are they emotionally shattering or award winning performances? No, but they get the job done and don’t undermine the tone of the game. There’s a lot of character in the performances, to be sure, but they’re understated. Big emotional moments are not a thing in Remnant II outside the relief of surviving combat, and the voice acting reflects this.
The gameplay mechanics in Remnant II are very much a mashup of Soulsborne-style fighting sequences mixed with Returnal-type exploration. Open areas are pretty good about showing off where you need to go, helpfully delineating the main path and the side paths. However, just because you can see the path doesn’t mean that you’re going to be moving in a straight line. Remnant II, much like Chronos, relies on exploratory loops. For those who have a good sense of direction and situational awareness, the exploration portion of any session is likely to be rewarding, particularly as you’re working to figure out the vertical navigation as much as the horizontal. It’s one of the few games one can easily point to where you almost literally have to think around corners.
However, that also stands out as a serious impediment at times. It’s all too easy to miss the hidden entrances leading to the spaces behind locked doors, which is potentially a point of frustration when the map points out there’s an item nearby but you can’t seem to dope out the access point needed to reach it. There’s not too much in the way of jumping puzzles, thankfully, but there’s one point which is highly deceptive. Indeed, it’s not a jumping puzzle at all, but rather a navigation challenge along invisible paths. The problem was that the environment gave the impression a jumping puzzle was required, leading to great frustration. I was quite ready to knock a whole point off for that one spot. If that sounds harsh, you can only imagine how deeply aggravated I was by trying to find the right spot to let me jump safely to the bottom.
Remnant II‘s combat can lean more towards ranged or melee depending on your particular style and loadout. You have a certain amount of health which can either be totally cut away or reduced to “gray health” which can be regenerated. Additionally, you have a stamina bar to help you with dodges, running, and other strenuous activities in and out of combat. At the core, it really boils down to the archetypes you pick and how you choose to play. Four archetypes are immediately available to play, with a fifth in the form of the Gunslinger archetype if you pre-ordered. There are other archetypes available to obtain, though you’ll probably need to do some exploring and complete specific steps to unlock them. Once you’ve unlocked them, you can level them up, then start mixing and matching to see what works best for you. In addition to archetypes, certain activities and bosses will unlock trait pools to help further refine your character’s passive abilities. Your archetype traits improve as you level up, but other traits require trait points which can be obtained from items out in the world or from defeating certain bosses. Some are obvious, like the ones that improve your health and stamina bars. Others seem to synergize with certain archetypes, which makes it a little irksome if you haven’t unlocked those archetypes yet.
If archetypes are the foundation of your gameplay experience, then gear is the internal infrastructure. Certain armors are lighter, which allow for more of a nimble movement scheme, which is very useful in boss fights as well as trying to kite enemies away in melee. Others are more resistant to certain types of damage, which allows for a more tanky sort of bruiser. Surprisingly, there’s not any sort of set bonus mechanism. Thus, you can mix and match armor pieces to help tailor your survivability in specific biomes. The downside, though, is that there’s no good way to store specific loadouts, so you’re probably going to be spending a lot of time switching things around if you’re going super-granular. My own experience was more range-oriented, and the gunplay is pretty darned good. I was pleased to see the Cube Gun from Chronos making a return appearance, and it made for a good solid choice in a number of areas. I’m reasonably certain that I missed a significant number of items in my almost single-minded effort to try and beat the game. Yet that says something about Remnant II. It’s not something which encourages speed runs. Gunfire Games wants you to take your time, to explore every nook and cranny, to find all the cool stuff and build up your arsenal, then get your favorite pieces upgraded to the highest possible level in order to bring them to bear against the final boss. And that’s going to take grinding. A lot of grinding.
That said, Remnant II seems to suffer from a bad case of information opacity. Not in terms of lore (though that can seem a little obscure) but in general progression. Yeah, I made it to the final boss in about 20 hours. But beating him? Ha! For a game that relies on Soulsborne reset mechanics, it becomes pretty obvious when you’re hilariously outmatched by a given boss, but it doesn’t give you any sort of measurable information to gauge that fact beyond a number in the upper right corner of the HUD’s minimap which lays out what power level you should be at. At which point, you beat your head against the wall a few times until you walk away for a bit or give up entirely. Moreover, you have no idea you’ve started on the path to unlocking an archetype, or a trait pool, or a new piece of gear until you get a message informing you that you’ve done so. The main map lists some objectives, but you don’t know how much progress you’re making until you reach the end. All the nifty lore you’ve come across is unavailable to you for further perusal. You’ll have reminders at certain thresholds to let you know when you can do things like adding a second archetype or getting into the “Adventure Mode” element to help you challenge certain dungeons or bosses.
Yet the presentation of information all feels somehow incomplete, almost withholding vital bits from you for some reason. It’s that “invisible path” section writ large. I’m all for exploration and finding new stuff, but there’s times where it doesn’t feel like an exciting adventure and more like an interminable chore, particularly if you’re running into a case where the enemies are mobbing you and beating on you like a punching bag. If you’re looking to finish the campaign in a week, you either need to be a god-tier Soulsborne player or somebody with no life and all the time in the world to devote to brute forcing your way through the game.
Ultimately, Remnant II really is an excellent game. Not without problems, to be sure, but far from anything I would consider to be a bad game. It’s visually stunning and narratively intriguing, even with the lack of signposts and codices. There is great potential for replayability, as advertised, but it’s going to be the sort of thing that requires more patience than I fear the average gamer is willing to demonstrate. Hopefully, it will attract the audience it needs to thrive. I am genuinely curious to see what the DLC expansions will bring over the course of the year, and I’m hoping that Gunfire Games is not going to be trying to turn Remnant II into another live service cash grab. This may be one of the most interesting games you’ll play this year.
Axel reviewed Remnant II on PlayStation 5 with a review code provided by the publisher.
