 When Remnant from the Ashes released a few years ago, I called it one of the very best non-from-soft souls-like ever made, and it was easily one of my favorite games of the last generation. In my review video I said I hoped they had immediately begun work in a sequel that was bigger and perhaps more traditional and structured than the first game. Well, I have now completed two full runs through the game and did a couple of the adventure mode levels, and though I'll still be playing the game for a little while longer, I think I've seen enough to write a review that touches on all the things Remnant does so so well, as well as a few of the serious issues I have with the game. Before we go on, though, YouTube tells me that I need to have a call to action in my videos. That sounds like a bit dramatic to me, frankly. You know, like I'm asking you to climb out of a trench and storm enemy positions, or maybe asking you to take part in an embarrassing boycott against one huge corporation or another. But, I mean, I guess it couldn't hurt. So please, like, share, and subscribe. Or, if that's too big a hassle, at least make sure the coffee you drink is ethically sourced. Or the beer you drink fully aligns with your cultural preferences. Or at least make absolutely certain that you don't accidentally watch a movie that is problematic either for its diversity or lack of diversity. Because I think it's extremely important that the movies we watch, or the beer and coffee we drink, act as powerful cultural totems that clearly demonstrate exactly what we think about every single issue and serve to sort us into highly homogenized ethno-political groupings. I mean, it's just common sense, really. Remnant, after the logo. Gunfire. Gunfire was founded by the people from Vigil Games about 10 years ago. Vigil Games was founded in 2005 and bought by THQ a year later. Under THQ, Vigil developed only two titles, Darksiders and Darksiders 2. Darksiders was a really good game that has aged fairly badly in my opinion, but Darksiders 2 was an excellent game that still holds up today. Sadly, Darksiders 2 was not a big commercial success. It sold less than 2 million units and THQ said the game did not meet its expectations. Very soon after that, THQ went into bankruptcy. And amazingly, nobody made a Chapter 11 offer for Vigil Games. In 2012, Nordic acquired the unsold parts of the bankrupt THQ and both Vigil Games and the license to Darksiders became company property. Shortly thereafter, the founders of Vigil created Gunfire Games with many of the same staff. And after a remaster of Darksiders 2 and a couple of small VR games, they began work on Darksiders 3. Darksiders 3, like Darksiders 2, ends Darksiders 1, was a very good game that, again, did not sell enough to be considered a success. And, man, Darksiders 3 isn't some all-time super classic, but it's a very good game. Good enough that I've played it three times. With Darksiders now having gone 3 for 3 with good games and 0 for 3 with financially successful games, Gunfire moved on to other projects. One of the first things they made as Gunfire was a very modest VR game with vaguely souls-y combat called Chronos. I've played it. It's fine-ish, it's fine, kinda. Not good, but it's fine. Then they took the world, lore, and many of the assets from this entirely unsuccessful VR game and made something not only great, but legitimately unique and remnant from the ashes. Okay, so let's get this out of the way early. If you played and liked Remnant 1, you will like Remnant 2. I've heard some rumblings that the game runs badly on consoles and I had a few performance issues myself, including crashing for the first few days, but I have a pretty good PC. It's a 4070 with an i7-13400K, so with DLSS3 and Framegen and the CPU, I am able to generally brute force most games to run at 4K on Ultra and get 80-90 FPS. And that's what I got here. I don't know how well this thing is gonna run for you if you're on console or on a low-end PC, but it runs more than well enough for me to say it is definitely a buy if you have a mid-range PC or better. So with that brief history and, you know, performance out of the way, let's get down to Remnant 2 and what it does well. Level design. Remnant is usually described as a souls-like shooter, the only souls-like shooter, in fact, aside from the truly shockingly terrible Immortal Unchained. As a side note, let's briefly acknowledge just how terrible Immortal Unchained is. It's kind of sad, actually, because within a few years, Gunfire would show that the core idea is amazing, but Immortal Unchained failed utterly. It's a souls-like shooter that keeps the Dark Souls lock on. You can't make a shooter with a lock on, man. I feel bad for that studio. They must have played Remnant and been like, oh my God, how did we not realize we didn't need to lock on? Anyway, Remnant is a souls-like because it has an Estus flask, a bonfire, eye-frame dodging, bosses with distinct attack patterns, and the classic Dark Souls level design of a long winding tunnel that occasionally loops back on itself to finally open a door that previously had told you it does not open from this side. Remnant also has the Dark Souls weapon upgrade system, the Dark Souls boss weapon system, and the Dark Souls inventory system. But what makes Remnant work so well is many of the differences from Dark Souls. For instance, you cannot, in Remnant, leave a message that says, try finger but hole. Slightly less important, you do not lose any currency on death in Remnant. Remnant has multiple difficulty options that range from die in four hits to die in one hit. Remnant has no lock on, it has no NPC summons, it has no PVP. Remnant 1 was obviously designed on a budget, and one of the game's primary features is a form of procedural campaign generation. There are five different worlds, and when you start a campaign, maps are generated from tiles with dungeons and bosses at the end of each thread. The first game took several campaigns to find every boss in dungeon because while there are something like 12 possible dungeons for each realm, each campaign will only spawn four or five. This was an ingenious way to save time and resources and encourage replays. The levels themselves seem to be made up of a few different sections that are shuffled each time. This means that every time you roll a campaign, the levels will feel slightly different because each little chunk can be followed by a different chunk than the last time, and those paths will end up in any of a few different handcrafted dungeons. In my review of the first game, I said that this was an interesting gimmick that felt more like a budgetary concession than an actual design goal. It was my hope that the sequel would just be a larger game with the ability to see all the content on the first playthrough. For Remnant from the Ashes was far more successful than Gunfire had probably anticipated. It seems to have sold well over 3 million units by now, and many people seems to really love that procedural aspect of the game. So Remnant 2 keeps the same procedural structure as the first game, but makes everything look nicer and be slightly bigger with far more in the way of secrets spread out across the levels. If you liked the structure of the first game, you will get exactly the same thing here. Now, I do love this game, but I have to admit, I am still left wanting Gunfire to make a proper, large souls-like with 15 levels instead of five levels that are slightly shuffled each time. But I'm aware there are people who really like this structure because they feel it extends the time they get out of the game. While the structure and design of the levels is basically unchanged from the first game aside from being a little better in every way, the graphics, detail, and art design are all a pretty significant step forward. Each world is extremely distinct with Nerud and Loso especially standing out for me, not only for the great level design, but also really great art direction. All of the levels are far more dense than the first game, and while a ton of monsters are basically slight reskins of the first game, there are enough new enemies to feel like a new game all its own. Each map is full of secrets and vertical spaces in a way the first game was not, so exploration is significantly improved. And amazing little details give all of the world's life. And the dungeons that are at the end of the path for each level are also a significant improvement in level design, secrets, and art direction. It's these details and this artwork that is the single biggest improvement from the first game. Several of the dungeons have entire hidden areas that are the best parts of the game. Many parts of the game feel like a AAA production, and at its best, remnants, levels, and art do go beyond the AA label in a way the first game never really did. Now, this is still not a full AAA game, however. Animation quality is distinctly AA. This is best shown by, like, comparing a couple of boss introduction animations, like, let's take one from Dark Souls 3, and then let's compare it to one from Remnant 2. They called me crazy. Who's crazy now? Then you got things like the melee animations which feel far less polished than a FromSoft game. How much this matters is up to you to decide, it does not hurt the game for me, but it's sometimes hard to actually nail down what makes a game feel like a AAA game. And for me, animations are probably the biggest difference between something like Dark Souls 3 and something like Remnant 2. Again, I don't wanna overstate how important super smooth animations are, but I think it helps explain why Remnant still does feel like a AA game. Let's move on to something else Remnant does really well. Combat. Remnant 1 was a revelation of the game because the successful mash-up of an action third-person shooter and a Souls-like was very fresh. Remnant 2 makes very few changes to the core action from the first game. And you might be thinking, well, most sequels don't make big changes, but actually, FromSoftware games do do that. Dark Souls 1, 2, Bloodborne 3, and Sekiro are amazingly different games in how they feel and play. Each of them is highly unique and different from the game that came before. Now Elden Ring is actually extremely similar to Dark Souls 3, but aside from that, FromSoftware games consistently change how they feel and how they play. Remnant 2, on the other hand, plays exactly like Remnant 1. And while some of that is surely down to how similar the structure and the levels are, it's more down to how similar the enemy and boss design and combat feels. So at its base, coming back to Remnant 2, has like no learning curve at all. It's pretty much like the first game with a couple of tweaks. Now this is more than enough for me because of how much I love that first game. While levels, enemies, and bosses are basically unchanged, Remnant 2 does at least have a few tweaks that add to the combat. The first game's classes were basically the classic Dark Souls thing. All your class did was choose the starting weapons you'd eventually stop using and start you with different traits, which are extremely minor stat bumps that only matter after you pump like five or more levels into them. But those perks were not exclusive to the class. So if you chose a scrapper at the beginning, you'd eventually end up with all of the traits that the other classes had anyway. Remnant 2 has actual classes that are much more like picking a Borderlands class. In fact, it has a system very similar to Tiny Tina's Wonderland. When you create a character, you'll choose a class. This gives you your starting armor and weapons, and a few traits just like the first game. But you'll also be choosing what active skill and perks you'll have. Each class starts with one active skill and it locks two more slowly throughout the campaign. There's like a healing class, a melee class, et cetera. I chose the Gunslinger because it seemed to be the only one that had a direct damage skill. Pressing my side mouse button allows me to shoot a revolver that targets a bunch of things at once and holding it allows me to charge them all into one super bullet that I can aim in an elite. When I first saw this, I thought to myself, uh-oh, this can easily be ridiculously unbalanced. Either they'll make the enemies annoying as shit to compensate or the skill will be useless to prevent it from being OP. But I am very happy to report that they managed to balance these things very well. The Gunslinger skill is useful situationally, but not ridiculously so. Certain bosses spawn killer orbs just like the first game, and the skill is highly useful to nuke them. Mostly though, I use it to burst damage bosses and elites. It's powerful enough to knock off like 15% of an elite's health bar or do like a few magazines of gun damage to a boss. It's basically perfectly balanced to fit in the sandbox. In addition to the traits and skills, you also unlock a bunch of actual perks and these are indeed highly useful buffs. And they level up with the class. Mine had one that increased fire rate and damage on ranged weapons. It starts at 1.5% fire rate and 2.5% damage, which is like nothing, literally nothing. But once fully leveled up, it increases to 15% fire rate and 5% damage, which is significant. Each class also has a team perk that is useful in co-op. These are meaningless to me because I cannot possibly have less interest in playing a souls-like game with other people. I'm good. I'm sure they're very useful though, so if you actually like playing these kinds of games with other people, each class has a buff that helps your teammates. And then I had a perk that increased reload speed by 10% to start, which is pretty nice and eventually increased to 20% when the mag is empty, which is very nice. Finally, the class had a perk where using your estus flask, reload your weapons, which eventually upgraded to reloading your weapons and increased range damage by 15% for 10 seconds. These are extremely useful perks that you can work into highly detailed builds you can make and makes each class feel really distinct. The actual build aspect of the class is in remnant, which was not really existing in the first game. You just had guns and chose your mods. Whereas in remnant 2, you actually do progress a build and combine many different progression systems in your guns. It's really well done. The way the game is similar to Tiny Tina is that after a while, you will unlock the ability to equip a second class that you can buy from different vendors. The first one I found was because I bought a book from a statue that I assumed would unlock a weapon, but eventually actually unlocked the summoner class. I was actually kind of pissed for a while because I bought this thing very early, thinking I'd get a gun and like it was useless. I had nothing to do with it, but eventually when you hit a certain level, you unlock the ability to craft the second class. Having that second class gives you access to everything the class has. You get the perk, the trait, the active skill. The main benefit of the class I got is that it gives you a bunch of passive health regeneration, which is very convenient, but it also lets you summon minions, which actually used to be on a gun mod in the first game that I used quite a bit. The first minions you unlock are basically useless annoying shits who only get in the way of your shooting. The second minions are little flying guys who are sometimes useful, except when they disappear or get stuck in the floor or ceiling, or when you take an elevator, they just never catch up to you. And the third one you unlocked is an absurdly overpowered elite mob that steals your kills half the time. A lot of times I walked around thinking it's amazing and other times I was thinking he was way too strong. Ultimately, I kept him around because he looked cool and he makes movement through the levels a little faster. And he generally gets destroyed instantly by bosses, so I mean, I guess it's fine, he's fine. All together, I do think that these classes are enough on their own to make Remnant 2 feel like it does more than enough to be a sequel. They're fun, they're interesting and involved to unlock, it makes XP and leveling feel rewarding in a way that the first game simply did not, and they're strong enough to matter, and aside from this thing, they're not so strong that they make the game too easy. When it comes to bosses, the vast majority are extremely well done. I probably killed about half in one try, most of the others in two tries, and only a couple that required more than three. The boss quality, in my opinion, is definitely higher than the first game with way less infinite spawning mobs. Now, there are still ads in a lot of the fights, but the gamer lies on that far, far less than the first game did. In the first game, most bosses had kind of constantly respawning mobs, which many people found very frustrating. I actually didn't mind that too much for most bosses, but for sure, for certain bosses, the first game did get right up to the edge of annoying, so in general, this is a nice change. That does not mean that all the bosses are amazing, though. This cube boss, which rewards an absurdly powerful weapon called the cube gun, is one of the worst, most annoying bosses I have ever, quote, unquote, fought. I died like 10 times to this garbage before watching a guide to see where the last cube was. Man, I just don't want puzzle bosses in my games. Like, I'm good, this was extremely frustrating. And while the final boss only took me four or five attempts, I also hated a lot. The difficulty of the fight isn't because the move set is particularly difficult, it's because I cannot see what the hell is happening. In the final phase, the boss literally teleports you between arenas, and it is just a mess of lights and particle effects. And man, I just really hate it. Finally, bosses can spawn with modifiers on them. They can be like super tanky, or have rats spawn with them, or other things like that. Most of these are fine, but one of them is quite stupid in my opinion. There's a modifier called empathy, which means that the boss heals for like 50% of its health when you use an estus flask. This means you either need to use the healing class, or use a couple of the healing gun mods, or no hit the fight. This never stopped me from killing a boss for any length of time once I figured out what the hell was happening, but it feels like a pointlessly frustrating modifier that adds very little. There are other ways to heal, so it basically only boils down to switching out your mods. I actually did not do that though, because it annoys me when a game wants to force me into a build, so I just got frustrated and kept fighting until I beat the boss without getting hit. It's dumb. Progression. So I've had almost nothing but positive things to say about Remnant, but this is where I start pointing out some small issues I have. Remnant is admirable for having multiple progression systems running at once. You are gaining XP to level up your class. Every few levels, you'll unlock one of those skills or perks. You've got the slow trait leveling, which grants you points for finding books, or beating bosses and encounters. You've got your estus flask to level up, and this time you've got like 10 different types of estus flasks that all do different things. You've got mutators to level, mods to craft, guns to craft, and guns to upgrade with the Dark Souls-like system that has like tiered materials for most weapons, and crystals for boss weapons. All of these things are good. The estus flasks in fact are really inspired. I ended up using one that cuts the amount of healing you have in half, but can be used twice as quickly as the normal one. But the issue here is that the economy of the upgrading crafting system is extremely stingy. In the first game, I leveled like five or six guns to max within two playthroughs. After two playthroughs here, I had gotten one gun to max, one to right before max, and that's it. There is a mutator system that gives you interesting perks to guns that you can craft and add to anyone you want. In two playthroughs, I leveled one to max, and not one single other one beyond five. Buying the classes uses the same crystals and scraps that level your guns and your estus flask, or your mutators. It is so painfully slow that they could seriously increase the scrap drops by like a factor of 10, and it would not hurt the game at all. They could increase the spawn of elite monsters by like three, and it still wouldn't feel off. The economy feels so bad that it seems like someone accidentally has a decimal in the wrong place for scrap and crystal drops. This is kind of a serious problem when one of the most interesting parts of the game is trying different guns and builds. I got the gun from the final boss, but I never got to use it, because it's gonna take like five hours to level it up enough to be usable against the enemies I'm currently fighting. I was, as usual, bitching on Reddit the last few days, and one dude was saying, well, if we do it your way, people will stop playing faster. I don't understand this idea. Do you play games to slowly upgrade weapons? Why? If that's the case, why don't we just put a button in the hub area that you can click every six seconds for a 2% chance to drop materials? He responded that the stingy economy is important for the grind, but it's my position that games should have progression, not grind. Grinding, which people seem to have forgotten, but grinding was originally a pejorative term used to describe the horrendous balance and progression in early MMOs. It was a word to describe hitting trees for three hours, or spawn camping a monster for an hour and a half in WoW, because the game wasn't all that well-designed and did not have enough quest content, and you could find yourself massively underleveled for the next zone, so that the only effective way to level up was to spawn kill six kobolds for three hours until you leveled up, but it turned out that some people actually found that soothing for some reason. But even in 2005, I found grinding to be a miserable failure and proof that the developers are not always right. But let's look at this argument supporting the current economy, that the horrendous economy will keep people playing longer. I am not going to keep playing a game because I want to watch a damage number go up on a gun. I've played Sekiro for like 400 hours and there's almost no progression in that game after you hit NG+. I've gotten Dark Souls 3 to like NG+,8, and there is no progression at that point you're done. Most important, Remnant doesn't have repeating procedural systems like Neo or Diablo. There are no greater rifts in Remnant. It doesn't have an end game to work towards like WoW or Destiny. It's just a Souls-like game that takes 40 hours to see everything there is to see. You can go up difficulty levels, but the game stays the same. You're just replaying it. There are no raids. If I'm going to replay the game, it's because I enjoy the gameplay, not because I just need 33 more crystals to finish leveling up a gun. I don't understand how someone will keep playing only because they want to farm materials in a game that is not an MMO or an ARPG. There's another big problem with the loot system in the sequel. In the first game, almost all of the weapons were either given as a starting weapon, crafted from a boss kill, or found in the world. But for some reason, a ton of the weapons in this game are sold at a vendor. Now listen, there are still plenty of guns defined, but I just don't like that all of the rest are sold at a vendor. Why not have them as item drops from elites or as just possible rewards in dungeons? As it is, if you end up getting the same dungeon and two straight playthroughs and you 100% will get at least a couple of repeat dungeons, the boss that used to drop a gun now rewards you like 300 scrap, which by the way is nothing, literally nothing. Why not have the 20 guns that this idiot sells instead be rewards for repeating dungeons? I don't know, that's just seems cool to me. One of the zones has a vendor that uses a material that only spawns when the sky turns red. How do you know when the sky will be red? You don't. I assume developers thought that the players would just slowly get one item per playthrough as they went through the game, but that is not how people play games, man. Instead, within like 12 hours, Reddit was full of people saying to just fast travel back and forth from the hub to the zone until you see the sky turn red. These kind of economies do not actually pace out content. They lead to players instantly Googling the fastest and most efficient way to circumvent the original intention, which is what I did. Finally, to briefly touch on that guy saying people will stop playing if they can level up guns any faster. Here's the thing, man. If you get unlucky like me, you might very well find yourself in possession of the game's most insanely powerful gun very early on. I already have the best gun. This finger thing does a ridiculous amount of damage and its mod makes me invisible, heals me when I shoot, and turns the gun fully automatic with infinite ammo for like 20 seconds. I don't need any other gun. This loadout is unstoppable. I just wanna screw around with a few other guns because I'm already gonna stop playing after my second playthrough for a while. But I can't use other guns because the campaign levels with you. So I cannot stop using the stupid overpowered gun until I finish leveling up the other guns. They're basically useless for now. All right, let's wrap up by talking about a few random things that annoy me about Remnant 2. Annoying shit. All right, so some rapid-fire complaints about an otherwise excellent sequel. Complaint the first. Why are there a bunch of puzzles? Many people, not me obviously, but many people play this thing co-op. There are a whole bunch of dungeons that are puzzles. There's one where you have to play Tic-Tac-Toe. That's fine enough solo, although kinda boring, but in multiplayer, are two other people supposed to stand there while watching me play Tic-Tac-Toe? Then there's the much worse ones like this bell here. I happen to play music, so this puzzle made like literally no sense to me because it has nothing to do with how music actually works or is written down, like at all. I tried this for like two minutes and then I Googled it. I Googled the one where you're supposed to line up symbols. There's this thing here that I failed seriously like 20 times. These crystals light up and can be destroyed. It seems pretty obvious to me that I am supposed to go down these stairs destroying the crystals before they kill me. Eventually, after dying over and over and over, I Googled it and discovered, no, you're just supposed to run past them? In what world do you have a long stairway of glowing, destructible crystals in a video game and not expect the player to assume that you are supposed to destroy the glowing, destructible crystals? In fact, I Googled almost every single puzzle that I could not solve instantly because I don't buy souls like shooters who do puzzles, man, why are they here? I came to this safe in the doctor's office and like instantly Googled it. I had this one here where like, there's the chest and the numbers are on the wall. That's fine, that's okay. And I had another one with this tower where I had to like remember these symbols and then stand on them. That one's fine too. It was in a hidden area and where the hint was was right next to where the puzzle was. But there are like a ton of spots where you're supposed to read fucking books and then take pictures of the symbols so that you can solve a puzzle later. I wanna shoot monsters, man, not solve puzzles. I'm sure some people might have liked to this shit, but man, I really hate it. And on a second playthrough, entire dungeons and ended in puzzles like it's just stupid and boring. Why do I wanna do this? I hated almost every single puzzle other than like three. Another thing, there is a much, much heavier focus on lore and story this time, which is not so good. The story's fine, whatever. Some dialogue and lore is actually pretty good, I guess, like the Doctor and Crazy People in the Asylum. That is great. But the game has the classic souls-like problem of every single character, talking very slowly. So eventually, I just skipped through it. Here is a great tip for developers. If I can read the dialogue faster than the actor is saying the dialogue, they are reading it too slow. Reading really slow doesn't make something more dramatic and makes it more annoying. Like this guy, listen to this guy. The pan, view I would have been counted among be sucked in the head, for perhaps the blood moon is not changed to handed one. I count those this like the two handed ones thirst for knowledge. Where was I? Yes. Also, these guys have lots of dialogue. And like in souls, you'll need to exhaust all of the dialogue completely for important rewards and stuff, so you're forced to do this. Can, if the path with death thus leashed the eternal great Sigurot's word. I hate that man, why? Consumables, the drops are insanely rare and they're like insanely expensive, so I never once used even one consumable. The first game actually required you to use them quite often. Bleed was a very common and extremely punishing status effect and you often had to use ammo boxes during boss fights, but I never once ran out of ammo. And the status effects in this game are very, very rare and way, way less punishing. In fact, I never once, literally never once, received bleed or saw bleed happen. There's like builds and rings and stuff that are based on inflicting bleed or being around things that are inflicted with bleed. It never happened. I don't understand how that is, but weird. It feels like they basically eliminated any of the need for consumables that you had in the first game, but then could not bring themselves to remove them. So you end up with super rare expensive consumables that you will never use. It'll give you a bunch of different grenades, but you find like two across an entire campaign. Very few players will use something that rare. Like I have never once used a divine blessing in souls, never, because they're so rare, you never wanna use it because you're saving it up for something really special or important that will never happen. It's like a common and bad design in my opinion. Either make the consumables useful and common or take them out. Useful and rare means they're pointless. I never once used any of those grenades, obviously. Eventually I sold the consumables and grenades to get rid of them because it was like stressful having them. And really that's about it. It's a good game. I mean, overall I loved Remnant 2. Easily one of the best games of the year and a must buy for anyone who likes challenging action games. I finished two playthroughs and I'll probably maybe mess around with a couple more adventure modes to try and find as many different bosses as I can. And then I will definitely be back for any DLC. The first game had a really great DLCs including a very fun roguelite mode, ruined by the fact that you can't fucking save even though the runs last like hours. And then a really great DLC story that actually improved a bunch of stuff and had the best levels and probably the best story content in the game. I do hope they add that roguelite mode back in again but you know, with saving. And I'm really looking forward to any story DLC they do. This game's an easy eight and a half to nine out of 10. I love it. And if you like souls likes or challenging action games, this is a great game. You should absolutely buy it. All right, thanks for coming guys. I'll see you next time. Bye.