What makes a Remnant game so special is the way it slowly reveals itself to you over time. When you first start playing, you’ll be impressed by the tight, demanding gunplay, the world-building, and the art direction. It seems like a polished co-op shooter with interesting worlds to explore and some high-pressure boss fights to learn and overcome. Eventually you’ll stumble onto a secret completely by accident and suddenly, you’ll realize the game is so much bigger than you thought.
You’ll start re-exploring old dungeons looking for hidden puzzles, and before you know it you’ve doubled your playtime and upgraded your arsenal with a giant selection of new tricks. Eventually you’ll jump into a friend’s game and discover that their version of each world is completely different from your own, and that all these little secrets and puzzles you’ve been finding exist in just one version of a game with countless interpretations. The genius of Remnant is that it's a detective game that begs you to experiment, dig deeper, and keep searching for more, while pretending to be a Souls-inspired third-person shooter - and does it successfully.
Remnant 2 could have just been more Remnant, but Gunfire Games has attempted to outdo the original in almost every way. Instead of just having semi-procedural levels, now even the order you visit the worlds in has been randomized. There’s a greater emphasis on RPG mechanics like class progression and build crafting, and twice as many equipment slots to fill. The story is fuller and more fleshed out, the bosses are more mechanically demanding, and the puzzles have gotten puzzlier. Oh boy, do the puzzles puzzle in this game.
Many of the changes from the original Remnant are positive. The emphasis on story makes each world feel more interesting and alive, including the world you revisit from the original game, Yaesha. After the prologue, you’re thrown into one of three options: the mystical jungles of Yaesha, a desolate planet suffering a terrifying cataclysm called N’Erud, and a gothic city reminiscent of Bloodborne called Losomn. There’s also an interlude in The Labyrinth, which is much bigger than its previous iteration, and a finale in a familiar, but twisted location. While Corsus was clearly underdeveloped in the original until the DLC, all of Remnant 2’s worlds are equally complex and compelling, full of variety, and dense with secrets to discover. There are no weak links here, which makes post-game adventuring a lot more satisfying.
I’m also impressed with the new bosses. I’m happy to report that I haven’t once been killed during a boss fight by stepping off a cliff (a source of constant frustration in Remnant: From the Ashes) nor have I been killed by something reaching across the map and through a wall to get me (cough cough, Scourge). There are still some frustrating fights — the Custodian’s Eye has some cheap attacks that feel almost unavoidable, and the final boss took my group two nights to overcome — but all in all Remnant 2 feels more fair than the previous game. There’s even a new category of bosses: Aberrations, which are elite monsters that show up in the middle of dungeons on occasion.
The class system is my favorite change in Remnant 2. Not only does it add new passive and active ability options to help you tailor your playstyle, but eventually it also lets you combine two classes at once. Figuring out how to acquire and change classes is a little too cryptic, as all things in Remnant are, but once you figure it out, it opens up a lot of progression paths and gameplay variety. I haven’t found all 11 classes yet, but discovering them is the number one thing that's driving me to keep playing the game.
Not all of Remnant 2’s changes are for the better, unfortunately. Removing set bonuses from armor was supposed to open up build crafting more, but it just made armor feel trivial. Once you find the highest armor and the highest weight you’re willing to contend with, there’s almost no reason to ever change it. Managing gear is a lot more tedious than it was in the first game, and while there are more rewards to find throughout the world, the vast majority of the gear is just rings. By the end of the game I had found one armor set in each world, a couple guns, tons of melee weapons (which is a build that still doesn’t really work) and countless rings. It’s nice that you can equip more rings this time, but I have 40 of them and there’s no way to sort them.
I also don’t enjoy tailoring my build as much as I did in the first Remnant, even though there are more things to equip now. The basic Dragon Heart is better than almost every other option that doesn’t heal you, and the fragments are meaningless until you reach higher difficulties. It’s strange that the world is filled with so many low-impact gear pieces to collect while all of the armor and weapon pieces are available from the vendors in town right from the start. I would have preferred to have those things scattered throughout the dungeons’ puzzles and secret room instead of yet another dragon heart I’m never going to use.
Speaking of secrets, Remnant 2 really ups the ante when it comes to hidden treasures. It feels like a strange thing to complain about, but there are a few occasions where the level designers took things too far this time. It’s nice to have a few tucked-away secrets to find off the beaten path, but Remnant 2’s dungeons have secret rooms hidden inside secret rooms, and those secrets have secrets. It’s particularly fatiguing on Yaesha, where pressure plates open doors to chambers with false walls that lead to bonus boss fights that then branch off to a room with a book full of clues for another secret in another dungeon. Gunfire Games even hid one of its many secret classes in the game’s code so it could only be found via data mining. I love solving puzzles, but some of Remnant 2’s dungeons exhausted me.
Remnant: From the Ashes is one of my all-time favorite games, so the sequel had a lot to live up to. Remnant 2 makes many bold changes, and not all of them are successful, but it doesn’t lose the core of what makes Remnant so popular. It’s still a rock-solid shooter with a captivating setting that’s full of challenging boss fights, unique weapons, and plenty of mysteries to discover. If the post-launch support for Remnant 2 is anything like Remnant: From the Ashes, we'll have a lot to look forward to over the next couple of years while Gunfire Games refines the systems and adds new locations and game modes to try. The cliffhanger ending certainly indicates there’s a lot more to come, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.
