In our review, Remnant 2 continues the path of the prequel unperturbed and offers a bit more of everything. The new RPG shooter has its peaks in the gritty battles, while it discriminates against "old, white men" in the basement.
Remnant 2 follows 2019's Remnant: From the Ashes, a hardcore Soulslike shooter that is highly regarded on Steam. "So why do anything different," Gunfire Games presumably concluded, and is therefore throwing a "merely" improved iteration onto the market with Remnant 2. But do we need it at all?
One thing is for sure, the survival and dark fantasy bastard knows how to delight with great visuals and fun weapon fights. At least when your PC is clearly above the recommended system requirements. Moreover, budding wasteland heroes will look in vain for a break from current socio-political topics here. That's because Remnant 2 uses ostensibly gender-bending language and deeply divisive phrases.
To dive into the post-apocalyptic world of Remnant 2, there are thus a few very essential things to swallow. Our test clarifies whether the third-person shooter ultimately strains the nerves of the players positively or negatively.
At the beginning of the game, we knock together a game character from sufficient templates; detailed customization (such as the position of the mouth, eye color) is already not possible, as in the predecessor. The customization categories include gender, body type, face and skin color, hairstyle and hair color, as well as scars and face paint.
The character editor of Remnant 2 is hardly lacking in customization options.
It is also possible to create a permanently dying hardcore character at this point. As such, he is only allowed to shoot together with other hardcore characters, and he is also not able to join or host public games. Still, there are worthy rewards for enduring all these hardships.
After that, our warrior is thrown into a warlike, rugged, urban game world à la Fallout & Co. Together with our wounded companion Cass, we climb over all kinds of rubble and scrap in a render scene. The tough lady refuses our help; for feminist reasons, as will become clear.
After a stranded train car suddenly breaks loose and Cass saves our skin with a courageous push, the toxic lifesaver doesn't tire of charging us for her act. After all, it was already the third time that she saved the day of the (in most cases, of course, male) main character.
Apparently has a deeper problem with "old, white guys": our comrade-in-arms Cass.
However, the path leads us to an end-time settlement called Station 13, which functions as both a social hub and a level hub. More on that in a moment. Supergirl Cass finds clear words on this topic as well, discrediting the people living there as "people who hang out with an old white guy. This refers to Ford, the aged founder of Station 13, whom we meet in person after a few instructive firefights against aggressive wooden monsters.
Ford, already hundreds of years old under mysterious circumstances, tells us about the reddish shimmering world stones that enabled the people of the pre-apocalypse to travel to alien worlds. Too bad these portals also spewed out all sorts of vicious monsters, to which a good portion of humanity fell victim. In our presence, Ford then touches one of these stones, whereupon he disappears without a trace - as does our sister-in-arms, Clementine.
The search for the missing is the leitmotif of the story, which occasionally branches out, but quickly becomes a minor matter due to the baller action. Mostly, the sometimes somewhat cryptic plot is told by in-engine movie sequences, but extensive writings also satisfy role-playing game fans with lore.
Apart from a few grammatical errors ("the only thing"), the German speakers also leave little to be desired. You have to be prepared for the "gender-equal language" present in many places alone, as well as for overly strong women with discriminatory slogans on their lips.
Remnant 2 has increased its class pool, or rather its selection of archetypes, compared to its predecessor. Thus, a total of five different character classes are playable, each with their own special abilities. The following is a brief introduction to the perhaps somewhat too conventional light characters.
A look at the stats and perks of a still early Challenger.
In addition, the archetypes can be further improved and adapted to one's own play style with the help of trait points (see picture above). A trait point becomes available with each level up, and the increase in character level (to our delight) is very noticeable in combat.
A single level can therefore decide the difficulty of an entire area. By the way, status values such as health, stamina or armor can be changed in a roundabout way. To do this, we use the aforementioned trait points and invest them in trait cards such as Strong Backbone, Vitality or Condition.
All archetypes of Remnant 2 played quite differently in our test, especially the helper provided variety on the relentless battlefields with his animal companion. We completed the campaign with the daredevil, however, as he provided the most fun with his robustness. Mind you, we didn't have an easy time with him.
Let's move on to what the Dark Souls-inspired RPG shooter does best: Gun skirmishes. It's really remarkable how Remnant 2 manages to give us a sense of power despite its four high difficulty levels (even the easiest one demands certain skills).
You also have to fight against these heavily armored gentlemen in claustrophobic corridors. Nasty!
For the partly "magical" enemies like wooden monsters (wiry, bizarre tree abstractions), menacing "UFO bots", fighting machines with meter-wide lasers or angry zombie tributes may indeed get to us. We them however likewise, if we visit regularly over checkpoints the weapon forge of Station 13. There we can improve our equipment and purchase healing and boost items in exchange for easily found resources. By the way, this is also where we meet up with some of the characters from Remnant: From the Ashes.
| Remnant 2 makes bad decisions in co-op A co-op session is possible in Remnant 2 with up to two friends. The difficulty of the campaign scales accordingly and therefore remains very difficult even with reinforcements. From a technical point of view, we had nothing else to criticize about the co-op hustle than the solo campaign. However, the developers have made some unfavorable design decisions here. For example, the host alone achieves the campaign progress, while the other players are only allowed to keep their loot. Also, if his brothers and sisters in arms leave the session, the discovery progress goes into nirvana. So the next time you enter maps that have already been visited, you have to explore them again. Last but not least, no investment was made in cloud storage, which means that co-op game saves can get lost under certain circumstances. |
But back to the shootouts: Landing hits is no magic thanks to the solid controls and the zoom-in aiming mode. Nevertheless, the encounters remain a challenge, because some opponents know how to duck under the bullets very well. This makes successfully placed projectiles all the more satisfying, which is additionally supported by decent hit feedback.
In Station 13 you will find craftsmen who can improve your equipment.
The special abilities, some of which are "magical", are usefully mixed in with the lead-heavy combat. For example, they can help us in dicey moments by throwing enemies back and wounding them (shockwave). Likewise, they can also reduce stamina consumption, allowing us to sprint longer, or reduce the damage dealt by enemies within a certain radius.
Lastly, the pleasantly simple weapon handling made playing Remnant 2 feel a bit like playing a reboot edition of Doom, only from the third-person perspective. However, this statement is in no way to be understood as a warning. Rather, we're referring to the gloriously thumping gun sounds of pistols, "pump guns", MGs, sniper rifles and other essentially conventional weapons. And, of course, powerful impacts!
| Attention, Performance Problems Our test system consisting of a Core i7-8700k with 6x 3.7 GHz, a GeForce RTX 3060 and 32 gigabytes of DDR4 RAM clearly exceeds the recommended system specifications. Still, Remnant 2 provided us with a maximum of 45 frames per second and regularly undercut this value by up to 18 FPS. Meanwhile, Gunfire Games and Gearbox Publishing have let us know that all obvious game bugs will be fixed when Remnant 2 is released. We assume that the performance, which can be improved, will also be the subject of a future patch. |
The fun also remains largely unclouded in this part of the game, since the reset points can be described as fair when measured against the Soulslike genre. For example, if we are lying on our butts in a boss fight against a steamroller-like garbage monster, we only get back on seconds before the confrontation. In contrast, the lack of a pause function didn't add to the difficulty for our taste; we found its absence simply annoying.
Remnant 2 is by no means an open-world game, but a good number of larger levels can be cleared of critters. One of the most interesting aspects is that the order in which we enter each area via the World Stone in Station 13 is not fixed, nor is our respective active task.
Thus, one round of the game may begin in an underground prison, provided we've been snotty with a certain monarch. In the next round, on the other hand, we may not encounter the empress in question at all, depending on how we have behaved in the previous conversations.
Some areas of Remnant 2 look stunning.
Either way, the different landscapes in our test were varied; we got to see jungle-like biomes, almost Giger-esque planetary panoramas, and engineered underground facilities with gigantic, functional apparatuses, among other things. Sounds good? Even more, it looks fantastic at times thanks to the high artistic quality.
However, some level boundaries were set a bit tightly and there isn't much to discover except for a few supply crates with useful content like resources. The design rather takes into account exciting gun battles - with considerable success.
Because our opponents seem to know the respective level well, since they know how to use the environment for themselves over a larger area. This means that an opponent can suddenly disappear and jump at us a bit later from a more distant tunnel. Unpleasant surprises are therefore the order of the day, and that's a very good thing.
More archetypes, more beautiful levels, high-class firefights: Remnant 2 improves on its predecessor and remains exciting most of the time despite the game's simplicity. The fact that the imaginative story takes a back seat doesn't really matter, because the interesting to sophisticated level design provides a lot of fun.
In the Withering Forest of Remnant 2 you'll confront hordes of wooden monsters.
So what, apart from performance weaknesses and a poorly designed co-op mode, stands in the way of a high rating here? It's the fact that not every gamer feels like being politically "taught" by video games.
A fantasy RPG shooter might be suitable as a political mouthpiece if the respective topics are approached democratically. However, this is not the case with Remnant 2. No, it even turns into bashing against a certain population group. And that's really sad.
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Remnant 2 offers great visuals and exemplary gun fights, but suffers from performance problems. The developers also don't do themselves any favors by belittling a certain population group in the context of the rather incidental story.
