Our Remnant 2 review breaks down what makes this Souls-like RPG work and where it falls short, including lack of challenge and enemy variety
Remnant 2 left a poor impression for a while. The open-world game‘s introductory sequence is meant to set up the narrative and characters while teaching you the basics, but it’s so tedious and slow that I instantly disliked the leading cast and wanted to skip every cutscene that followed. Things started to pick up a bit when I reached the first world, thanks in no small part to the world design.
Remnant 2’s worlds are superb. Every main area grabs you as soon as you step foot on the surface and plunges you into a dense, oppressive atmosphere, throwing a new set of environmental hazards and problems to contend with. Yaesha’s dense dying flora lets deadly foes hide almost literally in plain sight, for example, while N’Erud’s expansive plains and fatal fog block you from seeing what’s up ahead – and it’s usually something deadly. Then there’s Losomn, which is a hybrid of fetid sewers and lux strongholds safely ensconced behind plenty of guards.
The problem is that the enemies you encounter in each world aren’t that interesting. Most planets have a pretty limited selection of enemies, and they don’t come at you in challenging ways or combinations. and it rarely combines them in challenging ways. It started to feel like fight-by-numbers, and I lost interest quickly.
When you aren’t pushing through waves of repetitive enemies, you’ll be doing something much more interesting: solving Remnant 2’s excellent puzzles. There’s still a smattering of enemy hordes to deal with, but the emphasis outside the main hub areas is mainly on solving puzzles.
The puzzles are mostly worth your time, especially the ones that unlock new classes. The Lament dial puzzle can absolutely get wrecked, but that’s an outlier in an otherwise stellar selection of head-scratchers.
I just wish these weren’t almost entirely optional. The rings you get as a reward are nice, sure, but something more thought provoking on the main path would’ve helped make the main story more interesting and make up for the lack of challenge elsewhere.
That lack of challenge makes character customization difficult to dig into. You have dozens of options in this freeform system, with all the traits, classes, gear, and accessories you could hope for to build a weird lil’ guy, a monstrous force of nature, or whatever you see fit to build. If you spend time getting really good at it, there’s room for min-maxing and making a god of destruction with all the powers you can wield.
That’s cool, but I never felt like I needed this power.
I rarely struggled on higher difficulty levels against regular enemies. Most bosses took maybe two or three attempts, and I ended up sticking with the rings I liked from the early game, without ever running into negative consequences. I even kept my class’ default weapons until halfway through the game and kept upgrading to keep them current.
The bosses might have been on the easy side, but they’re still the best part of Remnant 2, which is what you’d hope from a Souls-like game. As with any good Souls-like, each boss is challenging in a different way. Some overwhelm you with numbers, others make clever use of Remnant 2’s status conditions, and a few just slam into you with excessive power.
My favorite was in The Labyrinth, where massive concrete blocks with glowing targets thumped around narrow paths, forcing you to plan very far ahead to hit all of the targets without getting crushed. Granted, I died more to my character’s refusal to jump than the actual blocks, but I still came away satisfied with a unique encounter.
That’s the problem with Remnant 2, though, even thinking back on the stuff I enjoyed, there’s an asterisk next to it of something that annoyed me. The worlds are atmospheric, but traversing them is dull; the puzzles are well thought out, but they’re mostly optional; character building is freeform, but you don’t need to pay it much thought; there’s a story, but it’s so bland it’s barely worth mentioning.
It leaves me in a position where I just don’t see what all the fuss is about. I don’t actively dislike Remnant 2, but every time I started enjoying it, something else would tick me off and snatch that feeling away.
Written by Ryan Woodrow on behalf of GLHF
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