I've been collarbone-deep in Remnant over the past week. I've cleared one Remnant 2 campaign with a co-op buddy and we're now working through a second. I've also beaten the original Remnant: From the Ashes solo to get my RPG shooter fix between our multiplayer sessions. See, I tried the first game back in the day but never got very far despite enjoying it at the time. I'm actually kind of happy about that now, because playing the two games side-by-side like this has hammered home not just how good Remnant 2 is, but specifically how much better it is.
Jumping from one to two feels like trading a match for a lighter. It's one of the biggest upgrades I've seen from any sequel in recent memory, and it's exactly the kind of game I want more of.
The good kind of jank
Remnant: From the Ashes reminds me of a lot of what I said in my Code Vein review, and not just because of the vaguely Dark Souls framework the two games share. They're both 3/5 games that I really like despite obvious problems. The original Remnant is clunky as hell, kind of ugly, quickly gets repetitive, and doesn't make a lot of sense. It feels like a game that didn't have enough of something. I don't know if it was time, or money, or experience, but it was lacking somewhere. It didn't have much polish, but it did have a good core idea, and that counts for a lot. It always struck me as the kind of game that needed a sequel, not to wrap up story threads – I'm not sure it even had those – but rather to make full use of design potential. So I'm incredibly glad we got Remnant 2.
This happens with a lot of games, and it seems to be inordinately common among Souls-likes. Maybe that's just my perception because it's the genre I can't quit, but I'd put the likes of The Surge, Nioh, and possibly Lords of the Fallen in the same camp. The Surge 2 is probably the best comparison for sequels; I know some people actually prefer the original Nioh, and though Lords of the Fallen's reboot looks quite good, it isn't out yet to review.
My point is that a lot of decent games are built on ideas that deserve more, or at least could be more. Well, OK, Lords of the Fallen 2014 was honestly a bit shit, but I'll cut it some slack here. As someone who sees, plays, and evaluates a metric ton of games, it's always exciting to see sequels that significantly improve on ideas rather than simply offering more of an already good thing. Good things are good and I'm usually happy to get more of them, but I'll always prefer the sequels that turn something decent into something great. That's partly because they're so rare, and they are so rare partly because it's hard to greenlight a sequel to anything less than a stone-cold banger. That's the magic of Remnant 2.
Even the significant improvements made in The Surge 2 don't hold a candle to Remnant 2's revolution. I still like Remnant: From the Ashes and would encourage you to try it, at least if you can get it on sale, but from visuals and quality of life to RPG systems and replayability, Remnant 2 is head-and-shoulders above it. It's one of my favorite RPG shooters ever, frankly.
A better RPG
Remnant 2 hasn't so much improved the RPG elements as it has added them. In Remnant: From the Ashes, your build is essentially your guns. There were 'classes,' but they're ultimately just a choice of starter weapon mod. You still had traits for a light skill tree, but no true archetypes. You also only had a few accessories and three bits of armor with fairly generic set effects, so I never felt like I got a true build going. The tightest synergy I found was combining an amulet that boosts bleed damage with a weapon that deals bleed damage. Just call me MacGyver.
Remnant 2 is incomparably more in-depth. Its starter classes are more plentiful and infinitely more meaningful, and you quickly end up dual-classing to combine passive buffs and active abilities. I started as a Hunter and soon picked up Summoner, and I've now slotted in Challenger as my main to beef up a bit. Once I max out Summoner and unlock its innate health regen trait as a class-wide option, I'm jumping straight into Handler to trade my pet demons for a pet dog. That's right; Remnant 2 has an entire class about an attack dog, and that's why it's the best.
There's a deep well of replayability here that most RPG shooters would rightly covet.
There are 11 classes total, and the buildcrafting potential between them is huge. I actually like that you're incentivized to level multiple classes to unlock their powerful traits. It's a grind, but a fun one, and it makes the two classes you equip feel more important by saving trait points. I could, for example, just keep Summoner as my permanent second class so I don't have to spend points on its health regen trait. This system also reminds me of the weapon grind in Ratchet and Clank in the way it encourages you to try stuff you thought you might not like, only to fall in love once you get it leveled up.
The interplay between your classes and your equipment has also improved immensely. All four of my rings, as well as my amulet and estus flask-like relic heart, are built around mod power and power generation. My whole build wants to fuel the innate mod on the incredibly broken boss gun Nightfall, which has not left my hands since I got it on my first playthrough. After beating the game once, I've looked into the Remnant 2 community a bit and realized every Nightfall owner had the same idea, but I regret nothing. I love that I can invest so much into this specific niche and reap huge rewards, even if it does make me a bit squishy. Just ask my co-op partner, who's scraped me off the floor of many a boss arena. But at least I hit really hard.
A rare degree of replayability
Remnant 2 immediately looks and plays much better than its predecessor, but I didn't fully understand its depths until I started another playthrough. A few worlds into my second campaign, I've already encountered far bigger differences than I did during multiple campaign-lite Adventures in the first game. My subsequent runs of Remnant: From the Ashes felt like obvious rearrangements, whereas Remnant 2 is capable of fuller rewrites.
There's a deep well of replayability here that most RPG shooters would rightly covet. My co-op partner and I have found completely different main bosses, basic enemies, environments, rewards, and puzzles – shockingly good puzzles, I should add. The first game never really went beyond 'combine bullet with dude's face,' but Remnant 2 has some real stumpers hiding valuable rewards. One of my favorite memories from the second campaign has been stumbling onto a new subquest in the Beatific Palace which fills out the lore of Losomn and introduces paired bosses. We killed one boss in this playthrough, so if we run into this duo again in the future, we'll naturally kill the other for some added newness.
I've seen plenty of overlap as well, but even repeat bosses can have different modifiers that subtly change up the fight, sort of like elite mobs in a game like Diablo 4. And as I said earlier, I'm using different classes this time around, which further changes up moment-to-moment gameplay. This isn't a game built to be played forever – putting it in the same camp as literally every other video game with the possible exception of Old School Runescape – but there's a lot more meat on it than I anticipated. I'm starting to see what the devs meant when they said even some 400-hour players haven't seen it all. I can easily picture myself putting in several dozen hours before the first DLC is out.
My few complaints are pretty small in the grand scheme of things. Friendly fire seems a little excessive, for example. I'd kill for a map overlay of some kind, or at least a map view of checkpoints so I can stop teleporting to the wrong one. Some bosses have so many particle effects on their attacks that you can't see their freakin' attacks, which is extra annoying when the hitboxes swing wider than a derailed freight train. And it sometimes feels like there aren't enough mobs around for two people to kill, but I've heard that three-player scaling can be excessively harsh, so maybe I should hold my tongue. Still, there have been no deal-breakers.
I had some hopes going in, but nowhere in my crystal ball did I see Remnant 2 being one of my favorite games of the summer, if not the year. It's no small feat to release in the same year as The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and still stand out as one of the most impressive sequels. Co-op is buttery smooth in my experience, the game runs well on my PC, and I don't think I'll ever get tired of laying into bosses with Nightfall or knocking dudes back with my double-barrel shotgun. Maybe I'll even try some of the other cool guns at some point. Maybe.
