Remnant 2 is a co-op shooter on track to deliver this year's most dependable sequel
This year's sleeper hit?
Sometimes all you need from a video game is a bit of bloodshed with your pals. And sometimes, all you need from a sequel is the first one, but a bit bigger and bit better. Having spent a few hours with third-person co-op shooter Remnant 2, I reckon it's shaping up to be exactly those two things. It remains unconcerned with telling groundbreaking stories or delivering breathtaking cinema in its fights - it doesn't care. From what I've played, it's more about being the looter shooter for those who care about fine-tuning the consistency of the numbers they're able to extract from their foes.
Remnant 2 is similar to its predecessor Remnant From The Ashes in one big way: it's not a live service game. If that's taken you by surprise, I don't blame you. Look at any gameplay clips of either one in action and they have the hallmarks of a live service shooter designed to persist forever and consume your entire existence. There's a very Last Of Us-style base home that has vendors who trade in shiny rocks and crystals. Currency is earned by delving into randomly generated dungeons and completing their quests, where more often than not you have to fight a fleshy mass of tendrils or a googly eye with a shotgun for an iris (I have made these up, but I bet they exist). The aim is to empty your pocket of rocks, upgrade your gear, and spend points until the campaign simply… ends.
There's a finality to Remnant 2 which sits it more alongside Outriders, than Destiny, in the sense you're not tied to servers being online to play, and there aren't any seasons or battle passes (at least, none planned yet). You're also delving into bespoke dungeons picked at random, as opposed to a series of procedurally generated ones. The idea being that you could see everything if you replayed the campaign over and over, with or without co-op pals. And I genuinely got a sense of how everyone's experience at the preview was slightly different, as our co-op teams quickly realised we'd all been plopped into different dungeon runs by the randomiser. As someone who's spent a frankly disgusting amount of time under the eye of live service giants, I'm all for a game whose start screen doesn't consider my button press as additional footfall.
Our beginnings were all the same, though, as we picked from three main classes: a medic, a marksman, or a tank, each with three offshoots called archetypes; a fancy word for specialisation. I opted for the Challenger because I thought they'd be quite good at battering aliens up close and drawing aggro away from my party. It turned out to be semi-true, in that I got a shotgun and a titanic sword, but by no means was I a beefy shield for my co-op mates to stand behind. If anything, I seemed just as susceptible to death as everyone else, with several level-ups offering little of an expansion into the bullet sponge I thought I'd inflate into.
What's odd is most loot-driven games throw rewards at you early on, perhaps tapering them off as you progress. It's a classic, isn't it? A surefire way to hook you in, like the shower of gems Duolingo hits you with for learning the word "hello" or the incredibly useful phrase "I will drink some milk this afternoon, good bye". Maybe it's something that really ramps up later, but man, the portion of the game I played lacked the immediate gratification you'd find in most looter shooters or MMOs. Aside from lots of Trait Points offering incremental percentage increases and rocks to spend at crafting benches, I rarely received any weapons gift-wrapped in shiny purple borders.
You could argue I should've returned to base and spent my space rocks. And you'd be right! The game, though, didn't seem to encourage that behaviour. It nudged us forever forwards, where maybe we should've taken a moment to return to the hub space and better our loadouts. If you aren't a Remnant vet, don't expect to understand how the hub space marries with your dungeon dives from the get-go. Still, my gripes are small in the grand scheme, as I'm pretty confident the game's layered like a large onion and given more time, my character would've started forming into a tank, with all the intro fluff peeling away to reveal different subsections of upgrade trees and archetypes.
Loot aside, the action is bettered by its simplicity. When presented with baddies, you're to dodgeroll and shoot between said rolls. What's interesting is the way Remnant 2 sticks with the Mad Max-y weaponry of its predecessor, as opposed to sci-fi pew pew pistols and laser cannons. Perhaps this will change as you progress, but I found it interesting that the mundanity of the weapons elevated the impact of fights. Encounters felt quite pure, in a way? There's a real pleasure in taking out a zombie with a clunk of a shotgun bolted together by slabs of corrugated iron, like you're a toothpick-between-the-teeth kind of bounty hunter, not one determined by the size of your RGB cannon.
My co-op pals and I managed to get through a handful of beautifully rendered dungeons, a number of which were themed around a labyrinthine sequence of crimson jungle, pocked with sickly flora that likely resemble the inside of my intestines after a Patak's vindaloo. Thanks to a lovely 3D map in the top right corner which would rotate as we explored, we found it relatively easy to navigate the multi-storey dungeons. Unfortunately, it didn't prevent moments where we'd scan our maps for slivers of the fogs of war we hadn't cleared in the hopes they bore a definitive path forward. Often, I just wished one of us could press a button and a big marker would put us out of our misery.
Towards the end of one dungeon we fought a spindly boss armed with a pulsating mirror which would follow us about and spit rippling death rays. I'm going to be completely honest with you, I had absolutely no idea how we beat him. You know how bosses have a pattern to them, like a certain lull in their attacks when you're meant to leather them with everything you've got? Well, I - and my pals - never quite worked out when that was. The fight itself was a cool bid for survival, I guess, but marred by slight jank in the clarity department.
And while I enjoyed probing the waterfalls of murder forests and the occasional death crypt, I'd hoped for a few more random encounters with friendly randos. Only once did I have a meaningful conversation with someone mid-dungeon-run, and that was with a blue nymph lady who hit me with a sequence of moral conundrums and offered me a reward if she liked my responses. Sadly, I didn't have time to chat with her properly, but I think I answered some of her questions right and I got something for my efforts?
Don't get me wrong. The game's combat demands brain cell activation in a good way, rewarding you with tense bouts with fucked up lil' guys that require much more from you than pulling the trigger. Except there's a never ending stream of them and I'd hoped for some respite from their constant barrage. While NPCs like the nymph lady could become mainstays as you progress, the roguelike shootybang felt a bit repetitive when compared to the likes of Hades or Cult Of The Lamb, which slide in semi-regular natters with NPCs who: a) aren't out to kill you, and b) can transform your sesh entirely with powerful mutators. I think with all the quality roguelikes out there nowadays, I've transformed into a bit of a spoiled brat.
I know I'm being a bit critical of Remnant 2 here, with all my little gripes and wants and needs. Truthfully, I really enjoyed myself and I think my criticism is a sign I wanted to really dig into it and see if it dug into me. Its whole premise is enticing, in the way it's a co-op shooter that plays like a live service but isn't one, as I know I can dip into it knowing full well it'll never leave me behind. And I genuinely believe Remnant 2 might be a great shooter when it launches sometime later this year, as it looks to provide exactly the right sort of action to promote a good ratio of inane chatter to overly serious chats about how to optimise one's pistol.
NotE3 and Summer Game Fest 2023 is over for another year. You can find out all the latest news by visiting our E3 2023 hub, or you can catch up with our round-up posts of everything that was announced at Summer Game Fest, the Xbox Games Showcase, the PC Gaming Show, Day Of The Devs, and our top highlights from the Wholesome Direct.
