![]() A lot of this comes down to the game’s formulaic combat. But progressing through Remnant 2 never imparts the same sense of accomplishment that comes from finally getting through a difficult area in Sekiro, or figuring out the optimal strategy for defeating a boss in Elden Ring. In a mechanical, kinetic sense, the genre portmanteau works well enough. Bosses attack with telegraphed movements that must be studied, recognized, and then avoided with an invincible dodge roll. The world resets at bonfire-esque checkpoints. Run-of-the-mill enemies ambush and swarm in deadly groups. Muddled story aside, Remnant 2’s basic gameplay elements still very much feel like the result of someone getting high and wondering, Man, wouldn’t Dark Souls be cool if you had an AK-47 instead of swords? And while they’re not as flagrant as the reception to Remnant: From the Ashes led me to believe, the borrowed hallmarks are obvious. But even original lore concepts are treated as so complicated by ostensibly all-knowing characters that they often give up trying to dumb them down halfway through a conversation, leaving me even more unwilling to put up with the game’s cliched post-apocalyptic trappings. It’s one of several things Remnant 2 attempts to poach (with varying degrees of shamelessness and success) from the Souls series, a group of games I love enough to still be holding out hope for a Bloodborne sequel. I’m OK with dense narratives presented by cryptic, unreliable narrators. Even worse, it makes a habit of falling back on that very same complexity as an excuse to avoid arranging its tangled plot threads into an appreciable canvas. What I encountered, however, was an overly convoluted, MacGuffin-heavy story dead set on explaining nothing. Heck, I thought I’d be lucky to grasp even half of the proper nouns treated with reverence by the largely foreign-to-me lore. The cavalier way in which Remnant 2 borrows merely serves to remind me of all the more competent games I could be playing insteadĪs someone who neglected Remnant: From the Ashes three years ago, I didn’t go into Remnant 2 expecting to understand everything from the jump. You run, you gun, you dodge, you roll ad infinitum, sometimes even breaking up the action with special powers depending on your chosen archetype. In each of these areas, you partake in third-person shooting mixed with the evasive tactics popularized by FromSoftware in games like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring. While the game’s post-apocalyptic adventure also takes you to less despondent locales - including ornate palaces, lush forests, brutalist labyrinths, and fiery slums - every world you visit in Remnant 2 contains an example of societal downfall via humankind’s hubris. Remnant 2, the sequel to 2019 sleeper hit Remnant: From the Ashes, was the irradiated straw that broke the two-headed camel’s back. I’m over sepia tones and dusty streets and overgrown vines and corrugated steel shelters and tales of civilization-ending greed passed down from generation to generation. I’m over jaded urban explorers born after the disaster du jour joking about dilapidated billboard advertisements from the Before Times as if they don’t know what coffee is. I’m over scrappy survivors scavenging supplies in abandoned car parks and office buildings. ![]()
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