izigame.me

TL;DR: Fun and intense gunplay, excellent build variety, and tons of progression for neverending dopamine hits BUT reeeeaaally crap performance and tedious and illusory-wall-spamming “puzzles” gatekeeping unlocks. Bosses have many cancerous mechanics (e.g. half of them have instakill attacks), which is either a good or bad thing depending on how masochistic you are.

General Vibe
Going through the biomes shooting and killing trash mobs is an absolute joy. Whenever an Elite spawns in the overworld, adds seemingly infinitely spawn until you take care of the Elite. Some players may dislike this (especially since those Elites don’t actively seek you out), but I enjoy this constant state of running and killing.
However, there are a few questionable design choices. Dodging, vaulting, AND jumping from ledges are all on the same button. Feels annoying to climb over cover you want to dodge into.
Also, there isn’t an interaction key for ladders—nor is there a way to animation cancel once you’ve started mounting one. This means if you so much as touch a ladder, you are locked into an animation where enemies are free to attack you.
Performance
I’m running a GTX 1080 (stronger than the supposedly “recommended” RTX 2060 as per the Steam Store page) and playing on 1080p 60FPS with everything on the absolute lowest settings. Despite that, I’m having massive frame issues in half the biomes and parts of the hub. Other users are reporting similar issues.
I will say that Remnant 2 on lowest settings looks just as good as Remnant 1 on highest settings, so it’s not the worst. Once patches fix the frame issues, we’re good to go.
Builds
By far the best part of Remnant 2. While the unique armour effects from Remnant 1 are gone, most of their effects have shifted to Mutators you can slot onto your weapons. On top of that, you have alternative Relics (i.e. Remnant’s Estus Flask equivalent), stat sticks to place on your Relics, Mods to slot into your weapons, an Amulet slot, 4 Ring slots, many Archetypes to select, and 3 Skills per Archetype to customise your character.
There are also DPS dummies in the hub to test out your damage, which is nice.
What's controversial is how Remnant 2 changed Traits, which are small incremental increases for stats like health and movement speed. In Remnant 1, Trait points were unlimited: with both DLCs, you could have a level 1,000 maxed out character. In Remnant 2, you are limited to a max of 60 out of 300-ish (85 if you're using 2 level 10 Archetypes).
The principal designer has stated this change was made to improve build diversity and make it easier to balance future content. I'm neutral on this change, though many players absolutely hate it.
Bosses
People HATED the add spam in Remnant 1, and the devs have taken that feedback into account. Adds are no longer a constant horde—the bosses that spawn adds often perform an animation to signal that they’re summoning, and the adds that appear are usually limited to a handful.
HOWEVER.
They have given the bosses tons of cancerous mechanics. Those who have played Remnant 1 will remember Enchanter Shroud. Imagine that design philosophy applied to every boss that has a modifier. My favourite new addition is the modifier that heals the boss for a third of their HP whenever you use a Relic, which is more of an ammo-check than anything else. They nerfed this. :(
Also, why do half of the bosses have instakill attacks? Especially the cubes. What the fuck is that?
Now, I’m a masochist who appreciates bullshit unfair fights in my Soulslikes, so I LOVE this. Others may not.
Puzzles
The “puzzles” in Remnant 2 are designed with Google Search in mind, and it shows. Some of the unlocks are only discoverable with thousands of players sharing info after one randomly lucked into the solution.
If you like puzzles, you’ll get annoyed at how lethal some of the puzzles are—there are now runbacks for fucking puzzles. I don’t mind trial-and-error, but when some puzzle runbacks are longer than Elden’s Ring’s Placidusax runback, it’s just disrespectful of the player’s time.
Not to mention some puzzles take a 90 IQ person 10 seconds to figure out but require 20 minutes of boring running back and forth to complete. And let’s not forget the Goddamn illusory walls. It’s the laziest form of “puzzle” in Soulslikes, and it forces players to either a) dodgeroll into every fucking wall or b) have to look up guides to find items. There are also puzzles that require multiple players, so enjoy begging in the Discord.
And if you hate puzzles and just want to experiment with builds and shoot things, have fun with how often you have to tab out to Google how to open a locked door.
I’m not expecting this game to be like Portal, but it feels like half of the more complex unlocks are from the Genshin Impact School of haha le rand0m, with the other half being from the Elden Ring Academy of Illusory Walls.
Overall
Remnant 2 is great. Gameplay is extremely satisfying, and boss fights are brutally fun. Performance is currently crap, and there are a few bugs here and there, but nothing a few patches won’t fix. Excited for what’s to come.