Remnant: From the Ashes

Remnant is from the developers of Darksiders, which I hated the first game, so going in I didn't have high expectations.

 Remnant: From the Ashes takes heavy inspiration from various games, most notably the Souls franchise, and third person shooters such as gears of war.

Gameplay:
+ The controls feel decent enough, you have a rolling manevuer similar to Gears of war/ Dark souls  where it gives you invincibility frames to dodge through attacks. The shooting feels decent, with numbers flying out of enemies with each attack.

- Unfortunately, the controls can also be a massive pain in the ass and feel artifically challenging in some instances. For example you cannot hip fire or shoot without zooming all the way into the screen, which means more often than not you'll be getting hit by things you can't see because you're too busy zooming in to even be able to defend yourself. This loop becomes frustrating. Why can't I just shoot from the hip? Why do I have to zoom all the way into the screen just to defend myself?

+ A very obvious and MAJOR plus to the game, and the reason I bought it, is that it has FULL Campaign co op. You can play the entire game with a friend, which means all the boss fights will get very passionate and angry because the game also becomes harder in co op as all the enemies and bosses get increased health and damage.

The game cycle involves a hub world, where you go to a handful of different vendors to buy consumables / upgrade your equipment, and from there touching a Crystal to teleport to the different zones of the world.

- The zones of the game unfortunately feel copy pasted a lot. You have different templates, such as swamp land, city streets, industrial building zones, and forestylands,  but other than that there is almost absolutely nothing identifiable or different about them.  Everything looks the same and it's very easy to get turned around and accidentally backtrack because of the lack of any identifiable landmarks for the most part.


+ The enemy design is varied, which is a strength. Almost every differet checkpoint/loading zone will have different enemies, and it never feels like you fight the same thing all too often.


+ The skill tree system revolves around unlocking tons of 'traits' which you get by performing various activites in the game. By the end of the game you have so many of these it does feel like you have a big variety of things to choose from. Things like maximum health, reload speed, crit chance, XP gain etc.. It's exciting to unlock new traits.


Now onto the serious drawbacks and massive flaws I have found with this game:

- This is suppose to be an RPG full of stats and such, but the fatal flaw is that the itemization SUCKS. It is totally expected and normal to play the ENTIRE GAME with the STARTER WEAPON and ARMOR. Fucking fail! I don't need to explain how boring this is. Imagine any other RPG where there are no fucking items! How did they mess this up? Even for a shooter game, ONE weapon?

 I mean, there are items you can find, but they are so hidden and few and far between it's not even expected that a player will find any on their first run. All you find are  rings and amulets. 10 Hours into the game and I was still using the same starter weapon and armor, just upgraded to do more damage. It's so boring! I want variety and cool armor and weapons to use, this alone made the game seriously flawed.
 Vendors mostly consist of visiting the same person everytime, upgrading your armor/weapon for more defense/damage, or going to another vendor and buying consumables such as more firing rate, or giving yourself ammo. That's basically it. Incredibly basic and forgettable.

- Like another example, 'weapon mods' are a big thing in this game, where you can attach different alternate attacks to your guns such as fire damage or healing or a swam of insects, however, again, there are barely any of them to unlock by the end of the game I only had like 4 of them and mostly ended up using the same mod the entire game. What the hell?

When you kill bosses, you can exchange a boss item for new weapons, and by the end of the game I didn't use a single one of them because they were so unappealing or not suitable for my playstyle. And it was only about 2 or 3 maximum. At the very end of the game I unlocked an assault rifle thing, and 2 pieces of armor, which was a good change of pace. But too little too late.


- The bosses are mostly a miss and failure. For example the vast majority of boss fights are just a big bullet sponge guy, and then waves upon waves of generic enemies. More often than not the boss himself isn't the challenge, it's the never ending waves of trash mobs that he spawns that make it challenging. And thhis happens for almost every  boss fight. Not to mention that a significant amount are just straight rip offs of Souls bosses.  Very few bosses have anything unique or identifiable about them, it's just shoot the big bullet sponge guy, then stop and attack the minions when they spawn. Total miss.


 + However, a small amount of the bosses are extremely challenging, engaging, and different. Like the dual butterfly boss encounter that constantly spams balls of lightning at you and a million attacks, well it took hours to beat this guy and we even had to go back and grind our traits up. This was the most invested we were into the game and it got very passionate and frustrating, but in the end when we finally defeated the challenge it felt worth it.

+ There are some choices you can make which change the course of the campaign, you can choose to kill certain bosses or help them, at first they are incredibly hard, but you can come back later and refuse to help them and finally kill them and unlock some different weapon attacks and such.

Neutral point: All of the enemies and items are randomly generated, so nothing is cleverly placed for you to discover or encounter. It's all made by a random number generation. I don't know if this is positive or negative, on one hand it makes repeatedly playthroughs more interesting and varied, but on the other hand it removes the carefully hand crafted clever placement out, so I don't know.


Presentation:

Mostly the techincal side of the game the graphics can be impressive, the lightning and reflections of water , and cloth physics of your cloak swinging around truly look next gen. But personally it doesn't all check out for me, the game has a serious obsession with the color red and most of the game world is tinted red and it starts to get repetitive and grating.

 - While the game has a lot of enemies, none of them are truly appealing or initmidating. The entire artstyle of the game looks more like a marvel comic book than any real sinister or scary believable world. Everything has this cartoony over designed fantasty look that is just really unappealing for me

- Especially the faces, the faces in this game just look like total shit. Looks like a shitty cartoon or someting, don't know how else to describe it. The art style is just not appealing.

- As I said there are barely any guns in the game (atleast on first playthrough), and such you are using the same gun for the whole game, and it doesn't even look cool. It has all this stupid scrap attached to it and looks totally bizarre and fantasy and it's just not all that fun to shoot cause it looks so stupid. Another fail.

- None of the world truly stands out as anything memorable, the art style of the whole game isn't the best, but it isn't the worst. It's just an average looking cartoony game.

+ But as I've said the techincal graphics of the game can look impressive, it has modern lighting shadows and details so it's just ok, let down by unappealing art style at times.


- I can't even comment about the story, seriously. I don't know. I can't even write a single sentence what it's about. It was never appealing or interesting, nor were any of the characters. I can't tell you a single characters name in the entire game, or boss, or anything really. Seriously. I just finished the game 20 minutes ago and if you put a gun to my head and demanded me to tell you a character from Remnant I would be hard pressed to tell you one. So I guess the story sucks, but atleast its irrelevant and does not get in your way.

+You basically always have control of your character, and the story does not interrupt you, if you want to learn more about the story you can do so on your own terms. so it's a postitive thing I guess.

I went into Remnant looking for a Souls styled shooter game, and while it really is not much like that outside of the roll mechanic, what I got was a third person shooter with very light elements of RPG. The itemization is total shit and the upgrades are very minimalist and only serve to basically scale you up with damage and health as the game progressivly gets harder. The shooting is solid enough, as is the movement, so the game never felt that bad to play or boring, but In my opinion it could have done so much more, and missed a lot of cues

6/10