Remnant 2 review: A Soulslike without a soul

I’m over the post-apocalypse.

I’m over scrappy survivors scavenging supplies in abandoned car parks and office buildings. 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 sepia tones and dusty streets and overgrown vines and corrugated steel shelters and tales of civilization-ending greed passed down from generation to generation.

Remnant 2.The sequel to the 2019 sleeper hit From Ashes, Remnant, was the irradiated straw that broke the two-headed camel’s back.

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. You can play in each area using third-person shooter tactics and evasive techniques popularized by FromSoftware’s games such as Dark Souls, Bloodborne” Elden Ring. The action is endless. You will run, fire, roll, and dodge.

Gunfire Games/Gearbox Publishing

Remnant 2. tells the story of several human-made catastrophes — some sudden, some plodding like our own — connected to an interdimensional evil known as the Root. The plant-like entity’s spread was slowed down during the events in the first title, but it continues to make its way across Remnant, wiping out countless worlds on an inexplicable mission to eliminate all life, except for its own. The sequel has you traveling from broken planet to crumbling planet in search of tools that can defeat the Root.

I am a neglectful person. From Ashes, Remnant three years ago, I didn’t go into Remnant 2.Expecting to know everything right away. 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. It was a good effort. But I tried. But what I got was an overly complex, McGuffin heavy story, which seemed determined to not explain anything. It is even worse because it uses that same complexity to justify not arranging the tangled threads of its plot into a coherent canvas.

I’m OK with dense narratives presented by cryptic, unreliable narrators. It’s one of several things Remnant 2.The Souls series is one of the games I’m still holding out for, and have been trying to steal from (with various degrees of success). Bloodborne sequel. Even original concepts of lore are so complex that characters who claim to be all-knowing often stop trying to simplify them halfway through the conversation. This makes me more frustrated with this cliche post-apocalyptic world.

Gunfire Games/Gearbox Publishing

A muddled tale 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?While not as spectacular as the reception, From Ashes, RemnantThe borrowed trademarks were obvious. The same enemies who are always around ambush you and attack in groups. At checkpoints which look like bonfires, the world is reset. A stamina gauge controls movement. The bosses attack using telegraphed moves that need to be recognized and avoided by an invincible Dodge Roll.

The genre portmanteau is fine in a mechanical and kinetic sense; however, progressing through Remnant 2.The feeling of achievement that you get when finally completing a challenging area is not the same as getting it done. SekiroOr figuring out how to defeat a boss? Elden Ring. A lot of this comes down to the game’s formulaic combat. Almost every encounter plays out the same way: You come up on a group of the current area’s Little Guys, a horn sounds to let you know if You can find out more about this by clicking here.You will be greeted by a bunch of Little Guys, but sometimes you’ll hear a loud noise that indicates an approaching Big Guy who has increased health or special abilities.

Gunfire Games/Gearbox Publishing

Remnant 2. is so rote that jumping from battle to battle reminded me of rewatching a movie I can already recite from beginning to end (although not nearly as enjoyable as, say, quoting Ben Stiller’s monologue from Heavyweights). Mowing down the game’s odd assortment of plant monsters, living stone figures, futuristic robots, and British peasants (the scariest enemy of all, let me tell you) feels great thanks to better-than-average gunplay, but you can only walk backward and shoot at weak points for so long, no matter how attached you get to your custom loadout. The story was not moving forward after a dozen-hour period. I had to rush from one area to another in order for the game’s plotline.

Even the bosses, one thing you’d expect a Soulslike to get right, are unimaginative. The bosses are mostly bullet sponges that check whether you’ve upgraded your gear. There were two exceptions, however: A group of giant cubes who try to squash you as you race through an incredibly claustrophobic labyrinth, and the final boss, which was my only real challenge during this entire game. Remnant 2.. It wasn’t until I got to this ultimate battle that dodge-rolling became an absolute necessity to survive everything thrown my way, which struck me as odd for a game so closely associated with the series that popularized the mechanic.

Remnant 2.’s biggest sin is its lack of identity. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a strong foundation at its core — but the cavalier way in which it borrows, both mechanically and aesthetically, from not only the Souls series but God of War, Control” Return to WorkThis serves only to remind me all of the other more competent games I might be playing. But while Remnant 2. obviously wants me to keep playing with friends after the campaign is over, the simplistic combat’s flattening of character builds and lack of a consequential loot system puts an obvious ceiling on how much satisfaction I’ll derive from the postgame, the height of which depends entirely on getting behind the mediocre gameplay.

Gunfire Games/Gearbox Publishing

This is the moment in which Remnant 2. launches doesn’t do it any favors, either. It took me 16 hours to finish the game’s campaign, planning early-morning and late-night sessions around a climate change-induced California heat wave so as to not exacerbate the daily triple-degree temperatures already turning my home into a sweat lodge. Folks, there’s no point in fearing some hypothetical apocalypse waiting for us over the horizon. We’re living through one right now. It’s just so slow-moving and boring that our dumb amphibian brains are instead making entertainment out of the water getting hotter around us like it’s not seconds away from a rolling boil.

I’m over the post-apocalypse, and it’s going to take one hell of a game to get me interested in such a bleak setting for the foreseeable future. Remnant 2.It’s not a video game.

Remnant 2.Release date is July 25, on PlayStation 5, Windows PCs, and Xbox Series X. Gearbox Publishing supplied a PC download code to be used for the review. Vox Media is affiliated with other companies. Vox Media can earn affiliate commissions, but this does not affect editorial content. This is where you can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.