REMNANT II®

Buy it cheap if you do, lots of replay value if you like to be punished for existing. The initial few hours is pretty interesting, everything feels strange and novel and like discovering something. Story is horrid and voice acting direction is completely wrong. It all sounds like ad reads. Problems show up quick when you start to want to dig into mechanics and tailor builds to suit your playstyle, suddenly it all falls apart. Also when you realize the way the devs expect you to play the game, i.e. puzzles. you realize how narrow their design vision was. I will never appreciate difficulty that stems from poor design. The game is in DESPERATE need of both movement speed and reload speed enhancements. The devs actively went out of their way to remove these as there are many places for them, particularly since the looter shooter genre is a standard now. No buffs for armor sets or individual pieces? Cool, would have been a nice way to allow players to tailor the game to their tastes. I'm not looking for easy, when it works well its really engaging, but when it stumbles over itself its absolutely insulting. There is a place where you fight an enemy high up, during that fight you can see where you need to shoot but THE GAME WONT LET YOU AIM UP FAR ENOUGH, you literally cannot aim within the range of any normal human. Reloading is PAINFULLY slow, sprint regularly fails to trigger despite the button press and it feels like your character is constantly moving as slowly as possible. Its all just a slog to play, and its heavily balanced towards coop - with little thought to single player. I'm often left wishing for things like shields or other mechanics (there are shields but they are a joke) to help offset the lack of coop teammates. The amount of fiddling you have to do to manage health and gameplay mechanics is unreal, especially with no pause or pause-select type functions. Healing animation takes 5 years to complete and any little pebble or gust of wind interrupts it. The game actively WANTS you to die as much as possible and then has the audacity to pretend you have the ability to make it suit your playstyle. There is a massive lack of resources to encourage exploring the many starting weapons, the DLC armor is better than anything in the store and any variance is purely cosmetic - no bonuses or upgrades for armor (WHY????). You have enough money to try about 3 guns and 2 or 3 melee weapons before you are broke perpetually. It really likes to punish you for playing in far too many cheap ways (mobs spawn behind you with no warning regularly). The writing is laughably bad but what game isn't like this these days. The mood really is cool when no one is talking, lots of neat things to try out but it all feels way under baked - like half of what I should be able to do with a character just isn't there. Things that would make it significantly better in my opinion: - Armor bonuses/upgrades that allow tailoring gameplay (bulk vs reload speed, etc.) - Ability to increase player speed/reaction/reload speeds. These aren't currently mechanics to manage, they are built to kill you. - More resources for exploring different weapons - cap the weapon level to progress if it breaks scaling. - Maybe actually have loot? Its not a looter if there is no loot. You get a little piece of this and that carefully placed throughout the level (ring here or there, etc.) and that's it. No real incentive for exploring and not much to find - except some 30 hour puzzle you started wrong. - Less obtuse puzzles - if you have to search every five minutes because there is a 50 hour long puzzle loop you might break by picking up the wrong awful reward then something is severely wrong. I don't mind some of these, particularly with good rewards, but EVERY TIME? I have zero interest in playing this again and I'm probably only 1/3 through the first run. I'm definitely not going to be re-rolling multiple new worlds just to suffer some excruciating puzzle to obtain some worthless trinket that won't help my runs. - Pause menu for single player. This should never not be a thing. - Traits are a joke - most should just be linked to level and then give players actual worthwhile traits to upgrade. - Make SOME effort to have the dialogue match the setting - we are all tired of social media idiot dialog being thrown into every game. Imagine if Metro 2033 had the dialog of the original Borderlands but the tone was also all wrong, its like the characters are all voiceover actors for ads who didn't understand the world they were supposed to be in. - Why is it 300 years in the future and everyone thinks iron is magical while most weapons and armors are made of steel? Why do they have radios, games, flashlights, and aloe vera plants in nice little planters but somehow no one knows what coffee is? Why is all the galvanized fencing full of rust? Why can nothing be interacted with or destroyed by weapons? The absolute lack of attention to detail in this game is staggering. - You can't interact with anything, I found this really unsettling for a modern game. You can roll through some jars, don't expect much for your efforts, and that's it. It was nice to see that hitting glass caused small glass debris to show up but it wouldn't break a window for example. Shooting a tire caused little rubber bits to fly around for a second but the tire wouldn't deflate. Really weird. Why can they travel to different worlds seemingly indefinitely but they all have to sleep on ramshackle beds made of scraps; as though they can't find anything anywhere. There is clearly wood and material everywhere, why are they all living in shipping containers filled with garbage? You can't just put the underground Metro 2033 survivor village on ground level, in the middle of a ruined city for years, with no explanation. There are materials EVERYWHERE. Overall the game is a mish mash of lots of ideas that were executed in a largely mediocre way and is in desperate need of oversight and internal direction. They had no one saying "that's a bad idea" on the team and it shows. Most of the good stuff is copied from other games. Feels like a game from 10-15 years ago where limitations in budget or tech made the world smaller than it could have been, but back then we all understood that. Most of those limitations are gone now, its really surreal to go back to a world like that.