Introduction
Remnant: From the Ashes is a third person shooter RPG that was developed by Gunfire Games. It was published by Perfect World Entertainment and was released for Consoles and PC in August 2019.
Video Review
Review
When the world is destroyed by an evil force known as The Root, it is your job to find out how to defeat it. But as you are on your way to a place known as “The Ward”, your ship gets caught in a storm and you end up on the beach. Luckily you end up where you want to be, Ward 13, and have found the survivors that were taking refuge. With your help, you use a world crystal to travel to Earth, and many worlds beyond, to finish this mayhem once and for all.
The story starts off relatively simple, find Commander Ford and figure out how to destroy the root. I was expecting it to get a bit deeper than this, but it only does that when it comes to the lore. The story under the surface is fantastic and does some excellent world building. It even makes some callbacks to the previous game, Kronos: Before The Ashes, and I found myself going “hey I remember this bit of lore!”. But I played the game so long ago I couldn’t remember the finer details, but that’s okay because I loved it all the same when I was reading a lot of the lore.
Unfortunately the main story doesn’t exactly end at the end of the base game. It continues on in one of the DLCs, that being Subject 2923. I hated this. It’s fine to do a little continuation to the story, or side stories, but the fact that the story gets fully wrapped up there is just ridiculous. Luckily me and my friends had bought it, along with the other DLC, Swamps Of Corsus, which didn’t really add anything to the main story, but it added a bunch to the game, but we’ll get to that.
The game is basically Dark Souls, but with guns. This was super exciting because I do really enjoy the souls formula with twists to it. Plus being able to play the entire game with my two friends was a ball. Though it made me curious as to why the max amount of players was three and not four. As you defeat enemies you don’t level up like in a normal RPG. Instead you get a trait point. You then put this trait into a skill of your choice to get benefits such as health, or armour, or stamina, or extra damage for weapon mods. This still left me sitting there for minutes at a time sometimes as I decided what I should dump my skill point into.
The game is randomly generated so that not every run is the same. Mind you when you die, you don’t go back to the beginning, but you can reset your campaign progress literally anytime you want. This was a nice touch, especially considering the fact that we went for everything in the game as a group, but if you were to just play the game once and drop it, you’d be surprised with how much you miss. Whether it’s events or bosses or random maps. But not many people want to be at the mercy of RNG just to be able to see one boss they haven’t seen before. But at the same time, it gave more replayability to be able to see everything!
When you play with other players, you have to split ammo with everyone. So if there’s only one thing of ammo left on the ground, you have to see who needs it most. This was a fun way to make sure we were all geared up properly and everyone even had their own roles. I took on the role of support, so the mods on my weapons healed instead of doing damage. Sure I could still do a ton of damage to enemies, but when it came to healing and reviving fast, that was my job…unless I was dead of course. But for some enemies you can’t simply dodge backwards to avoid their attacks, you have to dodge forward or sideways. With how many enemies there are, it was kind of hard to remember for a bit.
The game was surprisingly tough even on normal difficulty. We expected to rip through it, but a few areas were harder than we thought they’d be, but considering the game scales for every player in the game, it made sense. There were a few bosses that felt a little unbalanced, especially with their attacks, but with enough determination, we pushed through. There were a few bugs in the game. At least once per session, someone was bound to crash, and if the host crashed, the game wouldn’t do a host migration. This was especially annoying during the Survival Mode, which is basically just a boss rush and comes in the Swamps Of Corsus DLC. Wanting to at least get to 10 bosses in this mode, because trophies and achievements, meant a lot of luck.
You start with nothing, every run. If your team fully dies, you start at level one, with nothing on you. This was aggravating in its own right, as sometimes the game would give you some of the hardest bosses right away, thanks RNG, and there was almost no way you had the firepower to deal with them in a timely manner, considering every 6 minutes, the world gets harder. Plus when you kill a boss, it adds a minute and a half to the timer, so you lose even more time! As I said too, with no way to have host migration, if something happened with the host, the whole run was a wipe. You can’t even join mid run either! Sure this adds a bit of extra pressure to it all, but is it worth it? This was a terrible choice for a DLC pack and should’ve been a free update. But the pack itself did expand a whole area and add a slew of new bosses.
Rating
Pros:
- Fun Gameplay
- Exciting Co-op
- Rich Lore
Cons:
- Crashes Quite A Bit
- RNG Is Huge
- Survival Mode
Summary
For what this game was, I really enjoyed it. Mixing dark souls gameplay with guns was exciting, plus bringing along friends in this fight against the root was a ball. I recommend this for groups who love the genre, or even solo players. Just be prepared for a lot of death.
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Game & Developer Information
Developer Website: Gunfire Games
Developer Socials: Twitter
Publisher Website: Perfect World Entertainment
Publisher Socials: Twitter
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