Remnant: From the Ashes Offers Excellent Co-Op and Challenging Boss Fights

Perfect World Entertainment

“Souls-like” is a very popular descriptor these days. Lots of games want to be the next Dark Souls.

Remnant: From the Ashes is Souls-like, but it’s also a shooter, and a bit of a dungeon crawler, and a cooperative-focused experience. It’s a complete mishmash of concepts that sounds, even under ideal circumstances, like a developer’s pipe dream. However, against the odds, this game manages to pull together many competing idea and produce a great, if somewhat chaotic, experience.

Remnant is an intriguing mix of postapocalyptic fantasy and science fiction. Earth has been invaded by the Root, a sentient plant species, but the story quickly rockets into so much more. It is complex, but not entirely esoteric like Dark Souls; conversations with NPCs offer dialogue choices to dig into the background of the world if you wish, and letters and journal entries scattered throughout offer a further glimpse if you’re one for reading.

Still, it’s weird. Don’t be surprised when you fight a giant moth whose name implies it comes from a lineage of moth royalty and wields a staff that shoots lasers. There’s also the four-armed fish man whose temple houses an interplanetary warpgate. You’ll probably get confused. The environments are just as different from one another as their inhabitants: you’ll go from the overgrown, abandoned streets of Earth to sand-swept villages to plague-ridden swamps.

If you’ve played the Souls games, you’ll be familiar with the process here—you fight through mobs of enemies that aren’t particularly difficult but can easily kill you if you get caught in a mosh until you reach an imposing fog gate that houses a boss. There are even bonfire checkpoints where you can to rest at the expense of respawning all enemies. However, Remnant also injects some elements of dungeon-crawler RPGs like Diablo or Path of Exile in that each playthrough is randomly generated. Dungeons you find in your playthrough are randomly selected, as are bosses; you won’t encounter all of them first time through. That said, given the randomness, you’re likely to encounter the same dungeon map layout several times (sometimes in a row, in my experience), though repeat maps are inherent to the system, I suppose.

Remnant separates itself from the pack by being shooter driven. As such, combat is considerably faster than comparable games. There’s no cover element, and guns are light on ammo, forcing you to press forward for those ammo pickups as you balance a stamina bar with sprinting and dodging. Combat is quite satisfying, and there’s something for everyone’s play style: shotguns, machine guns, sniper rifles, even beam rifles. However, this is no loot-shooter. New weapons and armor sets are rare to a fault; hours in, I was still using my original armor and primary weapon. By the time I found something new and possibly intriguing, I had pumped so many resources into upgrades it seemed foolish to commit so many resources to get a new armor set up to my current level.

Co-op is a key feature here—you and two others can play through together. (Three seems like a strange choice instead of four, but, alas.) The fun factor ramps up with more players; with weapon mods, you can work up a composition to fit the situation at hand, having someone put area-of-effect healing on their gun while someone else adds the ability to launch grenades to keep enemy hordes at bay, for example. However, during co-op there are some silly design choices. While item drops like bandages or antipoision are given to everyone, ammo drops are common, but only one player can pick each one up. With ammo in short supply, this leads to constantly having to call out what type of ammo you need—or, if playing with strangers, praying they don’t steal it.

This also leads to another annoying gimmick in boss fights. The developers had the foresight that players would run out of ammo, so almost every boss fights spawns in groups of weak enemies at regular intervals. Nothing more than an annoyance, their chief purpose is to drop ammo on death. Each fight has a unique and often bizarre design, with a pattern that needs to be learned carefully; some are downright brutal and all the more chaotic when strategizing on the fly while playing with two friends.

This is one of those games with such an absurd story you might give up trying to follow and just enjoy the ride. Becoming a shooter is a great departure for the “Souls-like” melee-focused genre, one that’s made even more enjoyable with the addition of two friends. Graphics may not be top-notch, and small design flaws betray the game’s smaller budget, but if you need a fresh lineup of satisfyingly difficult boss fights, look no further.

Remnant: From the Ashes is available on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.