Review: Remnant: From the Ashes Mistakes the New for the Noteworthy

Even when the game isn’t actively shooting itself in the foot, it never entirely succeeds.

Remnant: From the Ashes
Photo: Perfect World Entertainment

There’s a lot of deadwood, literal and figurative, in Remnant: From the Ashes. The literal kind stems from the plot, which tasks you with sending tree-like creatures known as the Root back into the dimension they were inadvertently, experimentally summoned from. And the figurative kind is just about everything else that stands in the way of this action shooter’s gameplay: three-player co-op with no means of communicating with your teammates; enemies that spawn directly over a downed teammate, keeping you from reviving them; and an as-yet unpatched glitch that may outright prevent you from seeing the ending.

Even when Remnant isn’t actively shooting itself in the foot, it never entirely succeeds. Melee combat exists but never feels viable against the many foes that fly, explode, or have status-afflicting auras. Because co-op unfairly increases the difficulty when a partner’s gear level is higher than your own, you’re better off tackling each region solo. And while bosses drop unique weapons, like black-hole generators and poison darts, or spell-like mods, such as summonable floating skulls and corrosion blasts, their appearances are randomized for each campaign, which makes getting what you want somewhat of a crapshoot.

When Remnant is considered in its approach, it’s compelling. Over the course of the game, you’ll unlock dozens of traits to upgrade, allowing you to customize your build far beyond the standard choice of hit points or stamina. You’ll face bosses in bespoke arenas, like Singe, a fire dragon that resides near an abandoned gas station, making the pools of oil on the ground especially hazardous, or the insectine Ixillis XV and XVI, who flutter about you as you attempt to cross a precariously narrow bridge, forcing you to make perfectly timed dodges. You’ll also travel to several diverse worlds, each with their own cultural nuances that you can suss out through too-rare scraps of lore and brief encounters with queens, rebels, and the undying.

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All of this bright kindling is buried under the dross of a so-called “infinite adventure,” in which each playthrough generates different areas and bosses. But the developers at Gunfire Games mistake “new” for “noteworthy.” It’s true that no two sewers on apocalyptic Earth or caverns on swampy Corsus are identical, but it’s also true that there’s nothing to do in those dungeons. These superficially different regions are just semi-randomized pit stops between bosses. Occasionally you’ll stumble upon a variant—a pan-flute chime puzzle in the jungle world of Yaesha, a timed machine temple dungeon on desert Rhom—but for the most part, all that remains of Remnant are generic corridors and waves of foes.

The game was reviewed using a review code provided by fortyseven communications.

Score: 
 Developer: Gunfire Games  Publisher: Perfect World Entertainment  Platform: PC  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Language, Violence

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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