![]() ![]() The worlds are so starkly distinct that sometimes I could hardly believe I was still in the same game I’d been playing just minutes prior. One of them, N’Erud, is a sci-fiction reality filled with violent robots, electronic gizmos, and laser guns, while Losomn is a fantasy realm with cockney elves who wear bowler hats and try to cut your throat in between what I can only assume are their busy chimney-sweeping schedules. What starts as a relatively simple toolbox containing a primary and secondary weapon, something to swing in melee combat, and a single archetype skill quickly spirals into a treasure trove of weapons, armor, highly customizable character classes, and mods that hasn’t come close to feeling stale after my first few dozen hours.Ī major part of what makes combat continuously feel so fresh is that you keep hopping between different worlds in the multiverse, each with their own distinct feel and new enemies to battle. ![]() Every new area is a dramatic dance of shooting, dodging, making clever use of abilities, and doing your best to not get surrounded by whatever relentless enemy is trying their best to maim and dismember you. No matter which stretch of the adventure you’re working your way through, though, every second of its challenging gunplay is a total blast. It’s just a shame that anytime I was back on Earth or dealing with the primary conflict my eyes glossed over while I listened to rambling from characters I felt I barely knew at all. ![]() Not only are those stories better, but you also spend the vast majority of your time in those worlds resolving them rather than concerning yourself with the main story. You might find yourself in a high-fantasy world of elves trying to solve a murder mystery, or aboard a starship helping a huge Gundam Wing-looking robot recover his lost cargo. The good news is that the different worlds you travel to on your journey contain bite-sized stories of their own, which are expertly told and far more compelling than your main quest. It’s not that the writing is bad – in fact, some of it is quite good and there’s definitely some interesting concepts at play here that the community will doubtless be crafting theories about in the weeks and months ahead – it’s just that very little of that has any impact on your blank slate of a character, and it’s all so high-concept it often doesn’t gel with an adventure that’s so squarely focused on shooting alien lobsters in the thorax. You get to chat with new and returning characters at your base, Ward 13, (most of whom have a lot to say while giving you as little actual information as possible), learn more about The Root and what’s going on with the multiversal war, and eventually come to a dramatic conclusion that’s immediately reversed so that you can continue playing without dealing with the consequences of the finale. Super weird, right? That setup is mostly used to justify you teleporting to different realities to do really awesome looter-shooter stuff and save the day, but it only ever becomes slightly more interesting than that one-sentence premise. Just like its predecessor, the surreal story has you playing as a nameless survivor in a post-apocalyptic Earth where a race of evil trees called The Root are attempting to take over the multiverse. ![]() We don’t have to wait for the next one: when it comes to games, the second time’s the charm. But procedurally generated, impressively replayable levels remain its killer feature, and here they have been improved in so many ways that it's alarmingly easy to lose half a day by jumping back into the same area just to see other possibilities. Combat is even smoother and more satisfying, loot and buildcrafting have been greatly improved to allow for countless possibilities and reasons to grind, boss fights have been completely overhauled to ditch spongy bosses aided by endless waves of minions, and each of the realms feel diverse and brimming with things to do and secrets to uncover. Following in the footsteps of breakthrough sequels like Borderlands 2 and Assassin’s Creed 2 before it, Remnant 2 iterates on the original to phenomenal effect. When you look back at the history of new games and their sequels, oftentimes it’s not until the second attempt at a bold new idea that things really hit their stride. ![]()
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