I have to give it to Gunfire Games – they seem to be a highly adaptable studio. Founded in 2014 by parts of the team who worked on Darksiders franchise in the by then defunct Vigil Games, I’m sure their original desire was to immediately go into creating Darksiders III. But they’ve adapted to the realities of the market and to built portfolio and keep the studio alive created several VR projects for the then booming initial wave of VR popularity brought in by Oculus Rift. One of which was called Chronos that played like a tough hack and slash inspired by Souls-like games and featured a setting that included both fantasy and post-apocalyptic Earth imagery, which they’ve already played with a lot for Darksiders. This also allowed them to get better acquainted with Unreal Engine 4 which they then used to create a visually beautiful (but incredibly frustrating and unfun) Darksiders III. And to follow that project up, they’ve seemingly decided to experiment with the third person shooting mechanics (as one of the Horseman – Strife, – is a gun user) while reusing a lot of the resources they’ve managed to create up until that point and created a genuinely clever mix of different genres – Remnant: From the Ashes. That also served as a sequel to Chronos (later to be re-released for flat screens as Chronos: Before the Ashes).
And it is really bizarre how they’ve seemingly just experimented and scrambled a bunch of ideas together from what they had on a rather low budget only to create their best game up until that point.
So what exactly is Remnant: From the Ashes and how does it play? It’s a third person shooter action RPG that takes the world structure and overall progression of a Diablo-like game, combines it with several ideas from Souls-like titles and then throws in several unique ideas of its own into the pile. Resulting in a game that feels like someone taking that more methodical and tough action RPG experience of the original two Diablo titles and mixing it with a solid third person shooter title from the early 2010s. Just like one would expect from a Diablo-like game, the maps are randomly generated, which incudes the availability of certain dungeons and side-quests tied to them or certain NPCs. You get enemies spawning into the maps dynamically, instead of only being pre-setup on the map and some of said enemies are harder and have unique mechanics and properties of their own. You get tons of gold scrap falling out of enemies and different breakable objects and chests.
But you also get a reusable healing item that refreshes every time you rest at a checkpoint, while resting also respawns all of the enemies, in a mechanic similar to bonfires and estus flask. Unlike both Diablo and Souls-like titles, there is no penalty for dying, apart from the enemies respawning with full health and the amount of gear you find is relatively limited without countless colour coded loot one would expect to see in a Diablo-like game. In fact I went the entire playthrough with mostly the starting gear, just upgrading it from time to time, which is something that one could also prefer in some Souls-like titles, but is not something you ever do in Diablo. There are special abilities that you can slot into weapons when you find or craft them that serve as spells or buffs, but the game doesn’t focus that much on that aspect.
Of course, the big differentiator of Remnant is the fact that it plays like a third person shooter. You do get a melee weapon and a few enemy types are better defeated in close range, but most of the time you will be swapping between your long range and short range weapons and rolling out of enemy attacks. Ammo is limited and depending on your style of play, you might have more or less of a problem with that – it was almost never a problem for me as I played a lighter armored sniper, who usually stayed way out of enemy range and aimed for weak points. But ammo is automatically restored when resting at checkpoints, can drop out of enemies and one of the usable items that you may purchase or find restores the ammo reserves to full at any point as well.
And the end result, for the most part, feels really great. Enemies hit rather hard, so you try to dodge their attacks and keep distance, but your weapons can also hit very hard, so it’s all about understanding behavior of the enemy types and smartly using the surroundings to your advantage, while not acting recklessly. Even most of the boss fights are pretty well balanced for this type of gameplay, feeling relatively easy as long as you do everything right. Yet things can go downhill very fast as soon as you make a mistake. On top of the familiar mechanics and ideas recontextualized for the third person shooting, the game also has a few cool unique ideas, like Traits – upgradeable skills/attributes that you unlock via progression, completing quests, playing a certain way or just finding them on the maps.
Unfortunately, a lot of the expected issues of the genres that inspired this title are also present. Random map generation can lead to more or less frustrating layouts at random and also often leads to easily recognizable reused elements. Difficulty of the game will also depend partially on random chance and your choices in how you develop the character, as you may get special enemies, dungeons or bosses that poorly combine with your playstyle. Storytelling, for how interesting the game universe is, barely exists and most of the plot elements are unresolved or handwaved aside. Limited stamina works fine for the combat tension, but makes some exploration more tedious, especially if it’s a map with several exits as you never know which ones are story progression and which are not. And it’s also really funny to see how this title blatantly copied the worlds from Diablo II, like so many other action RPGs do, so get ready for the “human town, jungle, desert” and inevitable “frozen wastes” for the DLC.
Speaking of the DLCs – I’d suggest avoiding them. The first one, Swamps of Corsus, is only available if you switch a game mode of your playthrough and only works within the structure of the main game playthrough (tied to its story progress). And it focuses exclusively on all those post-game grindy additional game modes and stuff people seem to like waste their time with in action RPGs. While the second, Subject 2923, does include its own campaign, but you need to switch to it manually, overwrites your main game story progress and also features really really tedious gameplay and a couple terrible bosses. It’s simply not worth the time and effort to play through it, even if its boss and puzzle design is less trash than the final boss of the main game. Now that one was just inexcusably bad and completely unintuitive.
Still, at least 80% of the game game is genuinely entertaining action RPG-ing with guns that feels tight and exciting. I was postponing playing through the game for years because I was afraid it’s one of those titles that want to be “hard like Dark Souls”, but no, this isn’t the case. The game is more tactical than the last two Diablo entries, but it really isn’t that much different from how much thought the first two Diablo games required. In those you too couldn’t just rush headstrong into a room full of enemies and expect to survive the encounter. So it’s the same, just with good feeling gun combat in Remnant: From the Ashes. Oh and I know people also seem to like playing it in coop, but I always play action RPGs solo, so I wouldn’t know. Friendly fire is always on from what I’ve heard, so maybe you won’t enjoy it. But for solo playthroughs – definitely worth playing.