Game Review - Remnant From the Ashes

Game Review: Remnant: From the Ashes by Gunfire Games
Score: +1/-8

I got Remnant: From the Ashes free from the Epic Game Store. If you don't already know, they give away full titles every week, and not cheesy indie titles either.

 

The world has been thrown into chaos by an ancient evil from another dimension. As one of the last remnants of humanity, you must set out alone or alongside up to two other survivors to face down hordes of deadly enemies to retake what was lost.

-1 The combat is basically dodge-rolling everything. Some people call this skill, others will call it cheese. Whatever you want to call it, there is a side effect of some playstyles (notably melee) being basically unfeasible.

+1 Otherwise, combat is basically solid at its core.

-1 Especially at the start however, it feels very monotonous. You can choose some "powers" to charge up and use (weapon mods), and some of them can be interesting, but it's a long haul before you actually get anything really interesting.

What really kills combat is the encounter design.

• -1 Combat wouldn't be so bad if the encounter design weren't designed to be tedious. From the start it'll be clear that this is "harder than normal" combat for games, and that's fine. But they try to kill you by suddenly overwhelming you with extra enemies (adds) popping up suddenly when you face a miniboss. Maybe you'll survive, maybe you won't. If you don't and you go back, now you know what's about to happen and you can sort of prepare for it -- which is not really satisfying. Plus you've wasted a lot of progress time by being sent back to the last checkpoint.
• -1 Even worse are some of the main bosses. The very first one, Shroud, is one of the ones that turn many players off right away. The fight is tedious with piles of extra enemies that hit very hard, plus the boss being able to teleport away literally all the way across the room. And periodically it will bombard your location. Unless you like retrying over and over again, this type of encounter design will ruin your experience of the game.
• -1 Despite Shroud's tedious abilities and the arena full of adds, it can be defeated. But sometimes it will have a randomly selected ability that can make it impossible. If you are unlucky, the arena will cause a cloud of smoke to appear at your location literally every few seconds, and if you don't get out right away it will explode and probably kill you. You can't even stop to aim (which you have to in order to shoot any ranged weapon) without risk of getting blown up. You definitely can't stop to engage the boss in melee combat. And once this random trait is selected, there is no way to reset the boss and get another trait without resetting your campaign progress entirely.

Also, the sheer amount of tedious combat and times you die and have to star all over hides the fact that there is actually very little content.

• -1 There's barely any story here. The opening seems promising but soon you will just be put in the combat grind. Hours later, you get a couple lines of dialog and you have to kill some boss or other. And for some reason, they block off various conversation choices that aren't even mutually exclusive. Is this supposed to give you a sense of "choices matter"? When in fact they don't? And basically the story is abandoned. There's really no resolution in sight. You just go from world to world slogging through combat over and over.
• -1 The maps and enemies are nice, but in each world you are basically fighting the same things over and over ad nauseum.
• -1 And some maps, such as the second world, Rhom, are tediously maze-like with turns and different floors, further stretching out your time. To get any objective done can require a huge time commitment, and checkpoints are often quite far apart so if you can't sit down for an hour or so, or if you have to leave halfway, you'll have to start all over again.

In the end, Remnant: From the Ashes will be worth playing only if you are a specific type of player: Primarily someone who just like mindless grind with no sense of objective; and they don't mind retrying overwhelming boss encounters literally dozens of times. This might sound like a stupid way to play a game, but consider that there are "progression raiders" in MMOs who will insist on trying over and over a "hard mode" version of some raid until everyone in the team dances flawlessly and doesn't miss a step to wipe the whole attempt.

If you are somewhere in between, willing to try the combat but not endlessly, we recommend you use the free cheat program WeMod for times when, for example, you really can't get past a boss encounter.