HomeFeaturesRemnant 2
The RPS Advent Calendar 2023, December 1stOpen the first door and get ready to rumble
Open the first door and get ready to rumble
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Let’s open the first door of this year’s calendar. Lock, load, and bring a buddy.
It’s co-op sort-of-Soulslike sci-fi action inRemnant 2!
Image credit:Gearbox Publishing
Ed: Former RPS vidbud Liam and I used to work together a fair bit. We put out longform vids forInventory Space, chatted about duds likeRedfalland triumphs like, errr,Sonic Frontiers, and sent each other memes of questionable quality. It was a heady time! In an effort to keep in contact since he bid the Treehouse adieu, we’ve played a good amount of co-op shooterRemnant 2together. And we are absolutely smitten with it.
Image credit:Gearbox Publishing
That’s not to say Liam and I haven’t encountered some wild guns on our adventures, as Remnant 2 does theDark Soulsthing where you can cash in a boss’s gloopy material for a some form of gloopy special weapon. Liam’s got a ghostly rifle wrapped in fingers that lets him go invisible for a bit and go berserk with rapid fire, while my fave is a block of stone that zaps baddies with jets of electricity.
And the bosses! Damn are they inventive. We’ve tango’d with a selection of giant sentient cubes in a series of narrow corridors, where winning wasn’t about chunking down a health bar but learning routes to avoid a crushing. Another had us descend a winding staircase where we needed to avoid going too fast or too slowly through a deadly laser field. The boss wasn’t so much an enemy, but a nerve-shredder of a scenario.
Sure, Remnant 2 isn’t without its flaws. Namely, it’s a bit unclear at times and we’ve missed a whole bunch of unlockable classes and guns because no-one was like, “Hey pal, you might want to check over here”. But the game’s so good at leveraging its strengths - being a banger of a co-op shooter that takes you to some deadly places - that it’s a struggle to log off. In the midst of lots of 120-hour monsters, Remnant 2 is a pleasant surprise.
