The RPS Advent Calendar 2023, December 1st

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 in Remnant 2!

Ed: Former RPS vidbud Liam and I used to work together a fair bit. We put out longform vids for Inventory Space, chatted about duds like Redfall and 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 shooter Remnant 2 together. And we are absolutely smitten with it.

I never played the game's predecessor Remnant: From The Ashes, but it doesn't matter in the slightest because Remnant 2 stands on its own as a simple pleasure. By which I mean it's a looter shooter where you dodge roll out the way of spiked tentacles, fire a rifle, collect silly crystals, slot mods into sockets, and then repeat the process. Except repeating the process often means battling a boss, then being warped to "dynamically generated" (handcrafted zones, just randomly slotted together) areas where the rolls become more frantic and the crystals become sillier. It doesn't overextend itself or split out into some open world bollocks; Remnant 2 is happy existing as a pal-based shooter, and is all the better for it.

Funny thing is, there aren't a bucket load of guns to loot like say, Borderlands. But the the old-timey rifle, pistols, and shotguns you blast have such a lovely crack, that Remnant 2 is one of few FPS games I've played where I've not been bothered by a lack of regular metal. This rings especially true when you're warping between realms filled with dark fairies, and transitioning seamlessly into some machinist alien worlds, tangled forests, or gothic streets. Interesting environments and gunfeel keep things plenty engaging.

That's not to say Liam and I haven't encountered some wild guns on our adventures, as Remnant 2 does the Dark Souls thing 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.