Remnant II

There’s a particular kind of confidence in a game that drops you into a hostile dimension, hands you a rifle and a dodge roll, and declines to tell you where to go, what your class does, or that an entire secret Archetype is sitting behind an item you’ll walk past three times without noticing. Remnant II has that confidence in surplus. Whether it’s earned depends entirely on what you want from a game.

Released July 25, 2023 on Steam, Remnant II is Gunfire Games’ follow-up to 2019’s Remnant: From the Ashes, published under Arc Games (formerly Gearbox Publishing, now folded into THQ Nordic’s orbit). The setup is unchanged in outline: humanity is a rounding error after the Root — an interdimensional parasite that eats reality the way rot eats drywall — and you’re one of the survivors stepping through the Labyrinth into a rotating set of hostile worlds to kill it at the source. Yaesha, Losomn, N’Erud. Each is a distinct art and story pillar, and each is reassembled by a procedural generator every time you start a fresh campaign.

The market positioning is unusual, and that’s the point. This is a soulslike stamina-and-dodge combat model welded to a genuinely precise third-person shooter, built for one to three players, priced and structured like a mid-budget title rather than a $70 tentpole. It sits in territory that FromSoftware doesn’t occupy and that Destiny abandoned years ago: methodical, punishing, loot-driven, and completely uninterested in a live-service treadmill or a battle pass.

The reception reflects that. On Steam it holds a Very Positive rating that has held steady rather than decayed, which for a 2023 co-op title is meaningful. Gunfire kept patching. The community stayed. That’s the rarest outcome in this genre.

• Dual-Archetype builds: Seven-plus unlockable classes — Gunslinger, Handler, Medic, Challenger, Alchemist, Engineer, Summoner and others — each with a prime perk, skill tree and passives. Any two can be equipped simultaneously, and the resulting hybrid is the actual character system. Layer on rings, amulets, trait points, weapon mods, mutators and relic upgrades and the permutation space stops being a marketing number and becomes a real design surface.
• Procedural world assembly: Every campaign roll reshuffles dungeon layouts, boss encounters, quest chains, NPCs and loot tables. Two friends who bought the game the same day will have materially different Yaeshas. Adventure Mode lets you re-roll a single world to hunt something specific without nuking your campaign.
• Three-player online co-op with escalating difficulty: Survivor through Apocalypse, plus endgame Adventure and Prism progression. Enemy density and damage scale, and Apocalypse in particular turns the dodge timing from a suggestion into a requirement.

The gunplay is the thesis

Most soulslikes that add guns treat the gun as a ranged melee weapon — a slow, committed animation with a stamina cost. Remnant II doesn’t. The shooting is designed to read like a competent third-person shooter first, with headshot feedback, weapon-specific recoil personalities and a reload cadence built to become second nature. Then it takes the stamina bar, the dodge i-frames and the punitive checkpoint structure from the other genre and asks you to run both systems at once.

That combination is the whole game, and it works because the enemy design respects it. Root infantry pressure you at mid-range while something large and unpleasant closes the gap. You cannot kite forever — stamina says no. You cannot stand and shoot — the melee threat says no. The correct play is a constant negotiation between the two, and when a fight clicks, the rhythm is unlike anything else in the space.

The bosses are the strongest argument for the game. Gunfire’s encounter design here is first-rate: multi-phase fights with add-management layers, arena hazards that matter, and — critically — bosses with alternate kill conditions. Solve the puzzle instead of out-damaging the health bar and you get a different reward. It’s an elegant way to make a boss feel like a system rather than a wall, and more games should steal it.

The build system is the reason you stay

The dual-Archetype structure is the smartest thing in Remnant II, and it’s smart for a boring, structural reason: it makes the second class a modifier rather than a compromise. Medic/Challenger isn’t “half a healer and half a tank” — it’s a specific playstyle with its own damage floor and survivability ceiling. Engineer/Gunslinger turns turret uptime into a DPS multiplier. Handler/Summoner is a legitimate pet army.

Because the prime perk of your secondary carries over even when you swap, you’re incentivized to level everything, and because trait points, rings and amulets are shared across the account, experimentation costs time rather than progress. This is the correct incentive design for a loot game, and it’s why the endgame holds. The Prism system and Apocalypse-tier Adventure runs give the theorycrafters somewhere to put all of it.

Then there’s the part where nobody tells you anything

Here’s where the review turns. Remnant II has no map. No quest markers. No meaningful in-game guidance about its own systems. In a hand-authored world, that’s a defensible aesthetic choice — see: every FromSoftware game since 2011. In a procedurally assembled world, it’s a structural problem, because the community can’t build shared cartographic knowledge the way Souls players do. Nobody can tell you where the thing is. They can only tell you the thing exists, somewhere, on a roll you may not have gotten.

The result is that Remnant II’s most celebrated content — secret Archetypes, alternate boss kills, hidden questlines — is functionally gated behind an out-of-game wiki and a willingness to re-roll worlds repeatedly. The game’s own discovery loop doesn’t surface it. This doesn’t read as a difficulty choice; it reads as a UX gap being sold as mystique. A single unlockable in-world map, or an NPC who hints at what’s present in your current roll, would cost the game nothing in atmosphere and fix most of it.

The procedural generation cuts both ways for the same reason. It’s the engine of the game’s replay value and the source of its most common complaint: some players simply never see certain bosses or quest chains without deliberate, repeated re-rolling. Variety you can’t seek is just variance.

The co-op flaw that should have been fixed at launch

Campaign progression in co-op only credits the host. Join a friend’s game, invest serious hours, and your own campaign hasn’t moved. You keep gear, materials and trait points — which softens it — but the narrative and world-state progress belongs to whoever pressed host. For a game whose entire identity is three-player co-op, this is a design decision that has aged badly and still generates friction in every friend group that picks it up. Plan around it: rotate hosts, or accept that one player is playing and two are farming.

Artistically, Remnant II is punching several weight classes above its budget. Losomn is the standout — a gaslit Victorian nightmare-city rendered with a specificity that most AAA studios can’t manage — while N’Erud’s dead-star architecture and Yaesha’s overgrown ruins each get their own material language, enemy silhouettes and color grammar. Nothing here looks like asset-store filler. The creature design in particular is grotesque in an intentional, anatomically confident way.

The technical side is the game’s weakest column. This is a heavy Unreal Engine 5 title, and at launch PC performance was rough enough that Gunfire publicly acknowledged the game was designed with upscaling in mind — meaning DLSS or FSR wasn’t a quality option, it was the intended baseline. That framing drew justified criticism. Shipping a game whose native-resolution performance is treated as an edge case is a choice that offloads optimization onto the user’s GPU vendor.

Patches have continued since 2023, and sustained post-launch support is a genuine point in the game’s favor. But the underlying design still leans on upscaling to hit its targets, and native rendering remains a stretch for mid-range hardware. The UI, meanwhile, is functional and dense — good inventory readability, clear stat presentation — but it never explains what any of it does. Expect alt-tabbing to figure out what a mutator actually scales.

On Steam, this is the definitive version, with the usual asterisks. Mouse and keyboard gives you a real accuracy advantage — the weak-point system rewards precision, and several boss alternate-kills involve shooting a specific small thing under pressure. Controller is the more comfortable input for the dodge-and-strafe cadence, and the aim assist is tuned generously enough that neither input feels broken. Most players will land on controller and be fine.

Graphics options are appropriately deep, and you’ll need them. Budget for DLSS/FSR being on by default and staying on — treat native 4K as aspirational unless you’re on high-end hardware. Handheld PCs, Steam Deck included, are a poor fit here: this is a demanding UE5 game and no amount of upscaling makes that comfortable on a 15W chip.

Co-op runs through standard Steam invites and is straightforward to set up. The PC version also benefits from an active mod and build-planning community, which in practice is where the missing documentation actually lives.

Remnant II is a better game than its rough edges suggest and a more frustrating one than its fans admit. The core is strong — the shooting is crisp, the bosses are inventive, the build system is generous in a way that costs the player nothing to explore, and the world art is far beyond what a mid-budget studio has any obligation to deliver. The steady Steam rating exists because that core is real.

What holds it back isn’t difficulty. It’s legibility. Gunfire built a game with enormous hidden depth and then declined to build the systems that would let players find it, in a structure where finding it on your own is mathematically unreliable. Pair that with a co-op progression rule that punishes the exact play pattern the game is marketed around, and you get a title that is constantly, needlessly harder to enjoy than it is to play.

We recommend it — to the right audience. Play it on controller, keep a browser tab open, agree with your friends on who hosts, and turn on upscaling without guilt. Under those conditions, it’s a satisfying action-RPG whose worst problems are all solvable, and whose best qualities aren’t replicable anywhere else.