Reviews
[Review] Survival-Action Shooter ‘Remnant: From the Ashes’ Doesn’t Live Up To Its Initial Promise
Remnant; From The Ashes is billed as a soulslike third-person survival-action shooter, with a focus on co-operative gameplay and replayability. Which of these things is it? Well, unfortunately, none of them. What it does seem to be however is akin to a cash-grab that’s fine to while away a few hours in. A game that isn’t terrible, but certainly doesn’t live up to the developers own hype, which is a shame considering the same studio brought us Darksiders 3.
Remnant takes place in a not too distant future, where Earth has been invaded by an evil force known as The Root. Instantly this conjures up fantastic images of varied, perhaps disgusting, or otherwise unconceived monsters. Let’s go and kick some otherworldly butt.
In the interest of fairness, I’ll start off with what I enjoyed about the game. The introductory cutscene did a good job in setting the scene, creating mystery and intrigue as to the problems and origin of this world. The sounds of the Root monsters, hidden and shrieking at you from around corners certainly adds tension. Hearing a pained, gnarled inhuman scream and wondering what grotesque creature you’re about to face definitely excites me in the right places.
Unfortunately, that is where most of the positives ended. Starting off, the graphics aren’t great. The in-world textures are mediocre at best, a throwback in the graphics departments to yesteryear. If Half-Life 2 had these graphics in 2004, I might have been a bit more impressed. The cutscene dialogue animations are mostly awful, not only out of sync, but we learned a long time ago that humans do not simply move their mouth up and down to speak. It seemed a bit, well, Terence and Philip, albeit in a nicer wrapper.
It did have a promising start, after the tutorial I was looking forward to seeing how the gameplay unfurled and how the intriguing story relating to the invading Root developed. However, it doesn’t take long to work out that the content of this game simply isn’t there. ‘Lore’ hidden throughout the world appears in the form of documents; reading through 10 pages a time seems a really bad way to add extra depth to a story, almost as if it was an afterthought.
One of the first things you learn in Remnant is that you have to smash crates to obtain ‘scrap’, a material used to upgrade your weapons and armor, which by the games own admission you need a lot of. I’m not against grinding for gear, especially if the grind is enjoyable, what I am against is despite advertising this mechanic that it feels incomplete; there’s only one type of object that is smashable. After ramming my melee weapons into pretty much everything for an hour in the faint hope of discovering secrets (or being able to write a comprehensive review) I felt I had wasted my time a little. I really don’t feel it’s a big ask to skin a different breakable object and place it in the world.
The worlds themselves are very linear, and not overly impressive. Sewer levels? It’s nigh impossible to get lost, even without using the minimap for direction there isn’t a lot of room for maneuver. As of yet, I have found no off-map secrets which would have made for a more fun exploring experience, something the game encourages you to do. I feel this would have added an extra level of intrigue and stopped the world feeling so flat and empty.
Combat wise, the shooting is fine. It works well, it feels good. Whilst not the main focus of the game, the melee combat I found to be poorly-optimized and clunky, certainly annoying for the few times you run out of bullets early on. The timing between the mouse click and the reactive swing of the Scrappers two-handed ax seemed mostly spot-on, however, the supposedly lighter and faster hatchet of the support role still seemed far too slow. In Remnant, there are 3 classes each with their own melee weapons and firearms. Oh, but you can buy the firearms from the different classes incredibly early on. And there are only about 10 weapons overall. Admittedly, much past the first hour into the game, I didn’t really see the point of having different classes, the main differences seeming based on physical appearance only.
There are also ‘ultimate’ skills, in the form of weapon mods, which become charged through engaging in successful combat. These weapon mods vary from extra damage on enemies to creating a healing pool. Nothing original, but again appear to be present in all classes. The skill trees, or traits as they are known, don’t seem particularly varied either, although you do unlock a few more as the game progresses. The choice of traits doesn’t particularly matter either, there are the general health boosts, but nothing that makes a huge difference towards building your character or adapting playstyles. An experience boost trait, once unlocked, was all I piled my points into for obvious reasons. Out of nowhere, I was leveling up very quickly, which I feel spoils the sense of victory and progression that a title billed as a soulslike should absolutely have.
The biggest thorn in my side in Remnant was that the sprint action is a toggle, whilst push to sprint is my preferred playstyle and may not be annoying to everyone it just compounded my frustration with the game. Controller support is present, should you wish to use it, and I found no huge difference or disadvantage from using either input mode.
As part of the games intended difficulty, resting at checkpoints to refill health and save progress also resets all the monster mobs in the world, in an effort to enhance levels of replayability. Certain story arcs can only be unlocked through a particular class. Unfortunately, this got dull quickly and seemed a very obviously cheap way of trying to squeeze out some more hours from the base content.
According to the developers, your choices matter. I was most excited for this aspect, I love dynamic worlds, if this concept can be integrated correctly it adds to an incredibly vivid and varied gameplay experience, with positive replayability the developers have touted. Unfortunately, it takes a bit more thought than adding a choice of two dialogue options. Remnant is not a visual novel, no, but it would have been nice for even a third, or the feeling that this hadn’t been shoe-horned in afterward in an already created linear story, almost as some attempt to justify the price-tag. The character development, player progression, storyline, and rewards just don’t feel sweet or varied enough, which is hugely disappointing. In a gaming world currently geared towards grinding, this feels almost like a very basic and mostly impossible mistake to make.
Despite the game taking place in a twisted alternate world, I didn’t feel the mobs embodied this setting, with there being little to no sense in monster creation. Sometimes, ‘just because’ is absolutely fine, but I really feel a little more care and attention to detail would have improved my enjoyment of this game. None of the mobs particularly grossed me out or got the jump on me, considering the huge scope that the setting of a dystopian world provides it’s a really big shame, and again, could have provided an extra element of excitement to Remnant.
On the positive side, playing with friends is fun. There aren’t many games that aren’t fun with friends, this is certainly no exception. Despite there being no overwhelmingly huge difference in the classes, facing bosses together was fun. The game seems mostly optimized and geared towards co-op, with progress promised to be shared between your single-player campaign and any co-op games you play. This mostly works, there is a slight irk with the host not saving progress and you all instantly falling back to the main menu and losing everything you’d done together.
So why did I describe this as a cash grab? Despite making huge promises, Remnant falls flat, with certain elements described as being included at an absolute base level that just isn’t appropriate for a game or studio of this size. Lots of the complaints or niggles I have pointed out could have been easily rectified with just that little bit more thought into the production, and it would have made for a different experience and I would have happily given the game a higher rating. The developers have rightly tried to push the co-operative elements of the game; friends banter can mask a lacking experience for only so long though. The solo aspect of the game isn’t as much punishing as it is overly repetitive and dull. No, nobody expects an exact clone of Dark Souls, but the difficulty doesn’t scale quite as much as the developers would like you to believe.
Overall, Remnant isn’t a bad game. It’s just an unoriginal one that doesn’t feel particularly well polished or well thought out. If you and your friends are looking for the next co-op adventure, I could recommend it from that avenue; although given the total playtimes of those that have completed it I would wait for it to come down in price.
Remnant From the Ashes review code for PC provided by the publisher.
Remnant From the Ashes is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Reviews
‘Unhinged’ Review: Netflix’s Interactive Horror Thriller Is Short But Serviceable Gaming Fare
Netflix has such a strange history in gaming. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people don’t even know that there are free mobile games you can access through the service. Many of them are adaptations of their TV series, like “Too Hot to Handle” or “Squid Game”, while some are mobile versions of existing games, like Into the Breach or Hades.
In addition to mobile games, they’ve also created interactive movie experiences where you use your remote to select narrative options at branching points. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was a fairly successful version of this, but my sentimental favorite was the one where WWE’s New Day had to escape a murder house boobytrapped by The Undertaker. Even if some of these made a bit of a splash, it seems it never really hit with mainstream audiences the way their shows do.
One of the studios they purchased while trying to break into the game space was Night School Studio, the creators of the spooky narrative series Oxenfree. This struck me as a particularly smart acquisition, as this type of narrative game seems like something that would feel at home under the Netflix umbrella. While they did release Oxenfree II while owned by the streaming giant, it was released on traditional platforms, which led me to wonder when their first Netflix exclusive would show up.
While they did produce a game called Thronglets, a mobile version of a plot element from an episode of “Black Mirror”, the recently released Unhinged seems to be one of the highest profile Netflix games in a long time.
Unhinged is a first-person, narrative-driven thriller starring Zoë Kravitz, Sadie Sink, and Troy Baker. This 30-minute experience, played on your TV through the standard Netflix app, is controlled by your phone, using some clever tricks to make the whole thing feel more immersive. It’s a neat variation on the “interactive movie” subgenre, with a tiny bit of point-and-click adventure game DNA thrown in for good measure, but it doesn’t exactly offer you as many options as something like Until Dawn.
Kravitz plays Ava, a woman who is hunkering down in her apartment complex during a dangerous hurricane. As she talks with her friend Claire, who lives in a neighboring building, about possibly leaving to find shelter elsewhere, she finds herself in a desperate chase with a crazed killer that stalks her through the halls of the building. It’s a decent setup for a very contained story, but I wish there was a little more meat on the bones. The voice acting is great, but there’s not really a ton of characterization for the two leads, and the killer was a bit “generic psycho” for my taste. There’s some implied backstory with other tenants in the building, but it’s not enough to make me feel like there’s a web of relationships that would give the story more emotional weight.
To play the game, you open up your Netflix app wherever you usually watch, then select the game. This will bring up a QR code, which you’ll scan on your phone, prompting you to download a controller app that will sync up to the game. The majority of the way you’ll interact is by pointing at the screen like a Wiimote, which selects on-screen options for Ava and shines her flashlight around the environment.
While this does give it the feel of an FMV game, Unhinged is rendered in a photorealistic graphics style, and while not quite to the level of something like P.T., it does the trick of drawing you into the action. You’re still put on a pretty strict path while moving around, which is done automatically when you select a direction, but moving your phone gives you the ability to look around your environment, even if only slightly.
The real immersive part of the game is the fact that your phone also acts as Ava’s phone. The plot is frequently moved forward by calls and text messages that you answer as you would on your own cellular device. As sound blasts out of your phone, it does put you in the shoes of the main character, momentarily worrying you that the sound of the call or text is going to alert your on-screen stalker. This part of Unhinged truly takes advantage of the format to draw you deeper into the story, though unfortunately it’s so effective that I wished the game found even more ways to use it.
There are a couple clever moments that make for unique ways of delivering twists or doing extremely light puzzle solving, but most of the time it’s just used to allow your friend to give you instructions on how to move the narrative forward.
All these mechanics come together to give the illusion of tension without actually fully delivering on it. When you get to a situation where you’re under pressure, a timer bar will appear on the top of the screen, indicating how long you have to get to safety. It’s a fine gimmick, but it comes off as a little hard to gauge. Since you don’t have direct control over your character, all your actions are very heavily animated, and sometimes your choice ends up taking longer than you think it will not because of the idea behind the choice, but because of the length of the animation. Fortunately, if you die, you’ll just pick back up at a checkpoint right before the choice, and you’ll even be treated with a voiceover discussion between police officers examining the crime scene, describing how you died.
So in theory, there is tension, counting down as the killer gets closer and closer to reaching you, but what you’re actually doing almost never feels like it’s testing you in any meaningful way. Actual choices come up very infrequently, making most of your interaction with the game world just scanning your pointer across the screen looking for an interaction point to progress, hoping the animation doesn’t take up too much time before the timer runs out. I didn’t hit a ton of friction points with it, and there’s even a Story Mode if you want to take out all possibility of death, but I found myself wishing there were more ways to affect the world around me. The phone calls and texts felt really fun and clever, but the rest of the gameplay just didn’t match that, making me wish there was more emphasis on the unique interaction model rather than the more traditional one.
Even though the mechanics aren’t necessarily pushing the tension as hard as they could be, the actual content of Unhinged’s story contains some pretty brutal situations. The villain isn’t the most unique or fleshed out, but he’s responsible for some gruesome moments that raised the stakes to make the game feel more intense. It makes your fight for survival feel that much more desperate, so even if you’re just highlighting icons on the screen, it feels more visceral thanks to what Ava is witnessing.
While I appreciate the game being lean and mean, I wish it was just a little bit longer. Thirty minutes is a pretty short runtime, and it doesn’t feel like the story for Unhinged has the time to come up with something that really sets it apart from other stories of its kind. The focus on the hurricane at the beginning made me think that was going to be more integral to the plot, but it didn’t really do much aside from explaining why the apartment complex was so empty. Thrillers like this live or die on how memorable their killer is, and there wasn’t anything really clever or unique about him. If this game doubled its runtime to the length of a standard Netflix show, it might have given them more room to build character relationships that made the action more meaningful, or at least given it a bit more personality of its own.
Night School Studio is on to something with the format of Unhinged. The combination of on screen and on phone prompts makes the game feel more immersive, drawing you in even when the narrative itself doesn’t feel fully formed or unique. The short runtime is both a help and a hindrance, keeping the pacing tight at the cost of adding any depth to the proceedings. This feels like a great first draft, and I hope that Night School is given the freedom to continue experimenting with the model, as the level of polish shown here was promising.
Even with its flaws, if you’ve already got a Netflix subscription, there’s no reason not to sit down for half an hour to check out Unhinged. If you can keep your expectations in check, it’s a nasty little thrillride that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Unhinged is streaming now on Netflix.
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