Fire On High: Remnant 2 Initial Impressions

As promised, we are now beginning our Remnant 2 coverage. When this game was initial annouced I was super hyped for it. It was probably the game I've been looking forward to the most this year and also a rare game when I actually bought it for full price instead of waiting for a 'Complete' edition or when it was on sale. Nope, I wanted to play Remnant 2 as soon as it was released. A lot of this stems from the fact I got the original (Remnant: From the Ashes) for free thanks to Playstation Plus but I had such a fun time playing with my fellow 7B homies Mr. J and Blythe that we all brought the DLC and played that together as well. It is rare for a game to capture all of our attention that is not a fighting game. After multiple playthroughs, we all moved on but the memory remained and when Remnant 2 was announced I announced this was going to be a day one title and Mr. J was down as well. Blythe said he'll play catch-up but he will eventually join us too. 

So the wanting game begun and I watched all the content Gunfire Games produced for the game. From trailers showing off the worlds we would be exploring to the classes aka Archetypes that were available. Ironically I think I changed which Archetype would be starting one a couple times but it was the last one revealed that sealed the deal for me. I was going to be a 'Hunter'.

The Hunter is a sharpshooter/ sniper class which caught my eye (mainly because I played too much Railgunner in Risk of Rain 2 and wanted that playstyle again). The Handler with their dog also appealed to me but when I found out you could use dual archetypes I knew I would pair the two. Now after 45 hrs so far, I've become comfortable with my choice but the fun in Remnant 2 is you are not locked into your initial Archetype and you can change it anytime. In all honesty, I feel I might switch out the Handler class for the Gunslinger as soon as I unlocked it because A) gunslingers are cool and always have a big appeal to me and B) I kind of not like watching my doggo get hurt and C) and He seems to not help as much as I hope against bosses. 

 However to get to the fun, we had to do some stuff so I need to talk about my initial problems. First, this game really pushes my Steam Deck to the limit and it sometimes struggle to stay at 30 fps even on low settings. Graphic fidelity suffers a bit too, when I initially started with no changing of settings the game looked very rough and ran worse, however after change some settings it became much better. Now it is nothing that's going to stop me from playing it but yeah, it can be rough sometimes even with optimized settings. I, however heard the game has trouble running smoothly even on the best computer rigs so it might not even by Steam Deck related and might be down to optimization. 'Lies of P' can run at very high frame rates (sometimes above 40) and feels much smoother on the Steam Deck for example. It is heartening to hear through that Gunfire Games will be working on the performance for all rigs through so this experience might improve as time goes on. 

 My second moment of doubt of my day one purchase was a rather strange input bug that seemed to disable my healing and turned it into another melee attack. This was super strange and was very frustrating because I was now playing a Souls-like game without a healing function. This input bug strangely seemed to only affect me so I eventually had to find a solution so I could play the game with the controller instead of being forced to use the built-in Steam Deck controls, mind you, the SD does have good controls it just rather awkward to hold for long play sessions. Honestly I've never used my built-in SD controls for any action game so I did not want to start with this one, especially one I had been really looking forward to playing. I however figured out that if I switched the heal for a similar button it would work as intended so now I heal with Right Bumper instead of Left Bumper and I've gotten used to it. 

 However after conquering fuzzy graphics, less then optimum frames and weird input bugs on my controller I've really got into Remnant 2 and now I'm playing it non-stop. Me and Mr. J even revisited our From the Ashes days and did some co-op as well which was very fun. The game itself is amazing and running around and shooting and rolling past dangerous attacks and the wealth of weapons, items and secrets (THE SECRETS!!) are a hard pull and I no longer regret getting in on ground floor. Some of these bosses tho, that is another story, which we may talk about in a subsequent blog.

For now, I'm enjoying the ride and ready for some more Remnant 2! 

 AV