Remnant: From the Ashes Review — A 7.6 That Undersells the Best Co-op Shooter of Its Class

Remnant: From the Ashes came out in August 2019 for PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One, and it is still doing the work. Gunfire Games built a third-person shooter on the bones of the Dark Souls series, then handed the player a gun and a friend. Perfect World Entertainment published it. A Nintendo Switch port followed in March 2023. By December 2021 it had sold over 3 million units, and a sequel, Remnant 2, arrived in July 2023. The aggregate critic score sits at 7.6 out of 10 across 14 outlets. That number is fair, and it undersells the one thing this game does better than almost anything else in its class.

Trailer, via PC Gamer.

Ward 13 and the Root

The setup is plain. An interdimensional evil called the Root has wrecked Earth. You are a wandering survivor, and early on you are brought to Ward 13, an underground bunker where the remaining humans live. The task is to find Ward 13’s founder, Ford. That hunt sends you through a portal into the Labyrinth, a rift that lets you move between worlds.

From there the game opens up. Rhom is a dead civilization that destroyed itself to escape the Root. Corsus is a swamp ruled by the Iskal Queen, a parasitic insectoid hive mind that has taken over the planet’s former inhabitants. Yaesha is a forest world in the middle of a civil war between its Satyr-like inhabitants, where you befriend a group of rebels and eventually find Ford imprisoned.

That is a lot of ground, and the game keeps moving across it. The structure is a set story wrapped around randomly generated levels, which means the order you meet enemies and bosses in will not match your friend’s.

Two Guns and a Random World

The combat is where Remnant: From the Ashes earns its keep. You carry one main weapon and one side arm, plus a melee weapon. The guns run from machine guns and shotguns to hunting rifles and sniper rifles, and each can take mods that grant extra abilities, teleportation among them. You build your own character, upgrade weapons and armor with materials found in the world, and spend trait points to raise stats.

Up to two other players can join. Difficulty scales with the number of players in the game. Loot is shared, but there is a catch: when a joining player returns to their own world, they have to run the story again. Different worlds hold different enemies and bosses, so progress does not carry cleanly across. Death costs you nothing — no items, no skill points — but sends you back to a checkpoint, and the enemies waiting there may differ in number or type.

That last detail is the whole design in miniature. The game is not punishing you with loss. It is punishing you with uncertainty.

What the Labyrinth Gets Right

Here is the part worth arguing about. Remnant: From the Ashes is often filed as a Souls-like, and the comparison is accurate about mechanics and wrong about feel. The Dark Souls series asks you to learn a fight. This game asks you to learn a world that will not hold still. Random generation is usually a cost — it buys replay value with forgettable spaces. Gunfire Games spent it differently, on the enemies and the bosses, so the variation lands where the tension already is.

The shooting holds up. Two guns, mods, melee as a fallback rather than a lifestyle. It is a third-person shooter first, and the role-playing systems sit underneath it rather than on top. That balance is harder to strike than it looks, and the game strikes it.

The cooperative layer is the real achievement. Scaling difficulty by party size, sharing loot, then resetting story progress per player — that is an awkward set of rules on paper. In practice it means every session has stakes for everyone at the table, not just the host. Most games in this genre treat a second player as a guest. This one treats them as a survivor with their own map to redraw.

The 7.6, and What It Misses

The score is defensible. The story is thin in places, the worlds vary in how much they reward a second visit, and the set narrative and the random levels pull against each other more than once. Fourteen outlets landing on 7.6 is not a fluke. It is a consensus that the game is very good at several things and merely fine at others.

But 7.6 does not capture how much of this game’s value shows up late. It sold over 3 million units by December 2021, two years after launch, which is not how a flash-in-the-pan moves. It is how a game with a long tail moves. Enough people kept playing, and kept dragging friends in, that a sequel was worth making. Remnant 2 arrived in July 2023.

The comparison that matters is not to the Dark Souls series. It is to every cooperative shooter that shipped with a campaign you finish once and shelve. Remnant: From the Ashes built a campaign you cannot finish the same way twice, then made sure your friends could not either. That is a narrower achievement than the genre’s best, and a more durable one than most.

Remnant: From the Ashes is available on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.

co-op shooter · game review · Gunfire Games · Remnant 2 · Remnant From the Ashes · Souls-like