REMNANT II

Add it all up and Remnant II is a game of sharp peaks and sharp valleys, and I land it on an 8. It is nearly flawless where it plays and turns in a blank page where it tells a story — and its success is the clearest proof you could ask for that, for this kind of game, the playing is the thing that actually counts.

The 2023 dark horse that sold a million in four days

Rewind to July 2023, and Remnant II was the kind of dark horse nobody especially expected, the one that ambushed everyone the moment it launched. It cleared a million copies in four days and topped two million by September, by a comfortable margin the best-selling game Gunfire Games has ever made, and it picked up a Best Action Game nomination at The Game Awards 2023 to go with the sales.

The critical reception is just as solid: an OpenCritic top-critic average around 82 with an 85% recommendation rate, and a steady 82% positive on Steam across more than forty thousand reviews. It never broke into the 90-plus masterpiece tier, but it planted itself firmly as the benchmark sequel for the soulslike-shooter. Next to the original, Remnant: From the Ashes, it expanded across the board — more worlds, deeper classes, more inventive bosses — which is what earned it that "surpasses the original" verdict.

For a series that started as a relatively niche cult curiosity, this entry reads like a coming-of-age — the moment a dark horse stopped being a pleasant surprise and became a name people actually wait on. That trajectory matters for how you should weigh the whole package: this is not a studio coasting on a formula, but one that took a decent first game and rebuilt it into something with real staying power and a clear identity of its own.

Who should buy it, and who should walk past

So who is this actually for? The answer is clean. If you want soulslike difficulty and inventive bosses but are long since done with the melee run-back, prefer fighting at range with a gun, and want to rope in a couple of friends to clear runs together, Remnant II is practically tailored to you. It deletes the genre's most grating punishment and amplifies its most addictive build and boss chess, landing right in your wheelhouse.

Flip it around, and there's a crowd best served walking past: the single-player story diehard who comes for narrative and character and needs one clear, complete arc to carry them through. Remnant II's story is its weakest link, propped up by text dumps and thin characterization, and if you mostly play to be moved by a great tale, it will probably let you down. As for editions, the base game is plenty to start; once you've confirmed the loop is for you and you want more classes and build space, add The Awakened King and The Forgotten Kingdom to unlock the Ritualist and the Invoker — the safest path in.

Why it's hard to replace

One last question: will something else casually knock this game off its perch? Not in the near term. Take its most direct rival, Elden Ring — a great game, but one whose magic rests on a single, meticulously hand-built map, and the defining trait of a hand-built map is that once you clear it, it's set; the second run walks the same road.

Remnant II takes the opposite road entirely. It welds procedural generation to a bottomless dual-archetype build system, so every run hands you a different map, different bosses, different loot, and you happily re-roll dozens of times over.

That "every run is different" experience, paired with the brisk run-back-free pace, is the thing that's genuinely its own and hard to find anywhere else right now. The narrative shortfall is real, but it never sinks the game, because Remnant II bet on the right thing from the very start.