YMMV / Remnant II

• Awesome Music: Rob Westwood returns to compose the soundtrack, and manages to put out music with as much dramatic intensity as the original had.
  • "Annihilation", the final boss theme, is an appropriately epic score fitting the scale of the boss and the stakes at hand. It starts with a rising orchestral part for the first phase of the fight, adds a sci-fi bent when you reach the second phase, and goes all-out in the third and final phase, as you're unloading everything into the boss to stop it once and for all.
  • "You Shall Rise", the credits theme, feels like a Self-Empowerment Anthem, telling listeners that they will keep on pushing forward, no matter what troubles may lay ahead.
• Best Boss Ever: One major improvement between games has been the bosses, with some standouts being as follows;
  • The Nightweaver in Losomn is a fittingly ghoulish and intimidating boss who phases through solid objects and tries to grab you frequently, keeping you on your toes for the entire fight. The difference here is that she's very vulnerable to guns, so you get to fight back with just as much force.
  • The Red Prince. He was hyped up in trailers and boy does he deliver: A Lightning Bruiser Magic Knight with a Flaming Sword who can switch between lengthy melee combos, unleash waves of holy flame at a distance, unleash a Storm of Blades that can then return to him, teleport, and even summon spectral copies of himself. If that's not enough, when you deal enough damage to him, he summons a whirlwind of flame that forces you into the center platform of the arena, forcing you to engage in melee range against him. All while each hit punishes you with Curse and Burning. Not to mention the blaring orchestra playing during the entire fight!
  • The final boss. Simply named Annihilation, it takes the form of a Root dragon with a large sword that flies around, takes swings, creates shockwaves and can inflict a debuff that prevents healing while active. However, halfway through the dragon splits its head open and the entire arena takes on a more digital appearance, the patterns becoming more frantic. All well and good... until it glitches out and returns to its first form. Throughout phase 2, it shifts between forms, but always gives the player time to adjust to the shift, preventing it from being disorienting.
• Even Better Sequel: From The Ashes became a cult hit on its 2019 release, but Remnant II took the scrappy AA shooter and polished it up to full-blown AAA standards. The graphics are significantly better to the point of just being outright gorgeous, the pacing of the campaign is much improved (with your character getting away from dreary post-apocalyptic Earth immediately after the tutorial, rather than several hours into the game) with a much more satisfying conclusion and final boss, boss design leans much less on swarming you with hordes of adds, and the character build system has been made much deeper through the introduction of the Archetype system. Sure, there are changes that some players don't like as always, but in general the game is considered a big step up over its already well-liked predecessor.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Enigma is widely regarded as one of if not the single best gun in the game. It's essentially an SMG that shoots Chain Lightning, trivializing any encounter with groups of enemies even after receiving a substantial nerf in the first major patch, especially if you gear yourself to maximize Shock damage and damage to Overloaded enemies. You don't even need to aim with it as the lightning will automatically target the closest enemy in range. Admittedly, said range is rather short, which is its only major drawback (other than the fact that friendly fire is a thing in the game, making it a dangerous gun to use in multiplayer), but that's where the mod comes in. It launches electrified stakes which embed into the enemy to deal Damage Over Time, with a much longer range than the primary fire. Additionally, the material required to craft it can be found in the Labyrinth, a fixed biome with fixed loot, meaning there's absolutely zero rerolling required for you to get your hands on it. Finally, if you put yourself through all of the Guide Dang It! needed to unlock the Archon archetype, then any future characters you make can even start the game with it!
  • The Bright Steel Ring, which let you always roll at the highest possible speed regardless of your encumberance, was so laughably broken that it got patched out of the game shortly after release and replaced with the Dull Steel Ring, which only drops your rolls down a single weight class. Even the fact that the Bright Steel Ring was difficult to obtain^note Reggie would add it to his shop inventory after you'd defeated 15 world bosses and you still suffered the stamina penalty for encumberance did nothing to justify the ludicrousness of you tumbling around in the Leto Set as quickly as if you were naked, for the cost of only a single one of your four ring slots.
  • The Nebula is a bit difficult to use on its own, being a sort of acid flamethrower with extremely short range and a wonky hitbox that has as much stopping power as blowing smoke at your enemies, but when combined with the Energized Neck Coil (which causes all status applications to cause an explosion of damage from the enemy) it gains enough punch to down common enemies in a single puff and stagger elites as the Corrosive debuff opens them up to more damage. More importantly, however, its unique mod Nano-Swarm is absurdly powerful, unleashing a host of nanites that seek out and attack any enemy within 20m of you for 15 seconds, regardless of whether you can see it or not, tearing them apart with acid damage and a corrosive debuff before moving on to the next one. A single cast can clear an entire room of normal enemies on Survivor, chew through most of an Elite single-handedly, and even take a noticeable chunk out of a boss.
• Improved Second Attempt: The climax of Remnant II is similar to that of From the Ashes as you travel to the heart of the Root's power to try and destroy the source and end its threat. However Ward 17 was a Disappointing Last Level due to being just a straight, unopposed run to the final boss completely bereft of enemies, obstacles or puzzles, and the final boss itself, Dreamer/Nightmare, was considered somewhat an underwhelming and gimmicky Anticlimax Boss. Root Earth in II is an entire (albeit somewhat short) final world to explore, complete with enemies, two lesser bosses to fight through on your way to the climax, and new items and secrets to discover, while the final boss Annihilation is considered to be an excellent final challenge.
• Porting Disaster: The PC version launched with abysmal performance, regularly struggling to get good framerates even on modern rigs, forcing players to set everything to low and bear it. Even after the first patch or so improved performance substantially, this did nothing to address another major problem - weird shimmering and blurry graphics that makes everything look muddy and indistinct, like you're playing the game through a very opaque pane of glass. It was fixed eventually.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The trait point limit has proven to be a source of contention among the fanbase. In the previous game, trait points were unlimited and you could max out every trait if you so desired. In Remnant 2 however, you are limited to a maximum of 60 points (85 after an update) to distribute between traits. This, combined with the overall nerfing of traits, has resulted in the playerbase finding the system to be overall more restrictive. The developers responded by claiming it was done to promote build diversity, but this hasn't halted the flow of frustration, especially since the logic there is spotty. Mods were already developed within the first 24 hours of game release to uncap trait points.
  • Armor upgrades and abilities being removed has also caused some displeasure, since now the only reason to equip certain kinds of armor is because of flat defensive values and weight rather than mixing and matching according to what suits your playstyle, and there's no way to improve pieces of armor to make up for enemies getting stronger as the game goes on.
  • One particularly annoying occurrence is when an enemy drops both types of ammo on death (meaning both ammo boxes occupy the exact same space), and you are full on one but not the other. The game will always attempt to pick up the one you are full on and fail, leaving you unable to get the one you actually need until you waste a round of ammo just so you can pick up both boxes.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike:
  • While the previous game had some pretty baffling puzzles in it if you wanted to find everything, some of the ones in the sequel, like the ones to get some Engrams, absolutely blow them out of the water.
  • As long as you smashed the majority of the breakable objects (crates, vases etc) you came across on your journey in From The Ashes you'd get so much scrap that eventually you'd have Money for Nothing; upgrading your equipment was gated by iron (and Lumenite) rather than its cost in scrap and buying everything the merchants had to sell was child's play. Not so in II, where not only are there many more things you have to pay for, but finding consumables is a lot more uncommon, meaning you have to buy most of them rather than being able to cruise by on what you pick up, and upgrading equipment (particularly unique weapons) is a lot more expensive. However, even if you smash every last little breakable object on every map, not only is scrap considerably less-likely to drop, but it drops it in much smaller amounts, meaning you're constantly going to be strapped for cash and having to choose carefully what you buy and upgrade (although it's slightly mitigated by no longer being able to upgrade your armour, which is one less expense, and also having the ability to get a refund of some of the resources spent on upgrading a weapon if you decide you've changed your mind and even to sell items you no longer want).
  • Ammo drops a lot less frequently, making the possibility of actually running completely dry a genuine threat, particularly if you lean on one gun more than the other. Combined with the aforementioned reduced frequency of consumable drops while exploring (and Ammo Boxes only appear in Losomn now rather than every world), you should probably buy a couple from Reggie just to be on the safe side.
• That One Attack: Any boss that has a One-Hit Kill grab attack, like Bruin, Blade of the King or Magister Dullain. These usually aren't that hard to evade, but if you mess up and get caught by it, you're just dead, no ifs ands or buts. Not even Auto-Revive effects like the Challenger's Die Hard trait can save you.
• That One Boss: The aberration miniboss "The Executioner" is derided by many as the worst boss in the game. It's a jacked-up version of the huge axe-wielding Heavy Fae elites, but the environment you have to face it in is what makes it unbearable- an extremely narrow corridor which makes evasion particularly difficult, the first part of which is filled with deep water that heavily reduces your mobility (which, of course, doesn't affect the boss). You can get to dry land easily enough, but if you head too far down the wrong side passage you'll run right into a Lantern Horror who will pincer you between it and the boss, all but guaranteeing your death. What really pushes it over the edge from "tough" into "utter BS" is how it uses some of the randomized boss enhancement affixes it can spawn with. With the confined space you have to fight such a powerful enemy in, Shocking (which periodically casts lightning bolts in the area around it) or Displacer (which spontaneously teleports the player into melee range of the boss) can be devastating, but if it rolls the Cubes affix (which causes giant glowing cubes similar to those fired at you by the Labyrinth Guardian to repeatedly spiral out from its body, not only dealing significant damage that's literally impossible to avoid in the cramped quarters, but also completely obscuring your vision and making it impossible to see the boss winding up its crushing attacks, which combined with the damage from the cubes is all but a guaranteed One-Hit Kill) then you might as well just give up and reroll your world, because you are not going to beat it. It may be possible to cheese it depending on where its event spawns it by running far enough away until it gets stuck on terrain trying to follow you (assuming it doesn't have the aforementioned Displacer suffix), but trying to take it on in a fair fight is just more trouble than most players can be bothered with.