Incidentally, while I can\'t in good conscience review on multiplayer I never engaged with directly, an extremely cursory examination of it shows I didn\'t miss anything anyway. It sure looks like it\'s extremely poorly designed, with bosses and even basic enemies either scaling way too hard and becoming incredible pains in the butt, or not enough (and/or struggling to split their focus effectively) and turn into total walkovers.
Oh, and there\'s absolutely no balancing around different Gear Levels either, with the highest player in a given group being used to calculate the level for a given world, so hey, there\'s another place the stupid roguelike random garbage that actively makes the game worse for no benefit they just threw in \'cause it was trendy is a strictly bad thing.
The gear level for co-op worlds is host + 1 if the rest of the group is roughly same level, host -1-3 if the group is mostly lower level, and host +1-3 if the group is mostly higher level. I'm not a fan of the gear level system (even if it serves a necessary function vis-a-vis adventure worlds), but it's vastly more functional than you speculate.
EDIT: It scales by that amount per player.
I’ll give you that then, even if I still find it deeply confusing and unintuitive to no real benefit.
Having played the DLC, it was ultimately more of the same. I wish I hadn't said to "stay tuned" in the review proper; that's a thoroughly unsatisfying answer, but it's the truth.
It does have a neat bespoke, non-randomized dungeon at the start with a fun gimmick and oodles of environmental storytelling, but the rote nature of the dungeons that follow kind of sucks the fun out of it. New final boss was kind of fun, and had great aesthetics and presentation, but his very last phase was such bleh that I just brought summons and cheesed it with them and the Soul Link / Soul Anchor / Blood Font setup, which worked just fine like it has all game. Also, the new gun they give you partway through the fight is fun and cool, but actually not terribly useful against him, which is disappointing.
I started a new campaign at a higher difficulty to try farming materials to max out weapons and armor, but... in the end, I gave up and just quit. It was fun, and I don't regret the purchase, but I am mildly discouraged that it seems like the sequel moved in the wrong direction, doubling down on things I didn't like and removing things I did, or that felt like they made up for them.
We'll see though. It'll go on sale someday.
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A Fundamentally Sound, Fun Game Undermined With a Lot of Trendy Bullshit
At its core, Remnant is actually a pretty fun little dungeon shooter experience, which it then proceeds to systemically undermine with a bunch of design choices I wish I could say I found baffling.
Said core is a hybrid of third person shooting with Dark Souls style slots for upgradable equipment, healing item scarcity, and so on. Weapons can be slotted with "mods" that charge up special attacks for extra damage, summon allies, cause buffs, and so on. As you advance through a map, enemies will appear, with special "elite" foes randomly spawning, but clearing an area out means they won't come back until the next time you die or refill your health, ammo, and so on at a checkpoint. Said checkpoints are relatively generous, positioned at the start of every dungeon and every boss fight, although only the ones outside of dungeons can be freely travelled between.
It helps that some of the game's stupidest design decisions are partially counterbalanced by good ones. The baffling gear level system and attendant rubber-banding effects on difficulty are stupid and confusing, but at least no level cap or XP scaling ensures the player's constantly getting a drip feed of small incremental power increases to help work around it. The randomly generated and procedural maps are boring, repetitive, and make actually getting a lot of the better items (or solving some of the more-interesting quests) more of a test of luck and patience than thought or skill, but at least penalties for death besides lost progress are relatively light, and many of the various items, guns, and weapon mods are fun to fiddle around with, even if I often find myself coming back to a handful of personal favorites.
While the ending (pre-DLC at least, stay tuned) is a bit short and perfunctory, and while too many of the characters are too shallow for my liking, at least the conceptual bases behind the various mysterious alien worlds the player can visit and people they meet are actually kind of fun and interesting. Although, again, the randomized nonsense sacrifices much of the nuanced environmental storytelling present in games like Myst or Dark Souls that it's clearly aping, it is still fun to read diary entries and explore around nooks for special treasures or well-hidden environmental puzzles, and the handful of non-randomized dungeons do have some of it.
I suppose some of the reason was probably cost-cutting related, but I think shorter, more intricate dungeons could more than make up that difference, so a player wouldn't have to throw dice trying to get stuff that might make the game more fun in Adventure mode. And I don't even know where to start with everything wrong with gear levels and what I understand about how they work.
Ultimately, though, while I did have fun with the game, and I do sort of recommend it, I resent that it felt the need to throw in all this randomized, procedural garbage that actively makes the game worse.