Conclusion

Remnant II is developed by Gunfire Games and published by Gearbox Publishing, who are behind the Borderlands Series. If I had to summarize Remnant II with a single sentence, I'd say "it wants to be Dark Souls with guns." You get to battle all sorts of enemies, who will respawn when you use a checkpoint; boss fights are tough and require that you learn the mechanics and pair that with well-timed dodges and rolls. Unlike Dark Souls, you may team up with up to two friends online, which definitely makes the game more enjoyable. While the story is forgettable, gun play is decent, but definitely not outstanding. Character progression is alright, but nothing we haven't seen before. Overall the game is worth checking out if you like Dark Souls or 3D shooters, everyone else should probably wait for a sale.

Remnant II is the first game (besides Fortnite) to use Epic's famous Unreal Engine 5—finally! I've been waiting for years. Although some impressive tech demos have been showcased, there is yet to be a AAA game released utilizing the new Unreal Engine 5. Unreal Engine 5 brings with it numerous improvements over UE4, like Lumen and Nanite. Nanite enables direct import of highly detailed assets into the engine, which improves productivity and results in beautiful environments with automated Level of Detail that allows incredible fine-detail rendering. Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination solution that reacts in real-time to scene and lighting changes, eliminating the need for pre-baked lightmaps. For an unknown reason the developers are not including Lumen in Remnant II, I suspect that the decision to use Unreal Engine 5 came rather late in the development cycle, so they ported the game from UE4 to UE5, but couldn't make certain "from the ground up" changes.

Visually Remnant II can't impress, despite Unreal Engine 5—check out our screenshots. I expected much more from the new engine, very disappointing. Some parts of the game look like a decade old title, especially indoors scenes with objects like racks and shelves look very poor. Many maps have extremely flat floor geometry, which results in a dated look. On the other hand, textures are of extremely high detail and stay super crisp even if you walk up right to them—that's the magic of Nanite in action. The player's model and NPCs look "ok," but facial animations of humans that you interact with are just terrible. In certain areas, Remnant II does looks pretty nice, mostly near rocks and vegetation, there's also occasional moments where the visuals truly impress and make me think "Wow, Unreal Engine 5 is amazing...," mostly thanks to lighting effects.

The lighting does look fantastic in many scenes, shadows and light come together to form a believable environment, that's dynamic enough to look "next-gen," even without Lumen. Surprisingly there is no support for ray tracing in Remnant II, you do get screen-space reflections though, which the level designers made clever use of, to approximate a "ray traced" look in certain parts of the world.

Hardware requirements of the game are pretty extreme. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p with ultra settings you need a RTX 3070 Ti or Radeon RX 6800. RTX 4060 Ti is pretty close with 57 FPS. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you better have a fast graphics card. At least a RTX 3090 Ti, RTX 4080 or Radeon RX 7900 XT is required for 60 FPS at WQHD. 4K? You guessed right, not even the mighty RTX 4090 can reach 60 FPS. NVIDIA's fastest card only gets 45 FPS at 4K, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX is close behind with 44 FPS.

Intel Arc GPUs do surprisingly bad in Remnant II. They are usually able to match RX 7600 / RTX 3060 Ti, but here they run quite a bit slower. We did use the latest beta drivers, which fix some rendering issues. Kudos to Intel for fixing these problems very quickly—they are on the right track. AMD on the other hand still hasn't released a game-ready driver for Remnant II. When comparing AMD GPU performance against NVIDIA's offerings, team Radeon does very well though. Based on the typical average results from my graphics card reviews there's some expectations—in Remnant II the FPS rates on AMD are a good deal higher relative to NVIDIA than that expected average.

In a statement responding to users reporting "WTF? Performance?", the developer stated "we designed the game with upscaling in mind (DLSS/FSR/XeSS)." To me that sounds like a lame excuse as to why performance sucks. I would be less critical if graphics were awesome, but they look dated. A lot of earlier games do feature better looks and lower hardware requirements. I'm not sure if Unreal Engine 5 is to blame here, rather it seems that Remnant II is just another 2023 title that was rushed out, with terrible optimization. At least there's an official promise of "We're definitely going to roll out performance updates after the game's launch." I'm having doubts, but we'll see.

Now some good news: I am very happy to report that thanks to Unreal Engine 5, shader stuttering is a non-issue in Remnant II. While there's a short shader compiling screen on first startup, that takes only a few seconds, and runs only once. The vast majority of shaders are now precompiled and downloaded with the game as cached Pipeline State Objects (PSOs). This is a huge improvement over recent Unreal Engine 4 games.

As expected, VRAM requirements are fairly high. With 8 GB in 1080p, even recent releases like the GeForce RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti are reaching their limits in terms of VRAM. Interestingly, 1440p barely increases VRAM usage, but 4K reaches almost 10 GB. You do have to consider that upscaling is pretty much a requirement for decent FPS, which brings down VRAM requirements, because of the lower rendering resolution.