izigame.me

"Dark Souls with guns" is sort of a weird idea but it works reasonably well. While there are some issues that hold this back from being truly great, Remnant does a few things that make it quite fun (particularly with friends).
Most importantly, you never get 'de-summoned'. It was so natural that only after playing with a friend for hours did I realize we weren't having to constantly re-summon each other. It's particularly odd that the actual Souls games even have a password system to encourage co-op with friends, but then they de-summon after every single death or boss-victory. That amount of gameplay inconvenience with friends shouldn't happen, even if it side-steps some of the lore. Who cares, I'm trying to play with friends.
*Everything* you pickup (other than ammo) gets sent to the other players as well. No need to worry about constantly fighting over pickups or tediously having your friend come over and pick up an item. Money? Yes. Upgrade materials? Yes. Equipment? Yes! It's so convenient.
There's various things in the game that directly interact with the other players in your session, particularly for healing. They definitely make the game easier but you can mostly choose to avoid them if you really want to.
Another thing I GREATLY appreciate in this game is that sometimes when you find a new weapon it's already upgraded to a reasonable level. It has always annoyed me that these games will have tons of weapons (or armor) and almost always you have to start from scratch despite equipment-upgrades being essential to the game's design. I don't know how often the game provides upgraded equipment but I hope it keeps doing that. My preferred solution is still to "upgrade the blacksmith" so that all of your equipment is the same level and therefore you're free to experiment.
While it's not hugely significant, nearly every breakable object in the game can drop money or upgrade material. Especially early on it encourages to interact with the environment a bit more.
So far there's been enough enemy-variety to keep us engaged, and going from the standard handgun (which was decent) to an automatic fire-based boss-weapon handgun was a great moment.
--- Critiques ---
The level-design is usually bland. Very little to be noteworthy, both as individual areas and the fact that the game is extremely linear.
The story and the characters are mostly forgettable in my opinion. A few journal entries are decent but the characters mostly feel generic. The thing you realize with some fan-favorite characters like Solaire is that they often literally have less than 10 minutes of dialogue in the entire game they're from. Not even cutscenes usually, just dialogue and a few gameplay moments. And yet people talk about them for years and years. So far I haven't met anyone particularly memorable in Remnant.
Fall-damage is very harsh. There are many falls that would be fine even in real life and for some bizarre reason cause you damage here.
Some of the traits are either boring or just very worthless. Like increasing your vault speed by 1%, absolutely ridiculous. Even if it was 5% I wouldn't put any points into that lol.
4 years after release and many patches later, it's mind-boggling that you *can't* remap your controller. In a game with stamina why would you ever want to activate sprint with L3 of all things???
I haven't played the sequel yet but I've heard good things. Will check it out in the near future.