Swamps of Corsus is a deceptively meaty expansion for one of my favorite games, Remnant: From The Ashes. The DLC brings three major updates to the game: a new rogue-like game called Survivor Mode, a map in Adventure Mode (Corsus) that comes with all the good adventure things — new weapons, armor, mods, bosses, etc. — and a new cosmetic reward system. These updates add more than just additional content; they create a reason to keep playing even after you've seen every new boss and collected every new weapon. Swamps of Corsus is exactly what was missing Remnant: From The Ashes.
Survival Mode Could Be Its Own Standalone Game
Players begin survival mode with a repeater pistol and just enough scrap to buy an item or two. There are vendors that sell weapons, armor, trinkets, consumables, and traits/dragon hearts for scrap. Once you enter the game, a timer starts and the goal is to find the dungeon, clear it, and defeat the boss as fast as you can. Killing enemies rewards experience. When you level up, your health and damage increase. When the timer runs out the threat level of the dungeon increases, raising the difficulty. Scattered throughout each dungeon are items, scrap, and skill books that assign specific trait points on pick up. After clearing the boss, you return to the hub where the shops have been randomized with fresh equipment to buy before your next dungeon. It goes on infinitely until you die, at which point you restart entirely from zero.
The boss at the end of each level is random, however, after playing daily for the last week, I can confidently say that it's weighted much heavier to the handful of new bosses added to this expansion and recent updates. This leads to two problems: boss fights are meant to be learned through repeated attempts and incremental progress, something not possible in survival mode where death is permanent and you may not even see that boss again on the next run. Secondly, the new bosses are way overturned. The three new Corsus bosses I've encountered are orders of magnitude harder than all the other bosses from the base game. It got to a point after dozens and dozens of attempts that I just knew if I started a run and rolled one of those bosses, I was just going to lose.
I expect Remnant to be hard, but I also think there are four difficulty settings for a reason, and normal really needs to get turned down. In survival, the only real difference between the difficulty settings seems to be how fast you acquire experience. I eventually started grinding the new adventure mode just to learn the new bosses before taking them on in survivor mode with an assortment of random gear. Even in an adventure mode run on normal difficulty with fully kitted characters, these new bosses felt way too hard compared to all the other bosses.
Still, I'm excited about survivor mode and I hope that Gunfire Games supports it for the long run. Rotating in new weapons, mods, and bosses periodically will keep the mode fresh without the need to design all-new content. I would love a season track or battle pass for survival mode too, assuming they can come up with some worthwhile cosmetic awards
Cosmetics Are A Bust
The other hook Swamps adds is a new cosmetic vendor. Survivor mode rewards a new currency (Glowing Fragments) that can be used to purchase new cosmetic items. At first glance, it looks every gear item is now a cosmetic that, once purchased, can be mixed and matched however you like regardless of the gear you're actually wearing, which I would have liked.
In reality, what you can purchase is a color swap for the gear you're currently wearing. Some of them are ok. Some of them are barely noticeable. A lot of them are green. This does not particularly excite me or motivate me to grind currency for cosmetic when the cosmetics are very simple recolors. At first, the Glowing Fragments were exciting to collect, now I typically just walk right past them.
I Think You're Just What I Needed
When I first learned about everything coming in the new Remnant: From The Ashes DLC I was, frankly, kind of disappointed. I was hoping for an entirely new act à la Diablo that would introduce a new planet, new dungeon layouts, and new bosses. Instead, I was shown a survival mode that simply pulled gear and dungeons from the base game and repackaged them in rogue-like survival mode. There is a new adventure, but it's just Corsus, the zone that stood out among the other three for being linear and having static bosses. The new adventure seemed to just bring Corsus up to the level of the other three, something that I expected while playing the base game. Getting back into the game with my friends and experiencing the new content as a team almost instantly convinced me that survival mode alone is worth the price of admission.
I collected all the gear and maxed my character in the base game in about 20 hours. I came back to try hardcore, but it was a little too intimidating. I've wanted to keep playing Remnant, but I never felt I had a good enough incentive too.
With survival mode, my enthusiasm for the game has been renewed and I'm so excited to keep playing it long term, even if it's just jumping in for a run or two a few times a week. It definitely has some tuning issues, and the new bosses need to be brought down by a significant margin (especially on normal difficulty), but even the regular bad beats haven't turned me off from the allure of "just one more run before bed." I'm loving Remnant again, and Swamps of Corsus was just what it needed.
A PC copy of Swamps of Corsus was provided to TheGamer for this review. Swamps of Corsus is available now for PC.
Swamps of Corsus