Remoteness

A city faces a grim natural disaster, chaos ensues, and individuals must find their way out through harsh survival techniques. No, we've never heard that concept before, have we? Remoteness is an action-adventure game based on an electrical meteor shower that strikes New York City. Players will have to fight to escape the isolated urban area mercilessly.

Narratives like these make you lose faith that there's any creativity left in the gaming sphere. But as they say, you should never judge a book by its cover. Naturally, it's worth getting a glimpse into Remoteness to get smug and try and prove your point about copy-paste game scenarios or be pleasantly surprised at the outcome of gameplay. It's up to us to determine the correct answer.

Snake Plissken Has Left the Chat

So let's set the premise for Remoteness. It's 2034 in New York City, and the US military has isolated Manhattan because a meteor show has caused some strange local phenomenon. Nobody gets in or out, so it's completely lawless. What do you do? Get your crossbow, grab your drone, and get out there and hold with the hope that this nightmarish scenario will end sooner rather than later.

You'll hike around this open world, discovering new weapons and enemies and delivering 'justice' to those who cross you in creative ways. Players will use the environment to their advantage with a recurring day/night cycle and all the urban obstacles to take down their foes. So yes, there's a lot of focus on the combat prowess of Remoteness. But how about a story to motivate players to get to the finish line?

Now, this is where we start to see Remoteness falter. There's minimal narrative to direct players in the game apart from the fact that they want to escape. Yes, it's a straightforward objective, but with a significant open world, who knows where to start in achieving that feat? It feels like the game was developed purely to show off the abilities to create a half-decent combat arena. It succeeds on that front, but without any direction, players lose interest very quickly.

As you run around New York, you'll find soldiers, heathens, monsters, and more, all for vastly inexplicable reasons. Remoteness is a bit of a mess regarding the why or how. But anyone who prefers to showcase their FPS skills in a versatile combat arena could find some things to enjoy.

Left Isolated

Play Remoteness, and you'll get the instant feel of a portfolio game that showcases what developers can do. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but players should be advised that what they'll be getting is a pretty vanilla action-adventure game that lacks rhyme or reason. We've seen similar games that own the same concept visually, mechanically, and impressively, like Metro 2033.

Round-Up - Pros & Cons

Pros:

• Well-crafted combat making use of the open-world environment
• Explosive, cinematic moments in the city
• AI and physics are relatively impressive

Cons:

• The confusing narrative takes away from the direction of the game
• The visuals aren't awe-inspiring
• An unoriginal concept that's adopted by many other games