As you fight your way through the unforgiving hordes of Remnant 2’s procedurally generated soulslike levels, you’re going to need bullets – and a whole lot of them. And that’s where the Gunslinger archetype comes in. With a six-shooter at their hip and enough lead to bury an army of baddies, this western-themed outlaw makes ungodly levels of DPS their calling card. After going hands-on with the Gunslinger myself, I pulled out the spitoon and took a seat at the campfire with principal designer Ben Cureton to talk about the Gunslinger’s marauding ways.
“So the Gunslinger in Remnant 2 is all about weapons,” Ben told me. “They’re the master of weapon handling, fire rate, and ammo generation. And the fantasy for the gunslinger is they’re constantly switching between weapons. They’re rarely running out of ammo. It still can happen, but it’s much more rare than another class. And they shoot just much faster on average than every other class in the game. They’re just a rain of bullets everywhere.”
Replacing the Ex-Cultist from the previous game, The Gunslinger is a mid-range powerhouse designed to keep the bullets flying. Unlike the reformed cultist of yesteryear though, the Gunslinger mostly drops their role as a hybrid support class and goes all-in on dealing as much damage as possible. One of the main ways the Gunslinger accomplishes that is through its Prime Perk: Loaded, which instantly reloads all of your weapons once you’ve activated any of the archetype’s skills. If I was playing my cards right, I never had to spend valuable time reloading in combat by activating my skill right when I needed a fresh magazine for my weapons.
The skills the Gunslinger has at their disposal are incredibly deadly in their own right, like Quickdraw, the first of three abilities I unlocked during my playthrough. “Quick Draw is something you’ve probably seen in every western ever made, which is they pull out their six-shooter and they fire six shots,” Ben explained. “And there’s two versions of that. One will auto-target enemies in front of you and shoot up to six shots. The special mode is if you hold the button down, you can actually aim it and it will always shoot six shots, but it will shoot exactly at the reticle. So you can use that for something that has a very visible weak spot, something that’s not moving too fast, bosses – things like that. It’s quite strong. And it’s especially good because it’s on a lower cooldown, and it’s something that you can use with the Prime [Perk] to constantly keep reloading your weapons.”
There’s also Sidewinder, a skill that let me ADS faster and move more quickly while aiming, and Bulletstorm, which made all my weapons fully automatic and improved their fire rate and reload speed. On top of that, the returning Trait system allowed me to increase how much ammo I could carry beyond the maximum capacity of other archetypes. All of these abilities helped me drown the enemy in a hail of gunfire in an incredibly challenging game where dealing damage quickly can save your skin.
If you’ve ever played a shooter with me, then you’ll know I despise reloading, so the Gunslinger fit me like a glove. Of course, the downside to being such a relentless DPS machine is that I was quite squishy, lacking the second wind available to the close-quarters Challenger archetype, or any kind of support abilities available to other classes when playing in co-op. This meant that during combat I had to focus on taking down enemies quickly, preferably at a distance, and try to end combat before it had a chance to begin. This became especially important during boss fights, where one false move could mean an undesired respawn loading screen. By playing aggressively and using every ounce of gunpowder available to me, I was mostly successful at burning down Remnant 2’s most dangerous adversaries while spending as little time as possible dodging their onslaught of attacks.
In endgame builds, when the Gunslinger is combined with a secondary archetype like the close-quarters Challenger, they can use their nigh-bottomless ammo reserves with DPS-focused skills like Rampage to become a mob-slaying machine that’s sure to leave even bosses shaking in their wicked boots. As someone who gets a kick out of spending hours buildcrafting to squeeze every last drop of DPS out of my character, the Gunslinger had me positively salivating, and I can’t wait to play more.
We’ll have much more on Remnant 2 as our exclusive IGN First coverage continues all March long!
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