RemiLore: Lost Girl in the Lands of Lore Review – Lost in a Land of Bore (PS4)

RemiLore: Lost Girl in the Lands of Lore is a rogue-lite hack-and-slash game set in a colorful, magical world. It has procedurally generated levels so while this technically means that you should have a unique experience every time you play, the reality is that the gameplay is so shallow that it quickly becomes overly repetitive.

The game’s story is very simple; Remi is a high school student who is cleaning in the library when she accidentally bumps into a table. This wakes up a mysterious talking book, called Lore, who upon awaking, accidentally casts a teleportation spell which sends the two of them to another world.

Ragnoah is a magical land that has been invaded by mecha-monsters. Unfortunately for Remi, the only way to get back home is to fight her way through this land until she reaches a magical portal. The story is so painfully mundane that it’s hard to resist the urge to just skip through all of the story scenes. I forced myself to sit through them but you really aren’t missing out on anything if you do decide to give them a miss.

Remi and Lore constantly chitchat to each other. They seem to have a random assortment of things that they can discuss in each level and this leads to some of the topics getting repeated. I had one level were Remi kept constantly expressing her amazement about how they can breathe even while they are so high up, her constant astonishment even after Lore kept explaining the same thing over and over made her come across as quite bird-brained and annoying.

Hack-and-Slash

Let’s face it, a good story isn’t always necessary. As long as the gameplay is good then who needs a story, right? Well, unfortunately this is where the game disappoints yet again. The combat is really shallow.

You’ll be controlling Remi and will need to hack-and-slash your way through each procedurally generated level. You can attack and form combos using a combination of two buttons, and you can also cast magic – the spell depends on the weapon you have equipped. There’s no real depth to any of this though.

Once you’ve figured out the best angle to attack these creatures at, and mastered the art of dashing out of the way of enemy attacks, then you’ve pretty much learned everything you need to know. Fighting your way through level after level is just not particularly fun and soon feels like a bit of a slog.

Every room you enter will spawn a number of monsters that all need to be destroyed before moving on to the next room. There aren’t that many different types of enemies though, you get ones with ranged attacks, melee attacks, and tower things that shoot balls of energy at you or have buzz saws attached to them.

Occasionally you’ll come across a mid-level boss, these can be a little bit trickier to take down but only due to a larger health bar. You’ll still take them out in pretty much the same way as regular monsters. At the end of each act there will be a big boss fight which provides a little bit of much needed diversity. The bosses have some very pretty monster designs, but still aren’t particularly challenging to take down.

Treasure Trove

You get given a rating after defeating each set of monsters. This is based on how quickly you took them out, the length of your combo chain, and how much damage you took. Getting high rankings in each room will influence the number of chests you get rewarded with at the end of the level.

Treasure chests can contain a variety of things but the majority will contain weapons. There are six different weapon classes and they all handle slightly differently. For example, one-handed swords are quick but have low damage, whereas giant hammers can inflict huge amounts of damage but are incredibly slow, which leaves you vulnerable to enemy attacks.

There are over 200 different weapons to find and the majority of them are visually very different. There are swords shaped like umbrellas and saucepans, as well as some really random things like gauntlets holding handfuls of poop.

The Proof is in the Pudding

As you destroy enemies and objects in a room they will drop loads of desserts. These sugary delights act as the games currency and can be used to buy upgrades. If you die at any point then you’ll have to start at the beginning of that act, but you do at least get to keep any upgrades that you’ve unlocked.

You can improve your spells, as well as increasing the quality of weapons you’re likely to find, or the amount of HP that potions restore. It would have been nice if you could have unlocked more combo attacks or anything that gave the combat a little bit more depth.

Once you finish the story with Remi, which will only take a few hours, you will unlock new game plus. This enables you to play through the game under certain conditions, for example, a nightmare mode which gives you only 1 HP and no ability to heal. You can also play through with a different character and a new story that follows on from Remi’s. Unfortunately, it’s no more interesting than the first story.

If you want, you could play through the game with a friend by using the local co-op mode, although this brings me on to a really bizarre game design element. The game only has one save file for all the different modes. This means that if you’ve started to play the story mode but then wanted to switch to co-op then you’d have to delete the story save and start from the beginning. It is really odd that the game doesn’t allow you to have more than one save at a time.

I really wanted to like this game more than I do. It looks very pretty and there’s a large range of weird and wonderful weapons to collect, but sadly that’s about all it has going for it. The story is dull, the combat is bland, and it just feels really repetitive. Overall, it’s not a very challenging game and is unlikely to hold your attention for long.

RemiLore: Lost Girl in the Lands of Lore review code provided by publisher. Version 1.01 reviewed on a standard PlayStation 4. For more information on scoring, please read our Review Policy here.