I Shall Remain is an isometric title that features a world in where the Nazis have unleashed a devastating biological attack on the US and the few people that still remain struggle daily against the mutations that now roam the streets. It features three modes to play called Prologue, Story and Survive. I highly suggest going through the prologue first as it not only does a great job of setting up the events that occur in the story mode, but also teaches you the basics. This title is quite unlike anything else out there, it is primarily a mash-up between an ARPG like Diablo and a twin-stick shooter. On top of that, you have survival elements such as managing your fatigue, maintaining and repairing the crummy weapons still left in the apocalypse, and you level up your skills not by stats, but by using them.
There is a lot to take in and before you start it, you may want to set your resolution to 1080p if you are running anything higher as the UI does not scale and you will be spending a lot of time in the menus. In the prologue, we play as CJ Hoges, a solider on a mission to save his brother. He is a very capable person and eases the player into the game as he goes through the city fighting off the undead/infected. There is a plethora of weapons to get your hands on ranging from crowbars to flamethrowers, with each item having their own unique stats making even finding the same weapon an interesting affair. You may think going the melee route is smart to save ammo, and it is, though as mentioned you learn by doing so even if you stock up on bullets your character will have an awful aim if you never use the gun.
You can pause the game to take in the situation but all the action happens in real time. It is much more involved than simply clicking at an enemy until they die, your movement plays a huge role into whether you end a fight without a scratch or not. Learning how to stay out of the reach of an infected strikes is key, and you do go significantly slower trying to move backward. It is rare that you will ever fight just a few mutants, more foes will pop out of the sewer grates, others roaming about will be drawn in by the noise, and it will quickly turn into a full out brawl instead of a small skirmish. They can also run at random which will keep you on your toes and constantly adapting to the fight as it unfolds. All that is before taking the special infected that are slowly introduced throughout your journey into consideration.
It is wise to be proficient in a couple of things whether it be handguns, hand to hand, or rifles to name a few. There is only so much ammo you can carry for each category of weapons and everything will fail you before too long if you rely on it too heavily. You can take apart other items for scrap and use that to fix up the weapons you use. It is an extremely handy skill to improve yourself in via practice, but at the same time, you could be selling those items you just scrapped. The currency in this game is called ‘Serum’, an antidote whose effects temporarily stall your infection. Not only can you buy other services or items with that, as fate would have it you are also infected in the Story mode and require an ever increasing constant supply. It is an interesting struggle of whether you should scrap your stuff or hold it in your limited inventory until you reach a settlement. And yes, you do have a weight limit.
By completing sometimes annoying quests from people that can train you in certain things, you’ll be able to access a secondary powerful attack that coats your bullets in your valuable serum in exchange for causing much more damage. Those quests strike a nerve because for stuff like melee you need to kill 50 infected with a knife. It doesn’t matter if you killed thousands with a crowbar, it has to specifically be a knife and it only starts counting them once you start the quest. The other missions feel just as pointless like doing a certain amount of fire damage or having a certain amount of scrap on you. You still have to pay them a fortune in Serum after completing their filler quests to upgrade your skill rank so it feels pretty unnecessary. It also plays against the infection mechanic. Your infection will increase as the time goes by, even if you are doing nothing, so the last thing you want to be doing is wasting your time doing those despite having the skill expertise and serum to level up that skill’s rank.
Luck and stats play a pretty significant role. Even if you have a shotgun and are right next to a hulking monster the size of a small house, you can still miss thanks to the ARPG aspect of the title. You really need to think about how you want to build your character before things get really rough so you don’t find yourself in a life or death situation, firing off round after round with a weapon you don’t know how to use. Minus the trainer quests bit, this leveling system works really well. Every time you level up, you don’t get to pour points into what you want. Instead there is a perk system which builds up your character’s background, like being able to decide that he was a medic so you get a boost in the relevant stats. You can also spend some points into learning new tricks in the skills you are experienced in, such as those that tinker with weapons being able to be far more efficient with scrap or a scavenger being able to carry more stuff.
Things get a lot more complex if you choose not to fight alone and recruit some fellow survivors into your party. They have infinite ammo, yet their weapons still degrade so you constantly have to be managing their stuff if you want to roll around the city with a huge crew of well-armed comrades. You need to have a good amount of leadership skill to get more than one bloke to follow you, though considering you invest in it, it is a pretty unbalanced feature. If they lose all their health they will be knocked out and simply helping them up will see them right back at it with max health. That means you don’t have to waste health-packs on them and if you properly maintain their weapons, you’ll have a ton of extra firepower at your side for no costs but your time micromanaging them. You can issue commands at them, though far be it from me if I could tell any difference in their behavior, they always shoot any in infected in sight.
With that in mind, the game still isn’t easy, especially if you enter sections of the city that are a much higher level than you. The areas are split up into zones and some have subway stations that serve as fast travel points so you don’t have to walk all the way back to a location. Your infection will go up when using it regardless, so avoiding pointless detours is encouraged. Your adventure takes place across multiple islands and it is quite a massive gameworld to explore. The 1940s atheistic looks great even if the game isn’t all that impressive on the technical front. There is a full day and night cycle, with the nights being very dark indeed. You’ll be lucky to see anything aside from the glowing red eyes of the infected about to murder you. Having a flashlight is important, but batteries in this game last insultingly little and don’t cast all that much light. There is a perk to improve the range of light it shines, though for the battery durability there is nothing.
This leads me into the topic of how glitchy this title is. It runs terribly, it crashes often, and experiences a whole slew of issues for those not running Windows 7. Normally you would have been able to simply purchase some batteries with your serum, but the inventory menu for anything other than your character will never open up. You won’t be able to see a merchant’s wares, you won’t be able to see what is in a locker, therefore, failing a quest since you need something from in it, and will have other problems down the line. Sometimes your AI teammates won’t fight at all, every-time lightning strikes and lights up the area the game will hitch for a few seconds, as well as more mishaps than I’d care to mention. I don’t have a Windows 7 machine to test it out on, yet as someone that mainly plays indie games and retro titles, it is impressive that a game released in 2015 featured far more problems than anything in recent memory.
I could handle most of that, the real nail in the coffin came in the saving system. There is no manual saving, instead it will save at random or whenever you exit an area. Not only is it annoying to exit a settlement, then go back in to make sure it saves, it is a fatal mistake with how much the game crashes and how buggy it is. At one point my party and I found ourselves fighting off waves of infected as they were attracted to the noise of an alarm someone set off when they saw us. It was an awesome battle, you had a flamethrower loving priest scorching swathes of the infected, gunfire roaring all around from my other less cool none flamethrower having teammates, and we were being overwhelmed despite mowing down countless amounts of them. Half of us eventually fell and since it was night, not to mention the number of corpses littering the floor, we couldn’t find and help them back up. Few of us remained near the end, I threw my last flare… and then the game crashed.
Not only did we lose all of the loot that dropped, but the mission didn’t actually start up again even if it was still in our quest log. We simply walked on through the empty streets and moved right on without any epic battle. At least our health, flares, and everything else we wasted during the fight was back, though calling it anti-climatic would be an understatement. So many moments like these could have been avoided if they simply allowed manual saving instead of relying solely on auto-saving. After 14 hours filled with having to replay sections of the game, I was done. I did not finish this title and so is understandably not worth being called a review to some. The worse part is, this is a legitimately good game. Great even. It has a decent story, the mish-mash of genres somehow ended up working brilliantly together, and it is filled to the brim with content.
It even has a third mode called survival in where you try to survive for ten days against an ever-increasing horde of zombies as a new character. Leveling up by that trial of fire is an awesome feeling as you turn this level one character into Rambo in a short amount of time through brutal fighting. You can recruit any of the main game’s party members and shockingly enough, the inventory system properly works in this mode for some reason, meaning you can buy stuff. You are stuck to a single map, though with the amount of killing you’ll be doing, you’ll be drowning in goodies if you manage to survive through the night. And then that too crashes then you find yourself having to start a night over once you boot the game back up. Curious by then, I downloaded it on two other PCs to see if it was a problem with my main computer. There was no noticeable difference. All the PCs tested on had different Nvidia GPUs using different drivers, and all ran Windows 10. Which of the two factors was the problem I do not know, but I’m betting on the latter.
I have gone on for a while about its flaws, but most of them are of the technical nature, aside from the save system. These can be fixed and you’d end up with an incredibly fun hidden gem of a title. It is sad to see that Scorpious Games was so quick to abandon I Shall Remain, with its last patch being a month after it released and then they moved on to another project. If it is ever fixed this would be a game I’d recommend in a heartbeat, though in the current state it is in, you would do well in avoiding it from what I experienced of it, especially for Windows 10 users.
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