Posted on: May 6, 2019

MrMuggles

Games: 302 Reviews: 2

Just as frustrating as it is engaging

Whether you would enjoy the game or not, will depend on how much its shortcomings will ruin the experience for you. This is not a game which takes you by the hand, but throws you into a world, where things will just kill you. But combine that with unresponsive controls, some weird UX choices and a couple of bugs and glitches (not game breaking though) and you are in for a ride, which is just as frustrating, as it is engaging. You will get used to saving and reloading a lot. Be it because some overpowered creep comes out of nowhere and kills you in one hit. Some creature that has been following you kills all the NPCs around, rendering you unable to finish a quest. You accidentally hit an NPC instead of the monster attacking him and and he now turns hostile towards you. You want to talk to a trader, but accidentally select the axe lying in front of him, which means you steal it and everyone starts attacking you. If that doesn't turn you off and you can cope with the sluggish combat system, then you might still enjoy an otherwise excellent RPG. A big open world to explore (with a jetpack!). Multiple ways of solving quests with different outcomes. An interesting mix of sci-fi and fantasy. Different factions with different play styles. Hours of exploration and replayability. But beware: this game might turn you off, before you start enjoying it.

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Posted on: June 9, 2021

OGBear

Verified owner

Games: 295 Reviews: 1

Good, but with some fatal flaws.

This was a solid 4 to 4.5 star game until I got to the final boss. Very rarely do I quit and delete a game before finishing, but this was just too much frustration to be fun anymore. Even dropping everything down to the easiest levels, the final boss battle is just too difficult to be enjoyable. Surrounded by enemies, constantly being knocked down so you can't recover, and when you restart from the autosave, you have to spend a few minutes trying to skip through all of the end boss monologuing. I wasted a full day trying different tricks and combos. Nope, the battle is still stupidly broken. Congrats to everyone who did manage to finish this game. I'm glad I got this game at such a steep discount, so I can say that the time spent prior to the final boss was worth the money. But not being able to end the game unless I chug some Jolt Cola and de-age myself back to my twitchy 11 year old self is not how I want to spend my free time. As to the rest of the game: Being forced to choose to align with a competing faction even though there is the theoretical possibility of forming your own was annoying. The game pretends to give you choices, but you are mostly railroaded. You can roam around freely, but doing things out of order can have a serious impact on the game, and could possibly even break it if a key NPC accidentally gets killed by a critter in the environment when they were barely on your area map. Save frequently with several saves if you don't want to risk having to lose dozens of hours of game play because of this.

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Posted on: October 20, 2017

Vizera

Games: Reviews: 17

No, it is nothing like Gothic 1 or 2.

Within a few hours of release there were plenty of gushing reviews proclaiming this to be a "spiritual successor" or otherwise on par with the original Gothic games. Let me assure you that is not the case at all, unless you are referring to Gothic 4 Arcania, in which case you would be spot on. This looks and plays like a 10 year old console game, and has all the issues one would expect from one. Awful UI, bad graphics, clunky controls and animations, simplistic 1click combat with "zomygawd combo!!!", tiny maps etc, etc. The voice acting is horrible but that is almost a none issue as no voice actor could make this atrocious writing bearable. I seem to recall an interview with some developer boasting about hundreds of quests, but when those largely consist of poorly disguised and badly written fetch quests, i hardly consider that a point in the games favor. In short, this is following the trajectory PB has been on since the first Risen failed to meet their sales expectations, with each new installment getting progressively worse.

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Posted on: November 28, 2017

AAChaoshand

Games: 150 Reviews: 3

The Definition of 2017 Developers

This game stands on its own as a pillar of what developers are doing with games these days. Elex is a game that is similar to Skyrim and Gothic in being open world yet the quests are bugged, fail to deliver, and leave you unimpressed. Elex starts off with you crashing and forgetting things while having periodic flashbacks. The graphics, cranked up all the way, look absolutely horrid on the characters while the scenery isn't as bad. For a game released in 2017, I have to wonder where the production time went. Combat is a complete mess. The first few levels you are barely staving off animals in the forest. For a supposed fighter, he can't handle himself at all. It isn't even the characters fault but more the fact that combat is so unforgiving and rediculous you can't accomplish anything. I'm not talking Dark Souls hard where it requires skill, I'm talking about hoping to land a hit with the terrain not getting in the way, the animal not dodging while you continue to flail needlessly unable to stop, and assuming you connect with the hit box, actual damage is done. The conversations in the game are long, drawn out, and seem to ramble on about nothing. I got tired of listening to the first guy you meet talk about useless crap. Backstory is nice but I don't need his whole life's experience about nothing. Additionally, the quests are occasionally bugged and vague. It's nice to have goals but how about something that makes sense and not "go talk to the apprentice that needs a bow but happens to have one on his back"? Elex is the epitome of bad. The controls are bad, the camera is bad, the story could be interesting but is busted, quests are bugged, combat is bad, and the graphics, other than the terrain, are bad. Uninspiring and typical of this developer. From now on, they are on my black list.

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Posted on: April 21, 2018

mdostal

Verified owner

Games: 84 Reviews: 2

Unfortunate...

Unfortunate, that's the best word to describe this game. Had a great deal of potential, it really did, but it was squandered away on a sub par product. This game was death by a thousand paper cuts. The story itself was great, well paced, and interesting. Unfortunately, it was horribly buggy, such as when it decided that I really should't be able to shoot my gun anymore during combat (you have to put it away and re-draw it to be able to shoot in those situations). Picking up items was also a bit less then stellar. If you aren't positioned in the right way around them, you don't even know you can pick something up. The option is not there. The mini-map is not that, just a radar that shows you where things may be on a black background. You don't know what time it is, ever! In a game that has battle robots, you cannot find out whether it is morning, afternoon, evening, or, in some places, night. I know what you'd say, night is when it's dark, well, normally you'd be right, but not in this case. Dialogue is wooden, and not just from my character. You stop noticing it after a while, but at first it hits you like a bad high school play (to be fair, many high school plays were actually a bit better). Graphics leave a great deal to be desired. I mean, there is no reason why these should look barely better than what I used to play on my old PS2. Did I mentioned that during many of the longer fights, like with the final boss, my gun would just stop shooting? At first I thought that whatever I was fighting just paralyzed me or something, but no, it was just the game glitching. Overall, the game had so much potential, and it was all squandered one annoyance at a time. I'd say don't bother with it unless you can get it for less than $20. Anything else and you overpaid.

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