ELEX

I love the Gothic & Risen PB games; played Risen 3 for the 4th time few months ago, was playing Gothic 3 (with CPT patch) for the 6th time when Elex came out. If you love those PB games, you should love Elex. I bought this with some trepidation due to neg reviews, so glad I did! Is it hard - yes. Just like those earlier PB games, you start out with no armor and a crappy weapon, and you promptly get your butt kicked by wildlife. Remember those scavengers -- here they look like giant dodos, but still the same. Do you miss snappers -- they're back with a new name & new skin, but still just as friendly. Are you good at lockpicking in R3 -- exactly the same system here. I almost expected to stumble across an Orc calling me a Mora! I played this game for 8 straight hours after install, spent 3 hours exploring before reaching the first city. Stuff hidden everywhere (use the jetpack!) & still using the rusty axe I found near the start! Much of the criticism I've read deals with graphics & performance. Some people have the latest processor that can launch a space shuttle and the shiniest $2000 graphics card, which they replace every 6 mos., and want a game that exploits all that power, so they are disappointed that Elex does not. I play with a 7-year old processor (i7 920) and a 3-year-old GTX 950, and I have no FPS drops, no problems. (All the graphics are set to High, except render which was set to Medium.) It plays smoothly with no crashes (so far). I'm so glad they made a game that can be played on my older system. There are some funky graphics where the pommel of a sword may sprout out of an NPC wrist while talking, or you reach forward to pick up something and grab what was behind you. And as usual, the weapons seem to be magnetically attached to the NPC or player. One annoyance -- viewing your map or inventory uses your wrist tech gadget, and in the Berserker town, they all shout "forbidden technology put that away" every time! I gotta go play!

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.

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.

A game with a lot of choice and exploration. The world building is really good and the quests can have really unexpected results. The biggest problem is just the jankiness. The combat mechanics are awful. No other to put it. The controls suck and are unresponsive. This is no elden ring, which already had some flaws. But thankfully the devs added grenades, which are esssentially an in-game pay to win scheme where I throw 15 to end any battle. But for those flaws, the story is engaging and interesting, and discovering the lore is a super rewarding experience. The faction dynamics are deep and complex, and nothing is black and white. If you like story based games and deep worlds, give this one a try

I really wanted to like this game, as I'm a long time fan of Piranha Byte, but I simply cannot. Even ignoring the ten year old graphics, the abysmal dialogues and the clunkiest combat animations this side of the galaxy, the game remains terrible. I tend to like difficult games, for example I really enjoyed Nioh. The character there responded instantly to controller input though, making hard challenges rewarding and fun. In Elex, on the other hand, you move a wooden character who moves veeery slowly and is instantly exhausted, every single encounter is a major PITA. Maybe my mistake was to choose the "difficult" level, but at level 8 my weapon DID NOT DAMAGE AT ALL enemies near my level (no skull next to their name). Level 9, better weapon, now I can deal some minor damage to basic critters that ravage me any time they hit. Considering that they are much faster, can hit several times in a row while I'm exhausted if I so much as perform one roll and one light attack, I still have to rely completely on my follower to deal any damage, and I'm really fed up with this. Did they playtest the game before release? Is "normal" the only level one is supposed to play? Did they not realize just how bad the combat system is, with second-long lags between one keypress and the corresponding move? Whatever the answers, I really cannot recommend Elex to anyone. And please bear in mind that I did love Gothic and Risen games.