Posted on: October 30, 2018

wisewolfs
Verified ownerGames: 217 Reviews: 10
Sour wine in old bottles.
This text is written with a few months of distance. Elex is a direct successor to the Gothic / Risen games, utilizing pretty much the same techniques at story telling, world bulding and character progression. Elex basically suffers from being outdated in almost every aspect. While quite a few reviewers praise that as being "oldschool" or "true to the spirit" it's basically really just the inevitable result of trying to compete with the current wave of open world games. The Good: The world is rather well crafted, you can see that they tried to supplement the overall experience by telling little stories via the environment. Walking around, trying to explore is fun. The bad: The GRAPHICS are... okayish. The world is colorful, the textures are fine, although the rough terrein geometry speaks volumes about the aging rendering engine holding everything together (used in Gothic, then, Risen, then Elex). But the animations are horrible. What really left me speechless is the fact that they used THE SAME SMOKING ANIMATION FROM GOTHIC 1! And yes, it already did look awkward back then! Even worse, NPC models are reused so frequently. The MUSIC is neither standing out in terms of good or bad. It's just there. The VOICE ACTING is plain horrible, no matter if you play in English or German. Especially the protagonist just makes your eyes roll. The NARRATIVE feels worth digging into, but unfortunately due to the uninspired WRITING you won't feel very invested in finding out about the world or the NPC inhabiting it. Unfortunately people are as shallow as a mud puddle. The quests involve a lot of running back and fro, basically reducing it to fetch item / find person with intermittent, frequent combat situations. The COMBAT / SKILL PACING... is what ruins the game. Pacing is horrible. After hours of gameplay, you still are reduced to run away from almost everything, spamming arrows from elevated positions. The game lacks flow and immersion. It's a dull experience.
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In ELEX, you join the war over a powerful resource that gives people great magic-like powers but turns them into indifferent cold creatures. You decide if emotions and humaneness or cold synthetic logic will rule the world of Magalan.




