ELEX

... but I will try to sum it up in a very short way instead : Hello there all together, after about 2,5 hours I was like "my goodness this game is quite old school, in all kind of ways" after about 7,5 hours I was like "I wish I could refund this game somehow" but then something happened, after about 12,5 hours I was like "okay now somehow it is draging myself into it" after about 20+ hours I was like "I cant stop with it... what time have we got already again ?!" and now I m at about 48+ hours and still counting... There may be a lot of difficulties with this game in the first place, like it is already reviewed by many others, but it rewards you in some kind of way later on, hard to describe, since I m lacking the english skills for that. Greetings all, hopefully this review is a help for somebody else.

Decent time filler. Has some depth to it, but execution is all over the place. Voice acting is sub par, combat system is terrible, the "cold" system is really terrible. Completed the game totally with all subquests. Shows 100 hours, but I had a few nights where I left the PC running. Probably more around 60 hours total. It's ok, but don't expect a high end RPG. This was a testament to my willingness to beat the game so I never want nor need to play it again; that is the only reason why I kept playing. Boring, lackluster, shallow, terrible combat, flat voice actors (like reading a drivers license test), and poor real character growth. One thing it does get right is every action has a reaction. You will not make everyone happy.

Are you interested in an RPG that uses constant exposition to tell its story instead of letting you discover it yourself? Do you want to explore a vast, open world with all the elegant movements of a drunk chicken? Would you like to lay waste to your enemies with well-planned swordplay, then immediately die to a chicken because you didn't parry? Have you ever wanted to work with a deep, intricate skill tree that prevents you from pulling a trigger on a gun until you reach a constitution and strength score of 40? Interested in rising through the ranks of the factions by doing endless fetch quests that send you across the length and breadth of the map? Or perhaps you want to strike out on your own, become the ultimate survivalist, all while being utterly incapable of removing any armor from the heavily armored man you just killed? Then this is the game for you.

TLDR; Played through start to finish once and immediately uninstalled the game afterwards. It had just enough to keep me going until that point, but not enough to make me want more. I'd say it falls squarely into the "we want to make a difficult game first, a fun one second." Difficulty doesn't equal fun. Examina is difficult and yet still fun. Noita is difficult and yet still fun. CDDA is difficult and yet still fun. These games are not fun because of the difficulty, they are fun because the systems within the games are well made and fun themselves. Their difficulty is neither a good thing nor bad thing. It's just one aspect of them. With Elex however, f you stripped the difficulty out of it, there'd be nothing there worth writing home about. Combat is painfully unfun and clunky to boot. Exploration didn't do much for me, and that's mainly because the game didn't have me as engaged in the story or gameplay. The game feels fairly generic to be blunt, and feels like it just went through a checklist of "how to make game that would gain the title of 'hardcore' by a very specific niche of players." - Betrayed MC with a mysterious past? Check - Overly difficult world/poor quest pacing for that "the world doesn't care about you" feeling? Check - Good guys? What's that? Check (no the settlement thing doesn't count, the MC is just as bad as the rest of em(and no, this isn't an inherently bad thing some games do it well) - "It's not bad combat, it gives the game character!" Check This game was made for that one specific niche I mentioned, that's Gothic fans. If you like the game, then cool, I don't though. I've spent a lot of time collecting and playing hundreds of games on various platforms over the years. I can usually overlook many issues games have, but when a game has many things wrong they can come together to elicit not only a negative view from myself, but drive me to even make a review of it, which I almost never do. This one? Nah, pass.

Lots of fun exploring different areas but don't forget to save game often to prevent disappointment due to death and game jankiness. Seek wisdom from seasoned players for strategies for your play style.