ELEX

A relief to play a newer game with decent story-telling. - Good characters. - Well-structured quests. I'd complete a side-quest, casually make the choice at the end, and be rewarded with loot and the message, "This will change the story." Resulting in me waking up and immediately trying to remember wtf did I actually do in that mission, and pondering whether I should load a save and re-do it. - World-design (hyped as "hand-crafted") is superb. Great fun to explore. - Combat is absolutely terrible, though. It's like they wanted to bring Dark Souls combat to a sandbox RPG but had no idea how to balance character progression with damage dealt. Quick-save often, because even the smallest creatures can stun-lock you to instant death. #PiranhaBytes never changes... - The loot, though plentiful, is tiny. Without the sunglasses to highlight loot (they can be found or purchased from merchants), you'll miss 75% of everything. - Voice-acting is meh. Could be worse, but could be better. - I get that re-used character models are common in a game of this size, but outside of squaddies there are barely a half-dozen faces in the game. I picked it up for $20 last December. Considering the games that can be purchased much cheaper than that, I over-spent. Worth $10-12, maybe $15 at most. Consider that there is no DLC (just the soundtrack can be purchased) and the game as offered is otherwise the complete package. Enjoy the spectacle, the world, and the stories. A throw-back to the old days of RPGs, but not a flawless throw-back by any means. I wanted to give it 4 stars, but that combat... I had to fight the game to finish it. That ultimately hurts its score.

Some people are comparing it to Gothic but it is no where near that level. In Elex a burnt out turkey you find just in the staring area can kill you in an instant in Ultra difficulty. Gothic didn't have a foolish difficulty system which means they could do proper enemy placement and better level design. They intelligently put juvenile animals in the start, and tough enemies in difficult to reach locations. But in Elex you have to worry about a 1000 other things when fighting. Your stamina which keeps running out in the middle of a combo, staggering enemy attacks, rolling and evading, combos and special attacks with separate meters. It is unacceptable that a studio that constantly got bashed for bad combat systems still went ahead and made an even worse combat system. This is apart from all the immersion breaking issues. Why Beserkers don't care when I have a companion who is an Alb flying all over the city? aren't they suppose to be mortal enemies? In Gothic 2 if you go into a house in the harbour city people will drive you out but if you come back as a town guard they will not dare attack you. in the expansion, go to a bandit camp wearing the wrong armour and you are dead. Also why can't I take weapons from enemies? That is one of the things that made Gothic amazing, if you can beat a tough enemy their powerful weapon is yours. I truly don't understand how a studio that had that level of attention to detail based on the realism of old school RPG's like Ultima 7 devolved into making generic games. I don't think PB is getting enough feedback on their negatives or positives but I guess it is the gamers fault since they need to make financial decision based on what would appeal to most people.

I dont understand this studio. Another interesting RPG bogged down by its awful combat. Something Pirnaha Bytes seems to be getting worse at designing. Gothic 2 was ok, Risen got worse with each installment and now here we are at barely playable. I really hope they spend a little more time on combat in the next game, that or just remove it completely.

If you're feeling that the NPCs don't have.. souls.. emotions... Call it what you will, I just call it boring voice acting... Then I suggest you play this game with german voice over. It's night and day difference. The NPCs with german VO feel like they actually give a damn about what they're talking. They USE emotions, they often have ROUGH voices, in short: they are not boring to listen to and feel like humans instead of talking dummies. That's all, have a good one.

I like Elex a lot but you have to tear through it. And not just in a "it becomes better after x hours", it never becomes better. You start tearing and maybe last couple of hours you feel like a demigod, but the rest of the game is a struggle. I usually don't like artificial difficulty in games and prefer well designed player strength progression over the hell elex puts you in. Here's why i still give it a positive review: The world took me in instantly. It's a mix of science fiction with lazer guns and robots, fantasy knights in armor with swords and magic and mad max on top of that with drugs, raiders, mutants and ruins of a world long gone. I think the world is a hit or miss, either you like it enough to play or it wont work for you and neither will the rest of Elex. Worldmap was definitely made with love. There are four distinct areas, lots of documents and files about the old world, secrets and just neat things to see. If you loved exploring pre war facilities in fallout this is the game to scratch the itch. Whats so hard about it? Game is not fair, imagine starting an mmo in an endgame area: you suck, your weapons suck, you cant take a hit, everyone is using you for fetch quests and your most reliable tactic is to GTFO at the first sight of danger. Once you realize what part of the food chain you are and accept the rules of this world, elex becomes this weird yet captivating game of rising through ranks, slowly earning the power bit by bit. Elex rewards exploration and using everything that you have at your disposal. But it's... well, it feels not done. Like it's being stuck in early access forever. It's playable, it offers a lot of fun, but be warned about the jank.