ELEX

I play with normal difficulty settings and like in the old gothic titles sprinting is your best friend in the dangerous environment around the cities. At the beginning almost any monster can defeat you with ease but you can run away and search the world for riches and quests. But first you should do as much questing as possible in the the city of the beserkers (edan) to gain a few levels. I was after the long shot (clerics with psi-powers) so I had to run a lot :) But now at lvl 35 it`s payback time! The gfx are not top notch, but the design is at times beautiful, its handcrafted and the fun to explore world is quite big. Quests are o.k.; some fetch quests but also some original good ones. Fighting: not the best system but also not the worst; you have to get used to it and a lot of enemies together can be a problem. On the other hand there are strategies on your disposal to work around this fact (jet-pack). If you want a challenge and the satisfying feeling to build up a character from noob-status to uber-god, then maybe you should try it out. For me its a five-star game, cause its been awhile since I had so much joy in a game.

The idea of a post apocalyptic scenario with guns and middle-aged weapons is great. But thats all for me. The bad things are to many: 3 crashes in four hours, technical issues (framedrops, animation problems during cutscenes) and foremost: bad balancing. I get it, that enemies should prevent you froma ccessing areas of the map too early, but if an enemy can kill you with a threey-combo, isn't marked as "over bad-a** Skull type enemy too tha max", but as a killable one, there is maybe something wrong. More wrong is, when such an enemy gives you for killing only 5xp. The consequence for that: Im not caring for animals anymore. No matter which one. xp gaining with enemies is bullcrap. Totally. They force you into questing and far away from exploring with such a decision. The menue is another issue for me: it seems bad and unorganised. Half of my playtime is searching for stuff i I need (overdrmatized). And if you want to sell stuff? Better look for it again! Now there are other tabs! Great...really great... Could be a good game, if they fix the issues. Since they aren't fixed, they are no issues, the're wanted. So im done with it.

You may as well leave the porch light on for Harold Holt if you're waiting for these guys to remake Gothic 1/2. They did it with Risen 1, the rest have been garbage. Elex has two debilitating problems due to poor design and execution. The result is that PB has finally torn their legacy, and they will not be able to rise to those achievements again. We are talking 20 years ago,. They are not the company they were, and do not have enough understanding of their own games to rise to it again. They have some good programmers for a lower tier studio, but their direction is at fault, and these are the same owners who have been pumping out poorly designed games for a long time now. Gothic 1/2 is brilliant, and works so well as the design is self-consistent. Combat is clunky but simple and reliable. Progression through the environment is gated by high level non-scaling enemies. This forces the game along a semi-linear path, and allows for a narrative and a gratifying sense of unfolding exploration. Gothic 3 was an open world bun fight with broken combat, and the later Risen's were a piratey mess. Elex is sold as a return to the roots. The design is now open world, but the open world is littered with high level non-scaling enemies. As a result you can't explore it without getting randomly ganked by some critter. Players get around this at low level by exploiting the AI and running past creatures, and at high level just obliterate them. This is a complete failure of design. It is not fun to kite mobs, and the exploration is just not fun as a result. Any halfway sensible open-world game either gates high level areas, or scales enemies so exploration and progression maintains a satisfying level of challenge. It is beyond me how they could adopt this as a design choice, and I don't think they did. I think they simply took the Gothic 1/2 design, made it open world, and this mess is the result. The design is not self-consistent, and the gameplay is conceptually broken as a result. It's sort of bastard child of Fallout-SkyrimGothic, but these games have grossly dissimilar design choices, and they can't be put together in a manner that is self-consistent or fun to play. The other serious problem is the interminable and unending dialogue. Every little quest requires excessive dialogue, and the characters routinely repeat themselves using slightly different words! I'm not joking. The characterisation is poor, but it never used to matter as it was such a small part of the original games. In this one, these conversations are everywhere - they are unending. Questing is distinctly unenjoyable as a result. You start to dread the conversations! This is a PB game. I thought if they don't totally stuff the combat and just remake Gothic 2, they are sweet. Who would have thought a PB game would be basically unplayable due to interminable dialogue! It is bizarre, and game-breaking. Along with the other design choices, it is a real sad state of affairs. It's pointless now to wait for them to remake G1/G2. It's the past, unfortunately. Level progression is exceptionally slow, but this is secondary to the broken encounter design and the deeply unsatisfying 'combat' of running around creatures. People want to progress past that. If the game world was self-consistent it wouldn't really matter. The combat system comes under a lot of criticism. I agree with the person who said the addition of the stamina bar was unhelpful. It is basically G2 with a stamina limiting your attacks and movements, and it's not an improvement. It appears to be typical PB now, not really having any understanding of whether adding a gameplay element actually adds to the game, and just shoving it in anyway. But hey, this is from the makers of Gothic 3, and the combat system there truly was broken. That wasn't an early release issue, they had 3 years, it's just PB being unable to iteratively progress on their original formula. So much so they break it? Boggle the mind really, but they did. The animation comes under universal criticism. I have no idea why. It is uniformly excellent, especially the creatures. It appears the criticism is they're not mo-capped (or at least not with modern techniques, G2 was mo-capped), but it doesn't really detract too much from it. Finally, the environmental design was chosen deliberately, but it is jarring and non-sensical. It's all a bit fruity and hard to swallow. I guess this was their take on post-apocalyptic high fantasy, and it's a combination that's rarely seen for a reason. Bit hard to believe it, as its so comical.

Piranha Bytes has perfected the formula, running from Gothic 1-3 and Risen 1-3; you are Hero. There are three factions at war, on a continent. You choose with whom to ally. You roam around an incredibly detailed world, with believable characters, with schedules and daily toils. There is a huge, living, breathing world waiting for you to explore it and unfold its riches. It is filled with creatures and NPC's whom will make short work of you, if you're not well-equipped, or skilled enough. You have a jet-pack that allows you to 'fly/float' for a short while, helping you reach those just-out-of-reach cliffs, etc. There is a good enough story, which does not matter as much, due to overall awesome game-play. This is not Skyrim <--- you do not become "Ultimate Badass (tm)" within the first 5 hours of the game. It takes time, dedication and *skill*, this is made by Piranha Bytes, after all. It looks gorgeous and very atmospheric. It is everything you'd expect it to be, if you have played any of the Gothic or Risen -games, with the addition of science fiction and jet-pack.

its amazing how seamless piranha bites mixes different settings. from medieval villages to high tech cities in a world full of green landscapes, rivers, deserts, swords, broken roads and abandoned buildings of a once modern world... in this game you can find the huge immersive beauty of skyrim mixed with laserguns and hightech of a fallout game on a huge and free open world map. i really enjoy it and i have to say its one of the best games i have played in a long time. it keeps me totally addicted and even if its sometimes really difficult to survive, thats also an incentive which motivates me a lot - you have to be creative when killing monster: for example you can drag enemies into other enemies territory so that they fight each other, then you take advantage. you have day and night cycle, people will react in different ways in the night or when u try to steal something (in ultima7 manner), or walk in an npc`s wifes bedroom ;) your answers in dialogues and choices will have real impact on other people (almost like in a dragon age). some of your companions will like your choices while others might disagree. really nice job they did with that game!