ELEX

This game has its flaws, yes, but damn does its soul make up for it. I followed an NPC for 5 minutes after I handed in a quest just so I could see him walk to another NPC and deal with the fallout of my choice in the quest. This is a detail that NO ONE will ever really see, but they had minutes of dialogue just because it made sense! The minor details make this game special, and you can tell the devs cared about this game

The setting and fundamental concept of Elex is good, and the overall structure of the game is not revolutionary. The graphics are good, the scenery is great, and the provision of a jet-pack to allow you to get almost anywhere is a nice touch. Unfortunately, the quest leveling is awful, the combat engine atrocious, the weapon scaling sparse (one weapon in a tier requires DEX 11, the next 33, the next 60), and you will spend 90% of your gameplay time searching for trash mobs you can actually kill to gain experience to level up far enough to have a hope of surviving your current quests, only to be given a new set of quests you are again too low-level to survive with the atrociously clunky and non-cooperative combat system. And that's on "Easy". Having a companion is little help UNLESS you can somehow maneuver your companion into engaging first, otherwise you'll likely be already dead by the time your companion gets around to noticing that you're in a fight. To make matters worse, far too many of the quests either double-cross you or force you to choose between double-crossing someone else, wrecking your faction reputation, or forcing you into courses that will seriously hurt you later in the game. ELEX needs at the very least better-leveled quest difficulty, a better scaling of weapons so that you don't have somehow gain five levels to be able to wield a better weapon, and a combat system that doesn't leave you flailing at air because your target moved while the game was thinking about getting around to starting your swing, or doesn't leave you locked onto a target on the other side of a rock or a wall and unable to switch targets while another casually kills you from behind. Did they play-test this AT ALL before releasing it...? I really tried to give ELEX a fair chance to win me over, but in the end it just wasted my time and pissed me off.

I'm too young to have played gothic 1+2 when they came out but this caught my attention because of the cool setting. Honestly it's the best RPG I've played since New Vegas, the world is fun to explore, the quests are solvable in multiple ways with some allowing you to shape the story depending on your faction, with previous quest decisions tying into them. All around it's really great. However, PB aren't good at making a polished product, there's some dodgy voice acting (in the english release), and the combat is poorly animated despite being mechanically sound. I'd recommend it though if you want something old school or if you're a fan of this developer.

Initially the game is about avoiding combat, because most things just straight up out damage me and have tons of health. Kiting is an option for some of the creatures, but with the long kill times it is very unrewarding. I did try scavenging, but soon discovered that money wont get me very far. Armor, skills, and magic are locked behind climbing the ranks of factions. After exploring and meeting all the factions I discovered that they are the same in the worst sort of way. All the factions are authoritarian, and do not tolerate diversity of thought. They are all about oppression and doing the wrong thing in a blind pursuit of an ideological extreme. Much to their determent, they even lack pragmatism. All the factions need to be opposed, but the game isn't designed to progress without blindly committing to a faction. Without a faction and without a path for progression my time in Elex came to an end.

Elex is basically what would happen if you took Gothic 1 and stretched it out to 5x its size and length. Sounds great at first, until you actually try playing it. The steep learning curve and vulnerability of Gothic worked well because there was a steady progression throughout the game. You knew that some areas and monsters posed minor danger, while others meant sure death. You also knew that if something was out of reach, all you had to do was work for it for a couple of hours. It was clunky, but it made sense. In Elex, that progression is gone. Everything is spread too thin. It took me over 30 hours before I visited all 3 factions, and you need to choose one of these to get decent gear. You spend the first 15-20h as a total pushover. What's worse, there's no rhyme or reason in balancing when it comes to quests and open world. You can find harmless creatures 20m from one-hit-kill beasts. Early quests require you to travel across the entire map. Challenge is fun if it can be overcome in a reasonable time. If it can't, it only causes frustration. Combat is very clunky, often unresponsive. The good thing is it allows you to exploit enemies' braindead AI and large hitboxes, which is often the only way to win a fight early on. Once you get the good gear, the game switches from the punishing difficulty to a walk in the park for most enemies. It only shows how unbalanced it is. This means there's only a short period where combat is somewhat fun. The story and lore are easily the best parts of the game. A mix of sci-fi and fantasy where no faction has all the answers. Even some quests can be fun and offer insight into philosophical and ethical conflicts throughout Magalan. It's too bad they're presented in such a flawed execution. I hope PB will improve one day, but they haven't in 15 years and I'm tired of giving them a free pass. Imagine if Cyberpunk 2077 looked like The Witcher 1 or if Arkane Studios didn't improve their formula since Arx Fatalis. That's PB for you.