Posted on: February 14, 2021

tweduk

Games: 119 Reviews: 10

Enjoyable Open-World RPG

Elex has the Piranha Bytes trademark inverted difficulty curve: very difficult at the beginning, but becomes rather easy once you find the OP guns that stunlock enemies. Even then, you can still get smashed in melee combat if you relent on self-discipline. The RPG rules are fairly familiar to anybody who has played a Piranha Bytes game, where stats gate use of stronger weapons. If you don't meet the requirements, you simply can't use a weapon. I'm not sure if higher stats increase damage dealt by weapons. The world is large and detailed with four distinct biomes. Exploration is worthwhile, and there are a few secret areas to find. Graphically, Elex was not spectucular when it was first released and even less so now. However, it's colourful and easy on the eyes. Voice acting is serviceable. I don't recall it crashing much, if at all, so technically it's pretty good. Whereas many games have a simplistic choice to be made near the end of the game that determines the ending, dialogue choices throughout a given playthrough of Elex are what determine the ending, by essentially shaping the personality of the main character. I don't why I enjoyed Elex so much, but I suppose it has most of what I personally enjoy in a game. As such, I recommend Elex without reservation.

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Posted on: October 2, 2021

jmoose

Verified owner

Games: 41 Reviews: 1

Barely playable.

Mechanically, this game just feels really, really bad. The game is extremely difficult but not due to complex enemy mechanics or anything like that. Mainly because it controls like crap. Also because a lot of the enemies I came across (even near the start) basically do the same damage to you as you do to them, meaning that when you're surrounded or being attacked by multiple ranged attackers, you are often killed faster than you can kill. Dodging just didn't work sometimes even when I had stamina. Bow combat is terrible. I just repeatedly got swarmed by multiple melee based enemies making it basically impossible to pick them all off while avoiding fatal damage. This forces you to make use of melee, magic or guns, making bow-only builds pretty much non viable. Moving around feels sluggish, especially the jetpack which seems to move you forward at about 5 kilometres per hour. Dodging uses so much of your stamina bar that when you're in combat with multiple enemies at once, you basically have to regularly un-lock on and run/fly away just so you don't die. The voice acting and dialogue is mostly hot garbage. The protagonist (who you'll obviously hear more of than anyone else) has pretty atrocious voice acting and a lot of the writing for his dialogue lines is laughably bad. NPC AI is really bad, especially when they're supposed to be protecting you. When I was following Duras near the start of the game, I would be attacked by something while I was maybe 3 metres behind him and he would just keep running. When following someone, if you go a few metres off the road to pick a plant they stop and EVERY TIME you come back towards them they will say something like "Let's keep going!". If you walk more than a couple of metres ahead of a character who is taking you somewhere, they just stop until you walk back into range. There's much, much more I could critique, but this is the max length of a review. So basically, unless mechanics don't matter to you, don't buy this.

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Posted on: October 1, 2018

Ward.530

Verified owner

Games: 141 Reviews: 6

Awesome game with tragic flaws

Had to cut down the legth(VERY much): Great environment, dialogues and the plot lines. It gave me that feeling that old RPGs used to. Combat however is pure nightmare. The game is very poorly done console port from the controls point of view. Implementation of jetpack is horrible. Even with dodge on double-tap disabled, the character dodge rolls on (accidental) multi-tap. Target locking. Another very badly ported feature. When I turned this off, my death rate dropped by half. Suddenly multi-opponent fights were possible. But: In order to jetpack attack you need to manually lock on target (good luck in larger fights), not move too much so that the lock doesn't break, hope that jetpack double tap works and then fly up and press the attack The success rate of succesfully doing this is about 30%. You MUST learn npc attack routines. If you don't you die. A lot. My estimate is that at the end of the game 80-90% of my deaths were caused by controls malfunction. Camera and character turning are not locked. The whole difficulty is centered around midgame+. Be prepared to run from almost every mob in the game until Level 15(20-30 hours) the game. Almost everything will 1- or 2-shot you. Frustration is the word that I would use to describe the difficulty of the game. It's not made to be hard, it's made to be frustrating. Especially coupled with the terrible controls. Dev themselves didn't play or test the game on KB + mouse. Honestly, I am amazed I lasted long enough for this game to start to be playable. This game is a marvelous brilliant gem ..on the bottom of very deep public toilet.

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Posted on: August 3, 2021

Aphelon

Games: 354 Reviews: 4

Their weakest game to start a franchise.

It's a Piranha Bytes game with all it's flaws. A lovable game, that will have some bugs, sometimes frustrating game design and not the most amazing graphics. You will realise the low budget and that there were merely 20-25 people working on that game all the time. Taking that into account, it still has a wonderful world to explore, some Piranha Bytes humor, factions, choices and everything that makes me somehow attrackted to those games. But somehow this one is still the weakest start of a franchise in Piranha Bytes history. If you love their games, you'll probably like this game, but compared to the first Gothic, or first Risen it just falls behind.

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Posted on: December 25, 2020

Bloodrunsclear

Verified owner

Games: 1219 Reviews: 143

Fallout 3 But Colorful and Tough!

I like the Fallout series a lot including the recently 3D adaptations, but there's always been a severe lack of color. Elex has the similar fun of scavenging a fallen world and fighting mutants with laser guns and spiked clubs...but in a GORGEOUS world returning to nature with flowers and trees and nighttime bioluminescent plants. Even the enemies are colorful and creative. This is a lot like Gothic, from the fully voiced characters to the system of winning faction approval and the HARD AS NAILS combat. You have stamina now so now spamming for you. It takes getting used to but it's challenging, not unfair, and when you start improving your stats and getting better equipment you will get that same high that only Dark Souls could previously provide of facing down what was impossible and using what you've learned to turn the tide. The missing star is because there's a serious learning curve here. You can see quest markers on a map but more often than not NPCs give you really vague directions you've supposed to follow up on and make deductions with. Nearly everything can kill you if you drop your guard, especially in the beginning, and you will feel underpowered if you're used to power leveling without trainers. Here you want to learn how to lock pick? You need to find someone who knows how, ingratiate yourself to them, then pay them hundreds of resources to learn the darn skill. Anyone who played Risen or Gothic knows this, but Skyrim players will wonder why they can't magically improve their skills when they have the experience. Nope. Takes money and contacts. But the real stumbling block here is NPC dialogue which goes on way too long and repeats basic info, not being clear about whether what you say to someone will make them mad (that was REALLY annoying) and a couple technical hiccups. But otherwise, it's Gothic with a jet pack. Dig in, have patience, enjoy!

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