ELEX

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.

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!

I really liked the Gothic series and open-world RPGs in general, so I thought I give this game a try. I´ve played it for many hours now and it's time for a review, but mainly in order to warn others not to waste their mony. First impression was: this game is hard. I died as soon as I stepped outside the door, literally. So I thought, ok, this is an open world game, you need to learn yourself where you can go and where you can't. So I learnt that I could not go anywhere at all. Then I thought, I just need to get more levels and some decent equipment and it'll get better. So I somehow made my way through, dying all the time, running for my life from everything, until I joined a faction and got some decent armor and weapons. But still, I died as soon as I stepped out the door. So I finally turned all the difficulties down (the game has even several options for this), and tried with the easiest setting possible. Guess what.. I die as soon as I step out the door. After many hours I have come to the conclusion that it has nothing to do with levels or equipment, but this game is simply awfully balanced. Add a few bugs including quest stoppers (a person needed to complete a quest simply disappeared by falling into the ground right in front of me, maybe some clipping problem), and what remains is just another Gothic clone gone wrong. Pity because it looked promising. It might have been great with more development time, but in this state, the game is not ready for release. Balancing, fighting system, mini-games and bugs still need some major work done. So I hate to say it, but don´t waste your time and money.

The main thing I can say about this game is that it's best played with an open mind. Throw out your preconceptions of what you think a good open-world RPG is and just try it out. You might actually like it. But definitely pick it up on sale. I haven't played the Gothic games before, but from what I've heard they have that strange awkwardness and clunkiness that is also present in ELEX. It was hard to get used to at first. The dialogue between characters seemed contrived and forced. The melee combat was certainly no dark souls and is bound to piss a lot of players off. The plot wasn't exactly compelling or unique. After pushing through the first few hours, none of that really mattered to me though. ELEX has a beautiful, vast world that is a lot of fun to explore and actually rewards exploration. The areas seemed to all be varied and unique, and it suprised me that a small team was able to create a landscape and environment with very minimal repetition and a surprising amount of intricacy. This was one of my favorite features of the game. Once I accepted the fact that I wasn't playing one of the more modern RPGs that tries to outdo its predecessors in every way possible with a massive budget, I really started to enjoy ELEX. Give it a chance. You will either hate it and never play it again, or it will start to grow on you when you realize you can't play many other modern RPGs that are this strangely flawed. It kept me coming back to see the game fully completed, and although I will probably be moving onto another game now, I will probably replay it in the future and enjoy entering a different faction with another build. The replayability in this game isn't limitless, but it's at least worth a solid 1-2 playthroughs for the experience.

Gothic had orcs and dragons, Risen had pirates and monsters. ELEX has beserks fighting with axes and magic, alongside clerics being hightech robot fanatics, next to anarchists (or raiders in terms of Fallout) doing dirty weapons, battling psycopath junkies with air vessels. Gothic (not counting 3/4) was mostly a green world, Risen mostly Carribean sea. ELEX has a European-style national park, a freezing arctic, a dusty desert, a lava world with hexagon cliffs. At some point in the map, all those harsh borders come together in a few square meter. So we end up fighting, as a cold-turkey junkie, allied with raiders, fighting bit robots with a bow and arrows – successfully! – next to an icy hole in the desert. You try go out into the world, carefully, just to notice that close-combat really sucks since it completely drains the stamina bar within a very few, weak hits, just to notice that a bow does the job without that penalty from a safe distance, and that you better should be doing boring quests anyway, since XP rewarding is imbalanced as hell. DON'T STEP OUT before level 15 or so, really. The world serves little but garbage and monsters, it takes some time to notice we are really just out for a bunch of ELEX potions. Forget about secret weapons, treasures, it's an empty world, nothing like Fallout 3+. Ah, and there is no HP value you can see, but spending skills requires you to solve linear equations to see how to proceed, despite not having a clue what's relevant anyway. The game tries hard to present a lot of world and story, yet if fails to do any thing sufficiently good. For a short amount of time, it feels enjoyingly a bit like Fallout (in the desert, next to the raiders). Music is good, speakers are as well. But other than that, I found it disappointing and hard to play through.