ELEX II

Elex 2 is a technical marvel. For a team of 30ish people to create a game on this scale in a completely in-house engine, with this graphical fidelity, in which you can literally soar along through the sky like Iron Man with no loading screens, is a truly amazing feat. It's a pity they sacrificed everything else that mattered in order to pull it off. PB's desire to break into the mainstream and compete with AAA titles has resulted in further and further watering down of their games, ultimately leaving us with titles that will please nobody -- too generic and poorly balanced for core fans, and never going to be polished enough for average gamers. Here are some of the problems with Elex 2: - Very little personality/charm/humour -- staples that held together the messes that were Risen 2 and 3 - Stats like str/con/int etc. increase your damage/health by such a tiny amount as to be functionally meaningless, despite promises from the devs. I'll put it in perspective: to double your damage with an end-game weapon, you would need to invest all stat points in strength for about 850 level ups in a row -- you will finish the game around level 40. - The world is about 6x bigger than it needs to be, resulting in lots of generic nothingness. Enemies respawn everywhere so you don't actually need to explore to level up. There is very little by way of interesting loot, other than fuel upgrades for your jetpack, which admittedly are very fun to find while they last - Unfortunately, in one of the most self-destructive game design decisions I've ever seen, they severely limited the amount you can upgrade your jetpack so that you will cap it out by early/mid-game -- you won't be able to fly the way you can in the trailer, and without the incentive of finding fuel, exploration starts to feel pointless - Magic/2-handers don't work with jetpack, so you will always end up using 1h weapons regardless of build - Magic balancing is awful - oh no I'm out of characters to complain with

So after a few hours of playing, I'll give you a little review here. So far I really like Elex 2, as expected. Of course, the shortcomings in terms of graphics cannot be overlooked. The landscapes are well done and there is once again a lot to explore and discover. However, the faces and their animations are really not that good, to put it diplomatically. Especially the faces of children (yes, they exist now, a first in a Piranha Bytes game) look terrible in parts... But otherwise the presentation has really progressed, despite the somewhat dusty engine. A large part of the negative reviews here and on other platforms result from the, also in my eyes, weak design decision to place the camera too close to the player character. I don't really like that either. But overall I really like the game so far and it has made good progress in many areas, especially the battles are now much smoother than in the predecessor, although there are still some clunky moments here and there. I hope that Piranha Byte will improve here and there, which I strongly suspect. But even so, I give it an absolute thumbs up, especially for players who already liked the predecessor. Thank you Piranha Bytes, I'm looking forward to playing your game again and that's the best thing you can say about a game :) Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

This game is in really bad shape at this moment and devs dont care about gog community and patches so better wait few months for patch and think twice before you buy it.

Elex 2 offers some improvements over Elex 1 - the combat system is more fluid and namely melee combat feels significantly better, more agile, and more on par with soulsborne games or The Witcher 3 though it still feels less polished than these major titles. The major issue of Elex 2 comes in writing in general - side quests, main quests, story-related dialogue and the story itself is just... I don't want to say "bad", so I'll settle with "not good". It is below mediocre but not THAT bad. However, because of the generally low quality of writing, the game feels unfinished, like if all these dialogues and stories were just placeholders. To give you an example of a super generic and annoying main quest - at one stage you will have to defend three major camps from enemies and you will have to kill about three large groups of enemies near each camp. This comes AFTER you are forced to go through two "different" dungeons that are technically the same and contain the same enemies. This part can take about 2 hours, I think, and you can probably see the problem right-away. Unlike Gothic 1 or 2 or Risen 1, this game should have taken only about 20 hours to complete, not 35-40 hours of stretched content. They really should have left it there and encouraged players who liked the game to try a different built - e.g. dex-based instead of strength-melee or even magic built with the Berserkes. Instead of that, I forced myself to finish the game and endured the last 7 hours of main quests and somewhat enjoyed about 7 hours side-quests. Otherwise, it has some standard PB issues. I can only recommend it if 1) you enjoy Pyranha Bytes games, 2) it's at least 60% discounted to 20 EUR/USD, and 3) you have nothing better to do.

Elex 2 started out seemingly just as much fun as Elex, but after a couple of dozen hours into the game the realization has finally sunk in -- they took out the most intruiguing part of the game, which was the wonderful, varied, eminently explorable world, and replaced it with a pale imitation of that world. Gone are the different terrains. Gone are the fantastic buildings to explore, replaced by generic, repetetive clones, and not many of them. Oh,sure, some of the locations are similar, and I eagerly run to them, hoping to revisit one of my favourite places, but but this time they're just watered down and much smaller, as if we'll just forget how great they were in the first game. The passage of a few years doesn't explain where all the buildings have gone, or why they shrank, or where all the rooms went. And I think the overall map size has been shrunk, too. It's ostensibly the same map, but you can run across it in about ten minutes. The cliffs aren't as high, and the terrain is flatter everywhere. On my laptop the game runs perfectly, and I've had no issue with the camera angles. No crashes, either, and only a few visual clitches. The gameplay is pretty much the same as all PB games, and it's fun enough, but for me, Elex 2 has had all the wonder leached out of it. It makes me want to load up another game of Elex.