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.
The first two games are true rough gems with reasonably sized open worlds and a somewhat dark and sarcastic sense of humor. Gothic 3 is NOW a good game, but it is not what the fans expected. The release state was terrible and made the game unplayable - therefore the bad reviews online from that time. The GOG version now includes all the official and unofficial patches and it makes the game well, with minimum amounts of bugs and glitches. But about the game itself. The graphics are solid and even now the world looks ok, though you can see the age of this game. The majority of the quests are just "go there", "kill him", "bring this" with some interesting quests now and then and some very difficult ones without a wiki. The melee combat system is not good and is a dumbed-down version the previous ones and the reason why I give it just 4 stars. It is just bad. The ranged combat is a lot better and it is actually great! The world is now huge. Or was considered huge at the time, still it is probably smaller than something like Skyrim but it is a really impressive world with a lot of caves, dungeons and hidden areas to find and explore. The best loot cannot be just found by some creature or in a specific cave but requires you to find more chests of a specific type (old for mages or heavy for fighters) and with each additional chest you get a noticeably better gear up to the "legendary" items. A solid strength is its over-the-top voice acting. German voice acting is occasionally so bad it is amazing and the English one is just solid (main protagonist voiced by Crispin Freeman [e.g. Itachi Uchiha]). The music is just amazing and the sound design is great, though not perfect. Overall the game offers plenty of fun, a big open world, solid RPG system, great ranged combat and below-average melee combat. Maybe worth it without a sale but totally worth on sale! Also, it has educational value for language learners as it offers plenty of voiced lines in different languages.
