Everything is in slow motion. Supposedly, there is a way to play it in windowed mode and this fixes it, but I don't see a way to make this happen.
I've played the game for a few hours and died hundreds of times. The devs were targeting a very small, niche market with loosely explanatory descriptions and videos. Were I aware that the player dies on one-hit, I would've passed.
I own this on another platform and love it. I could be wrong, but I believe the story is based on historical events. My review: First: It’s not a swords and spells type game. The closest thing to magic is the alchemy system, which is pretty immersive. You find whatever your ingredients are and mix them together based on recipes you find. You do all the work when making your potions too, picking a base liquid, grinding with a mortar and pestle (if needed), putting ingredients into the pot, boiling, and distilling (if needed). It’s a really interesting system they created. At first, combat feels clunky because it's not a hack and slash type game. If you’re careless or impatient in combat, you’ll get punished. Once you get the hang of combat, it’s really enjoyable and those intense moments are that much more rewarding. I enjoyed the story a lot, the characters were developed well and most were voiced by excellent voice actors(esses). I’m not a fan of inventory management, but it’s kind of expected in a game like this. If your play style is to snatch and grab everything that isn’t nailed down, you’ll never be short on money once you’re able to sell hot items, you’ll just have to stash them until you can. Overall, definitely worth the sale price for the game plus its DLC.
Bonoobo's review is probably the best description of my experience with Elex. Bugs, terrible voice acting for most of the cast, clunky combat, strange difficulty spikes, and terribly slow character stat progression. Although, I'm a little more forgiving and gave the game 3 stars. The game could've used more polish, but it's likely that PB just didn't have the budget to put anymore time into the game.
If it weren't for the bugs, I'd love it. I preordered the game months before release because I had faith that CDPR would not pull the same nonsense as all these other "AAA" companies and release a half-baked game that's too buggy to play. I'm extremely disappointed in the state of the game at release, I would have been content to wait another year if it meant that the game would have had a few more passes to clear bugs. Unfortunately, the game seems like it’s barely into the beta phase of development. To understand my perspective on what beta phase means, here’s a quote regarding testing phases in game development from a book on game design, Players Making Decisions, 2nd Edition by Zack Hiwiller: “Alpha, beta, and gold are terms for sections of the test phase. Alpha is the state of the project when all the features have been completed and the testing stage begins. Beta is the state when the bug count has been reduced to acceptably small levels, but bugs are still incoming. Gold is when the publisher or team decides the game is sufficiently bug free and sends it to the manufacturer (or releases it to partners) to be printed, distributed, or both.” Zack goes on to say that the alpha, beta, and gold terms can have different names in different companies, but the meanings are generally the same. Again, I would have been perfectly OK to wait longer. My PC specs: Win10 Pro I9-9900K RTX 2080 Ti OC 32GB RAM TL:DR- I can’t recommend the game in its current state and would have been alright with waiting longer before release.
