TLDR; Played through start to finish once and immediately uninstalled the game afterwards. It had just enough to keep me going until that point, but not enough to make me want more. I'd say it falls squarely into the "we want to make a difficult game first, a fun one second." Difficulty doesn't equal fun. Examina is difficult and yet still fun. Noita is difficult and yet still fun. CDDA is difficult and yet still fun. These games are not fun because of the difficulty, they are fun because the systems within the games are well made and fun themselves. Their difficulty is neither a good thing nor bad thing. It's just one aspect of them. With Elex however, f you stripped the difficulty out of it, there'd be nothing there worth writing home about. Combat is painfully unfun and clunky to boot. Exploration didn't do much for me, and that's mainly because the game didn't have me as engaged in the story or gameplay. The game feels fairly generic to be blunt, and feels like it just went through a checklist of "how to make game that would gain the title of 'hardcore' by a very specific niche of players." - Betrayed MC with a mysterious past? Check - Overly difficult world/poor quest pacing for that "the world doesn't care about you" feeling? Check - Good guys? What's that? Check (no the settlement thing doesn't count, the MC is just as bad as the rest of em(and no, this isn't an inherently bad thing some games do it well) - "It's not bad combat, it gives the game character!" Check This game was made for that one specific niche I mentioned, that's Gothic fans. If you like the game, then cool, I don't though. I've spent a lot of time collecting and playing hundreds of games on various platforms over the years. I can usually overlook many issues games have, but when a game has many things wrong they can come together to elicit not only a negative view from myself, but drive me to even make a review of it, which I almost never do. This one? Nah, pass.
This is still one of my favorite games. It's buggy, slightly broken, ugly as sin in some places, and crass, but that's what makes it so great. The game was made solely for the sake of being a game, and to piss off the soccer moms of yesteryear. I didn't have the pleasure of playing it when it initially released since I was a dumb kid with only a gamecube, but once the early 2010's came around I quickly sank many hours into it. If you're on this page, you almost certainly already know about the game so just buy it and enjoy. Don't get too mad when the jank screws with you, it gets us all. I can't count how many times this game has crashed, but it's one of the only games I give a pass to when it does. It feels like it's being held together with bubblegum and hope, but even in spite of that it's fun. The humor might not be for everyone, but for those of us who enjoy it, it feels like it was specially made for us personally. 10/10 The dude's voice lines will live on forever.
