This text is written with a few months of distance. Elex is a direct successor to the Gothic / Risen games, utilizing pretty much the same techniques at story telling, world bulding and character progression. Elex basically suffers from being outdated in almost every aspect. While quite a few reviewers praise that as being "oldschool" or "true to the spirit" it's basically really just the inevitable result of trying to compete with the current wave of open world games. The Good: The world is rather well crafted, you can see that they tried to supplement the overall experience by telling little stories via the environment. Walking around, trying to explore is fun. The bad: The GRAPHICS are... okayish. The world is colorful, the textures are fine, although the rough terrein geometry speaks volumes about the aging rendering engine holding everything together (used in Gothic, then, Risen, then Elex). But the animations are horrible. What really left me speechless is the fact that they used THE SAME SMOKING ANIMATION FROM GOTHIC 1! And yes, it already did look awkward back then! Even worse, NPC models are reused so frequently. The MUSIC is neither standing out in terms of good or bad. It's just there. The VOICE ACTING is plain horrible, no matter if you play in English or German. Especially the protagonist just makes your eyes roll. The NARRATIVE feels worth digging into, but unfortunately due to the uninspired WRITING you won't feel very invested in finding out about the world or the NPC inhabiting it. Unfortunately people are as shallow as a mud puddle. The quests involve a lot of running back and fro, basically reducing it to fetch item / find person with intermittent, frequent combat situations. The COMBAT / SKILL PACING... is what ruins the game. Pacing is horrible. After hours of gameplay, you still are reduced to run away from almost everything, spamming arrows from elevated positions. The game lacks flow and immersion. It's a dull experience.
It's a frustrating experience indeed. Playing the Emperor's immediatly throws you back to the Tomb Raider era: Jumping puzzles, some shooting and brawling and the neverending corridors. It could be fun, as it enriches the old formula with the Indy flavor - whip, hat, great music and entertaining brawls - but unfortunately the horrible input system just kills it. Fighting even the more simply enemies becomes quickly annoying, simply because you're often going to miss focus, instead flailing at thin air rather than your enemy. Tuning down the mouse speed helps somewhat, but still the controls are so counter-intuitive, that one never really gets used to it. The checkpoint system adds to the frustration: Miss a ledge, end up in spikes and replay the whole section. Together with the unsupported widescreen resolution (the game is capped at 1280x960) it quickly reminds the user why this type of game(play) isn't really found in modern titles anymore. I gave the game a few tries and didn't find it overly entertaining. For a platformer its controls are too wonky and for a cinematic / story focused experience it has too much platforming. Probably rather a title for people who wish to embark on a nostalgia trip.
