Elex (2017)

Everything in Elex wants to kill you. There are dinosaurs, mutants, mutant dinosaurs, mechs, trolls and cyclops. There are also more human threats like armored sci-fi warriors, cannibals, and obviously mutant cannibals. A lot of these enemies can kill you with a single hit, for the weaker ones it will take maybe two or three. Here’s the thing – you're fucking weak, and you’ll be that way for a long time. Your weapons might as well be toys for all the good they do. But don’t worry, eventually you’ll be a god capable of killing the final boss with two hits.

The basic plot – the world was hit by a comet filled with a substance called Elex, destroying society as we know it. 200 years later there are 4 groups, each using Elex for their own means. There are the bad guys, the Albs, emotionless technowarriors who consume it for power and take orders from the mysterious Hybrid. There are the Beserkers, medieval hyprocrites that transmute the Elex into mana for magic and don’t condone tech of any kind – their goal is to rid the world of Elex and reestablish nature. There are the Clerics, brainwashing religious zealots who use the Elex as the basis for their technology, and are a bunch of condescending pricks. Finally, there are the Outlaws, a bunch of drug-pumped maniacs who live in the desert, stealing and killing folks. You’ll have to choose one of these factions (Albs excluded) if you want to survive in this world. So, do you want to be a Skyrim, a Mass Effect or a Mad Max?

The open-world is enormous and reflects these factions with different biomes that bleed into each other. It is feels amazing to exit a forest onto a cliff overlooking a vast desert wasteland. Work your way through the desert and you can circle around a mountain to find rocky terrain with rivers of lava. From the beginning you are equipped with a jetpack, so there is a verticality to all of this that makes it both daunting and accessible. Falling from a cliff isn’t a big deal – you can always work your way back up if you need to.

Elex is at its best when you are at your weakest. Early in the game I was given a mission to gather reports from all the factions. This required an epic on-foot journey across the game map, discovering the thoughtfully designed world and all the terrors that roamed throughout. I couldn’t fight these monsters, so I had to run and jetpack around them. I would jetpack up over a rock formation to avoid some raptors, only to come to a Troll who lobbed a boulder in my direction that smooshed me immediately. I would eventually return to this troll 20 hours later to exact my revenge. It can be fun and exciting to feel defenceless, knowing that you can always reload the quicksave you made a minute ago.

This was my first Piranha Bytes game, and you can tell it was made by a small team of people, and that it was translated to English after the fact. It is a janky mess – opening your map could take up to 10 seconds, and then the map cursor would grow increasingly sluggish. Sometimes the framerate chugs - I had to turn my back to the games “epic” final battle and let the NPCs duke it out because I didn’t want the game to crash. It did crash a couple of times, and I encountered plenty of bugs and glitches throughout.

The writing and voice acting is... not great. I liked the story and world, but the scene-to-scene stuff was mediocre, and the characters were mostly forgettable. There’s some light relationship building, and your decisions throughout the game have consequences, but it never feels especially organic. The pacing is weird. You start the game so weak that you can’t help but gravitate towards sidequests to try and level up. Because of this I spent 20 or so hours in the first chapter, then rushed through the others very quickly.

At its core Elex is a very flawed, yet very ambitious game considering its resources. It is a textbook example of Eurojank, and you probably know if you’re the kind of person who would enjoy this game. I am isolating at the moment, so I had the time to really dig into it, and found myself completely endeared to this big, lumpy mess.

Intro

This is a third-person open world RPG that takes place in a post-apocalyptic time on an Earth-like planet. It's almost identical to games in the Risen series by the same developer.

Metadata

I have completed and enjoyed all three Risen games and given each of them four stars. I played this game for 51 hours, completing all quests (except ones that require you to join the Outlaw or Cleric faction).

The Good

• Your character is called Captain Jax. Ey yo Captain Jax!
• Solid role-playing with lots of choices and some skill-based checks.
• Enemies range from raptors to robots to raiders to horrifying mutants.
• Lots of different weapons and each ranged weapon has 3 fire modes.
• Jetpack allows for more freedom when travelling, escaping from enemies, jumping down great heights and a special groundslam attack.
• The factions are well done and have some depth to them.
• There are many quests and most of them are well-done.
• The world is kinda interesting and there's a nice variety in landscapes.

The Bad

Wiki-ness

There is a ton of information that you have to look up outside the game. What items do you need for crafting? What stats do you need for the next upgrade after the one you consider getting? Where are the stat-boosting plants? Where are the teleporters? How do you reach the Claws? What are the safe codes? Et cetera. I had 4 bookmarks on my toolbar just for this game.

Weird & bad dialogue

I can't tell if it's just the translation from German but so much of the dialogue is unnatural or otherwise weird. Some sentences aren't proper English. Sometimes it feels like you're talking to someone with multiple personalities. And dialogue options that come across as positive can be unexpectedly negative, and vice versa. You absolutely have to save before talking to someone because of this.

Bugs

This game still has bugs. Sometimes you don't get up after sleeping. Some status effects do (next to) nothing. Things clip through floors/walls sometimes. If an enemy hits you while you have a ranged weapon you can bug out and be unable to aim until you holster/draw your weapon again. There are a number of other bugs too.

Item overflow

This game has way too many different items and especially for creature parts it is fairly vague which are used for crafting and which aren't. Sometimes this doesn't make sense at all, e.g. you need fine dining knives to upgrade shotguns.

The Ugly

Companions

Elex has the worst followers since Daikatana. Half the time they will just stand there and do nothing while you engage in combat. Other times they will forget you were fighting and disengage. They will block you or your attacks. This is especially bad because you desperately need them early on because they're much stronger. At the end of the game they become practically useless too.

Wonkiness

During combat the controls can be unresponsive which is super-frustrating. While travelling it is vague when you have to/can climb and it can be really annoying to navigate parts. Even worse is how after jumping you come to a full stop. This happens constantly and kills all momentum. It really gets on your nerves.

Pathetic inventory system

When you want to buy/sell/store/retrieve items in quantities above 5 you get a popup asking you how many items you want to include. You can't type in this prompt, you can only click the arrows or use the arrow keys. And by default it includes all items. So if you want to buy 10 liquor but the merchant has 100 you're stuck holding the arrow keys for a minute. On top of that the game for some insane reason groups all non-combat items during sales. Normally they are sorted in a dozen different categories but when interacting with stores/containers all notes, all plants, all junk, etc. all get grouped in this tiny window. For fucks sake.

Balance - lack thereof

In Elex armor is applied absolutely. If your weapon deals 11 damage and the enemy has 10 armor, you inflict 1 damage. As a result, enemies are either impossible to beat or irrelevant, with a tiny window of balance in between. At the start of the game you can only kill the frailest enemies, at the end i killed the boss in about four shots. It's incredibly frustrating. Gothic and Risen also had rough starts but nothing nearly as bad as in this game.

It's even worse if, like me, you don't focus on melee early on. Despite investing a bunch in ranged attacks it was still more effective for at least half of the game. And since you can't respec in Elex you can get kinda stuck. Worse still, playing on "Casual" difficulty seems to be irrelevant. It feels harder than Normal difficulty in a Risen game.

On top of that enemies with rocket/grenade launchers can stun-lock you with no apparent defense against this. Well, except if you count AI stupidity. Your companion and enemies will gladly attack walls or the ground, either doing no damage or knocking themselves down.

Oh yeah, and jetpack slams fail half the time because you land on your enemy, land on your companion or the game doesn't respond properly. :-/

Conclusion

In this game you can jetpack towards a raptor and smack it with a big burning warhammer like a fiery Thor and combat is still bad. I could live with the dumb AI, crappy inventory and clunky travelling but the utterly stupid decision to make armor an "all or nothing" system is super-frustrating. This game would have 4 stars otherwise. So, yeah, only play this if you love RPGs and you focus on melee damage early on or you will hurt your hand punching the wall.

Great exploration RPG with an extremely hard starting phase, requiring players to switch mentality and learn to run from fights for many levels and come back later for revenge.

The clunky combat will scare away most players, so rely on companions and pick your fights wisely until you have decent gear.

Melee combat is subpar compared to ranged and forces new players to use ranged weapons or drop difficulty to survive.

Jetpack mechanic is a great addition and allows a fresh approach to vertical exploration of such a big and interesting map.

The annoying parts are the amateur user interface and user experience: try selling trash while having to scroll past half a minute of notes and text files. Icons look all the same. No clear info on player stats.

Story is mediocre at best and feels rushed and incomplete in the finale.

Cold mechanic is not well described and requires quicksaving before dialogues to benefit from the desired outcomes.

Armor textures are very low res and could have benefitted from of a more detailed rendition, considering the importance gear has in the survival aspect of the game.

One single time the game glitched in an animation phase and once crashed to desktop after save without warning.

Get the game on sale and for what they ask now its well worth the 50+ hours it offers. Replaying and choosing the other two factions and taking different paths should add to the longevity and value of the game.

This is an RPG that gets many things down right to provide something satisfying. At first, the aesthetic and some bits of it reminded me of Mars War Logs, but it gets a more deeper and epic feeling as you go... and the world, its overall feeeling as you explore or skirt around areas is a nice kind of post apoc mystery comparable to say fallout 3's archaelogy or even that of STALKER.

The factions, NPC and player's role is also really believable and substantial feeling in the sense that you get feedback of your mistakes being made in the quest chains, but you just learn to accept it rather than reload and 'scum' for best outcomes as usually a player would do. Bad outcomes in this game manage to feel like another part of it and seem like they might be just as interesting. This is something i loved You never feel outright fucked and distressed by the things that get broken.

Some stylization might seem a bit hokey at times. At first I really didnt like a few things with the setting and the premise of mixing fantasy with sci fi... And the combat is pure crap. But it won me over as i gave it time. For one, the three main factions of the game seem almost a bit 'absurd' in their hard defined quirks, which stand out in a world that is otherwise real, but it feeds into the story, and the main quest, and works well for CNC. I eventually became genuinely interested in the factions. The factions have enough NPCS and thought put into them to hold weight and feel like something of interest. The games chief strength isn't actually its story (its not as good as you might be led to believe, particularly the ending), its characters or the lore, those are all just OK but the best thing is the way it ties them together and layers them into the quests rather than just toss or jumble things together like a bethesda 'RPG'. When you do something in ELEX it feels more like you are actually doing something, and that the outcome of the game will change based on what you do, and while you may not know what or why, you will wonder what the reason you are doing it might be or where it will go. Rolling elements tgoether and making the player feel like they are taking things somewhere is exacelty what an RPG SHOULD do. This game has the best quests i've seen in an RPG in quite some time. AT times I kept thinking 'why can't bethesda make quests like this" as I played it. Too bad the combat is so crappy, and many other aspects are less than desirable.

The games flaws are in it's bread and butter mechanics, such as combat (its really hard and annoying) odd skill developements, and crafting. Econonmy, resource gathering and things like that can also be annoying. All these things really get in the way of going to a new town, and talking to people in it and diving deep into the dialogue quests. There are also really janky bugs and a large pile of small little nitpicking annoyances that add up. The worst thing though was the way the game ends. a bit like skyrim, in the sense it really just doesnt.

This game is a lot like Witcher 1 for it's narrative focus and somewhat odd, overall design built around that, or Mass Effect 3 with it's CNC. and in like both these games a player becomes consumed with exploring pathways and people. also the player characters role is not bad at all.

However the rough patches in this game are often analogous to that of The Witcher. You might see past it or you might not! For me, it very much felt at odds with what I cared about in this game. My reccomendation is to fire up cheat engine and streamline it's experience. Its way better that way.

However you play it, it will take some time. its not an overly large world but its quite quest heavy.

In the end I thought the world of witcher 1 was interesting and loved talking to people in ME3 and thus found this mishmash of fantasy and scifi worthwhile with a Cheat Engine table. I defintely wouldnt call it good, but it definitely tried to do some things right and in a way, did succeed. However as a game? as a long game? It's not one I'd recommend to the uninitiated.