![]() Games like Dark Souls are punishing, but never feel unfair. But at the moment, I just can’t recommend anyone spend money on the technical disaster area that is ELEX.ĮLEX made me feel like I had to break its core systems to win.Even when everything is working as intended, the combat balance often feels absurd. It certainly has the ingredients to be a come-from-behind success story like New Vegas or Bloodlines (though fixing the latter was largely a fan effort). Maybe developer Piranha Bytes will fix it in a few months with some extensive patches. ELEX offers none of that, so a lot of quests aren’t so much involved treasure hunts as they are a guessing game mixed with hide-and-seek. But the reason great games like Morrowind got away with less hand-holding was the fact that you could read books, talk to guards, or otherwise get clues from the environment on where you needed to go. I’m not the kind of RPG player who needs everything spelled out for me with GPS directions on every quest. In another case, I spent almost an hour jetpacking around looking for a way into a locked structure because that’s where the quest marker told me to go, and I was never tipped off that it unlocks through another quest I hadn’t completed yet. At one point I had to chase down and speak to every named NPC in a large town - most of which do not stay in one place for long - due to having no indication of which one had the quest that would let me advance the story. Broken event triggers, horrible party member AI, and missing or misplaced map markers that make quest targets impossible to find call to mind the worst of Fallout: New Vegas or Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines at the time of their respective releases. The biggest problem with ELEX is that it’s buggy to the point I almost wasn’t able to finish it. Putting so much emphasis on combat isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the fact that I was given the option to dump points into skills that will almost never come up in a meaningful way feels like I fell into a trap set for idealistic fools who thought they could solve problems with diplomacy. Disappointingly, I could count on one hand the number of times I was actually able to use these skills to change the outcome of a quest. I built my character to take the fullest advantage of speech-based personality skills, as I often do. Yet for an RPG that puts so much emphasis on player choice, there really aren’t a lot of opportunities to solve problems by means other than combat. ![]() ![]() And it’s all accompanied by almost shockingly high-quality voice acting. There are enough potential variations in the ending that I almost want to play it again to see more of them. Nasty, an outlaw who seems like a stereotypical, curse-flinging, edge girl femme fatale has a meaningful arc of growth that sheds light on her behaviors in a believable way. Duras, a stoic warrior and your first companion, has a checkered past that presents many interesting questions as you pick through it. The characters are endearing, with multi-layered and engaging backstories. The story's twists are unexpected and memorable.The story is definitely the strongest pillar holding up ELEX. So in practice, they’re the same abilities shuffled to different parts of the skill tree. For example, many of the buffs available through Berserker magic have almost direct analogs in the psychic powers of the Clerics and the stimulant consumables that can be manufactured by the Outlaws. Melee weaponry almost always ended up being my main combat tool, and a lot of the supposedly exclusive abilities for each faction are mirrored in the other two. Ammo and mana potions are too scarce, and going all-in on ranged makes it very hard to defend yourself against most monsters. I quickly found that trying to treat ELEX like a shooter, or make a go of things as a pure magic user, isn’t terribly viable. The early part of the main quest involves aligning with one of the three main factions, and while each has a very distinct aesthetic, values they expect you to uphold, and a unique set of quests, they unfortunately don’t play as differently as I expected.
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