Due to technical errors, it was impossible to post Elex on Wednesday 15 Juli 2020. The review has now been posted on Juli 16 Thursday 2020. The next review will be posted as normal on Sunday Juli 19. With no further ado here is the Elex review.
Introduction
Elex is an action role-playing game that tries to emulate the freedom you have in the open world of Skyrim. The fact is
I felt very forced to do certain quests. Enemies will destroy you in seconds if you walk to the wrong side of the map.
You need to join up with one of the factions in the world which sounds simple but it was extremely difficult to do. I have spent many hours just looking to find out how to join a faction. The story is well crafted but I did not like it, all the twists that came at me I saw coming from miles away. I played Elex many hours to write this review but personally I did not like this game. I am glad I am done playing the game but I would recommend it to people who like open-world games that are difficult to handle. You will need Elex to upgrade your skills which is also a lot harder than I had expected. It is fun though to use the jetpack!
Story
Your name is Jax a commander of a force called the Albs. You have been sent on a special mission but your aircraft gets shot down but you survive the crash. All elex leaves your body which makes it so Jax can feel emotions once again. You will need to craft your own route through the game and choose one of the factions and learn how to survive in this world. Whatever path you take you will end up fighting the hybrid eventually. The story can be played out in so many different ways I cannot type them all here.
The game feels disjointed with running multiple main quests at once but the truth is that the storyline is complex.
You will need to explore a lot to find out the true story about the world of Elex. And create your own story.
Gameplay
Elex is played from a third-person perspective and you can use many weapons, be it firearms or swords. When you progress enough though the game you will also learn magic. Enemies are tough to beat and you will need to upgrade a lot before you can confidently take on the mutated creatures of Elex. Going in the wrong direction will grant you a swift death. Exploration is not the finest point in this game, it feels very forced. Depending on the faction you choose the gameplay will be different. There are four different factions in Elex.
The berserkers: They use Elex for magical purposes instead of using it they purify the elex and turn it into mana.
They grow plants called the heart plants that are said to heal the world.
The clerics: they believe in a god called Calaan and are the wisest persons left in the world of Elex. They are different than you would expect, the clerics use science fiction technology that they believe will save the world.
The albs: the albs were once clerics but they decided to take a different route by using the elex directly and consume it into their bodies. This gives them inhumane strength at the cost of their emotion which allows the hybrid to rule over them to gather all the elex of the planet.
The outlaws: These are the bad guys of this game, they take anything they want and kill everybody. They only care about themselves.
You will be able to level up in Elex, leveling up is important to take on bigger and stronger monsters which in turn allows you to explore more of the world. After every level up you will gain attribute points that you can distribute to build the character you want. In order to gain even more power, you will need to learn new abilities.
To learn new abilities you will need to have joined a faction and find the right trainer. This felt very restricting to me.
To really experience how this game feels you will need to play it. You will discover many things in Elex that you can do.
What did I think of Elex?
The story gripped me at first and the gameplay seemed very good to me but once I started I regretted buying this game. I have played many hours in Elex to write this review. The game felt very restricting even though it should have been open-world gameplay. The quest system felt way to complex for me. I really needed to think and look up how quests work since I got lost so many times in the system. Choosing a faction should be an easy task but it is really not.
Upgrading the abilities was incredibly annoying too, having to find a trainer first was very annoying.
I am glad when I was done with this game and getting ready to write this review.
My personal rating for this game is a 5.5
Graphics and sound
The graphics looks amazing and I have found zero graphical glitches so far. The graphics don’t exceed that of an upgraded Skyrim mod though!
The soundtracks and sound effects are wonderful. Elex exceeds in the sound department, the soundtracks have been selected carefully by the developers.
Pros and cons
Pros
– There are awesome graphics and soundtracks in Elex
– There is an open-world to explore.
– Many different routes you can take, this means the story will always be different.
Cons
– The open-world feels very restricting, walking the wrong way will get you killed.
– Choosing a faction is extremely hard to do in the beginning.
– The quest system is a very good idea, the quests walk parallel from each other but this makes it complex.
– Gathering elex, in the beginning, can be really hard.
Thank you for Longshade for requesting this open-world game! I did enjoy my time with Elex but this game is not for me. Anyone who likes open-world games and difficult mechanics would love this game!
Before you begin this journey you need to accept you will be playing Elex for a long time to finish it. It is a very specific genre and I recommend it for the people that like this genre.
I give this game a.. Drumroll…
7.6
Thank you for reading this review. Leave your thoughts in the comments or leave your own rating.
I hope to see you next review.
Thanks for the review. It seems to me that Elex is definitely a Piranha Bytes game. I remember when i played Gothic, it was an immersive sandbox game where you could explore it in its entirety if you respected the ones that are more powerful than you. At first even a goddamn mosquito would kill you in one hit but slowly you grew to dominate everything. Different factions, different skills… you can’t join the mages and learn to wield a sword effectively. In Gothic most trainers were important characters that also gave quests and played a big role in the unfolding story, so finding them wasn’t particularly hard. Elex i think is more akin to Gothic than Risen were and it further piqued my interest.
I am glad you liked the requested review! I am working on many other requested reviews but this one definitely took some time!
I hope you buy the game and enjoy it more as I did. I bought it because you requested it, the journey was hard and a different experience than what I am used to.
This was really not my style but I am so glad you requested it! I was very much out of my comfort zone and it was one hell of an experiment that I enjoyed even though the game was for not me.
uuu Elex… still didn’t have time to play i myself. Just like in real life, in the beginning you know nothing and get beaten by the smallest insect until you trained enough to kick a troll in his back part ^^
Wait, you got beaten up by insects in real life?
I didn’t knew Elex was reviewed, somehow i missed this. I played Elex, as in all Piranha Bytes enemies are not scaling to you, they are mostly from start on same level somewhere in a world, so if you fight them too early and in wrong place you can easily lose, Gothic/Risen even wild animals could easily kill you on start but this was changing quite fast. Must say at start at Elex enemies are generally really hard in this game, before you level up and leveling up like Sven wrote is also very difficult, before you level up 😉 What i was doing was exploring WHOLE huge map and completing quests those which were possible to complete without major fights, this way i tryed to slowly level up but it was bizzare because i was running from monsters/enemies most of the time (jetpack is invaluable in this game), i spent quite a lot time in this and couldn’t even decide which faction i want to join, for different reasons I seemed to didn’t like all of them 😉 After this chore when game opened for me a little more because i leveled up and could start doing some crafting i lost interest to continue with plan to get back to it a little bit later but to this day i not yet returned to this game, maybe i will do in future, i played and finished most of older Piranha Bytes games. This game was wrongly balanced, game start shouldn’t look like this. Technically game was incredible fine, zero bugs and glitches, loaded fast, good fps, audio and big world.
You are completely right, the beginning is far too slow, I hope to revisit this review in the future and make it more streamlined like the recent reviews.