“A precious, limited resource that arrived with the meteor, Elex can power machines, open the door to magic, or re-sculpt life into new, different forms.” – Elexgame.com
Elex is a game from one of my favourite RPG developers, Piranha Bytes. They are responsible for bringing us such gems as the Gothic series and the mildly disappointing Risen games. If you haven’t played Gothic games before, I would highly recommend playing them. If you can overlook dated graphics, the world and stories in those games makes it worth the time. Piranha Bytes always had great worlds and good stories even if the games were a little buggy at times, however their combat was never the best and when I heard about them doing Elex, an open world RPG that combines magic, technology and post apocalyptic gameplay, depending on which faction you take, I was sold. I was also hoping they finally managed to make an interesting combat system.
Elex is not the prettiest of the games and it feels and looks like a last gen game more than a current one. The game starts of clanky and it’s easy to get discouraged from playing the first couple of hours, but if you stick with it, it’s very rewarding. It is set in Magalan a world almost destroyed by a meteor that brought with it a new resource, Elex, which is destroying/mutating all life on the planet. Every faction has a different set of goals: Berserkers want to get rid of Elex and bring the world back to its natural state, with help of magic; Clerics want to preserve the technology of the past, and with its help bring back the golden age; Outlaws want to take drugs and make money and the Albs, who take Elex to make them stronger, but it makes them also lose all emotion, want all the Elex for themselves.
You start as an Alb commander sent on a secret mission, but soon after that things go awry, your plane gets shot down and you wake up behind enemy lines, having been left to die for failing your mission. After a clanky tutorial you meet Barserker who is willing to take you to safety. Soon after that you learn that the Albs are “evil” and you should join one of the 3 other factions (Berserkers, Clerics, Outlaws) to stop them and get your revenge. Berserkers are the magic faction and after doing few quests and talking to people around the world you realize that everything is not as black and white as it looks and every faction is not as good as they make themselves out to be, except maybe Outlaw, they’re just out for profit and will double cross everyone toget it, and don’t care who knows.
Most quests have more then one solution and outcome, for example early on you are asked to investigate a murder, and during that quest you find out that your companion/quest giver isn’t as innocent as he seems. You have the choice of giving him to the lord for advancement in the faction or keep it quiet and risk it coming back to bite you later on. Questing is never as straightforward as it is in most modern open world games, where you have main quests and optional side quests which you can do or just ignore. Here they all intertwine and you need to uncover it all to get a better understanding of what is going on. Also everything is open to you with limited barriers, like guards at the door which can usually be bypassed by waiting for the right moment, for a bribe, or even hacking. No quest is level locked, so you can do any of them at any time. From time to time you will be killed by enemies of a much higher level, but most of the time they can be bypassed. This makes for a very interesting and rewarding experience.
The weakest part of Elex, is the combat. With even simple enemies posing a risk, the boss fights can be just frustrating. Ranged combat seems to be very RNG dependent, melee combat isn’t much better. It’s clanky and random at times, but after a few hours you start to get the hang of it and know when to dodge, when to attack and parry. After that learning curve, combat becomes rewarding. I used combat only as the last resort. If I couldn’t talk my way out of it, I wouldn’t fight (as I’d most likely be cying and reloading more than once).
Elex is a fantastic game if you are stubborn and want an interesting story, and you’re able to overlook it being not as polished as most games out there. It took me close to 10 hours of questing and exploring before it clicked and I understood what I needed to do and how to do it, and I loved it. This game reminded me why I love RPG games!
Images and gameplay courtesy of Piranha Bytes.
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