![]() The overall story is standard fight the alien intruder stuff but the mixture of approaches and fighting styles does keep your attention throughout.Starting today, players can make their return to Magalan as ELEX II is now Available. This is a shame as there are some interesting moral choices to make that would have benefitted from a more subtle system being in place. Characters will straight up ask if you prefer creation or destruction (the game’s version of good and evil) rather than there being any finesse or subterfuge to the decisions. Much of your interaction with the characters of Elex is backed up by a morality mechanic that is unfortunately clunky. I would recommend focusing on bows early on as arrows are cheap and you can sneak and snipe enemies who would destroy you close up. As equipment is linked to stats you can’t just quickly use more powerful items to give yourself an advantage which means that you do have to be strategic in how you level up to get the full benefit of what you can scavenge and buy. ![]() Partway through the game you can join a faction which focuses your approach somewhat and makes a specific set of items and equipment available, but you can still mix and match to some degree. There are no classes as such in Elex II, with you instead customising your character’s attributes to match your style of play. You can often spend quite a few minutes exploring for no real benefit, but there is still a compulsion to continue just in case you find something. Almost everywhere you go contains some useful items, but it’d be an exaggeration to say that the world was well populated. Of course, this generally means that you end up in areas you aren’t prepared for, but jetpacks are also useful for making a speedy escape. While it initially only runs for a short time it recovers fairly quickly so you can use it to either scale or descend from otherwise impassable buildings and environments with ease. This one addition makes the whole world feel so much more open and exploitable. You can stick to slowly levelling up by fighting smaller enemies, but where’s the fun in that?Įxploration is standard open world fare, aside from the return of the jetpack. Combat itself is a mixture of old school hack and slash and ranged, but often ends up with you kiting enemies and chipping away their health as you try and avoid being slaughtered. Characters get interrupted mid-conversation by combat and then complain that “I wasn’t finished yet,” as if it was your fault. In the first few hours you’ll bounce between running away from every combat encounter while scavenging to raise funs to having inane conversations with your annoying child. While the visual stylings work well, the tone of Elex II is absolutely all over the place. Your levels are also lost, although this is explained away as Jax having retired to a cabin due to his exasperation at the behaviour of the various faction leaders – a choice compounded by an altercation with an alien beast that bites him and gives him a debilitating infection. No matter which companion you favoured and who you romanced, the game begins with Jax having a child with Caja. The drawback to this is that your choices from the first game are thrown away. Jax returns as the payable character, and there is clearly an expectation that you are familiar with the events of the first game, either through playing or reading up on them. Is ELEX II going to bring meaningful change and improvement?Įlex was a massive game, and Elex II is more of the same in that regard. That being said, the usual Piranha Bytes issues were present, with a somewhat janky engine and sudden instadeath encounters lurking around almost every corner. Whether you chose to go in swinging a sword, wielding a shotgun, or sniping from afar with a plasma rifle, a dizzying array of approaches were possible. Expanding the scope of their worlds to include options for fantasy, modern, or science fiction builds and locations to survive side by side. Going all the way back to the original Gothic, their titles have offered the challenging combat, customisation, and exploration, and the original ELEX was no exception. Piranha Bytes games are a peculiar breed.
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