![]() Elex II is a massive, wildly ambitious game, and while the developers and Piranha Bytes clearly had no idea how to get it started, once it flows it becomes incredibly difficult to put the controller down. You start visiting some vividly exotic locations, and the enemies that you fight shift from being those mutant chickens to the much more interesting factional forces and aliens. The narrative settles down and starts to become cohesive and coherent. ![]() Your character becomes more powerful and suddenly the depth and freedom of the quest system shifts to become a delight of possibilities. It’s an ugly start, even by the standards of Eurojank, but then things start to click. Quest markers for the first dozen or so missions that are thrown at you will tell you that you can go all over the place, but in reality, Elex II is incredibly linear at first, and there’s only one real pathway and sequence of missions that you’re going to be able to realistically challenge. At first, you’re going to be so underpowered that, despite being in an open world, if you go somewhere you’re not meant to, you’re going to get squished by a dinosaur or troll or something (the aliens themselves won’t re-appear for a long time, but that’s mostly because you’re going to struggle with the common mutant rats and chickens at first). It doesn’t get better when you start exploring. All of this happens at such a rate and with character interactions that are often contradictory or have serious gaps in the logic flow, and you’ll be left wondering if you’re playing a parody of the genre rather than an earnest attempt at it. ![]() You’ll meet familiar characters again, be introduced to the main narrative antagonist (a race of invading aliens) AND be infected with a debilitating and progressive disease that has no known cure, all the while having people yell at you about being a saviour and have faction names like “Albs,” “Berserkers,” “Merckens” and so on thrown at you with as much explanation as I’ve given in this review (i.e. It also doesn’t help that the narrative in the first ten hours or so is almost unfathomable to anyone who didn’t play the first Elex… and even then, it’s a struggle to remember all the assumed knowledge that the sequel has going on here. This all conspires to make this experience a difficult one to love out of the gates. Elex II is filled with weird quirks abound, there are plenty of minor bugs and irritants, and it suffers from a lack of polish in everything from the character design to the user interface. It’s just that kind of game, and it does feel like masking tape and cotton wool is holding it together in places. I haven’t experienced any game-breaking bugs at this point, but I would be very surprised if some don’t exist. There are going to be people that play one after the other, or any combination of them in parallel, as they do appeal to similar audiences as each is an open world, western-style RPG, but where Elden Ring and Horizon are both polished to an almost inhuman degree, Elex II is… well, it’s the precise opposite of that. I’m not sure there’s ever a precisely right time to release a “Eurojank” RPG, but I certainly don’t think that Elex II benefits from being released a few days after Elden Ring and Horizon: Forbidden West.
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