ELEX II

Реквием по пираньям. Мне будет не хватать их игр.

Its a typical piranha bytes game. Their writing has gotten worse but the guns are fun. Id start with risen 3 if you're new to the developer or Eurojank games

Ein tolles Rollenspiel, mit einem sehr knackigen Schwierigkeitsgrad. Das Spiel lässt einem alle Möglichkeiten offen und man kann zwischen 5 Fraktionen wählen, im Verlauf des Spiels. Tolle Geschichte und gute Fortsetzung des 1. Teils. Mir persönlich gefällt die Grafik sehr gut, die Lichtstimmung ist atemberaubend und das Weltdesign einzigartig gut. Die Charaktermodelle sehen etwas merkwürdig aus und die Geschichte ist teilweise ungewollt komisch, was mir wiederum gefällt. Ich habe hier für den ersten Durchlauf ca. 80h gebraucht. Ich habe mir an einem Punkt einen Speicher erstellt, so das ich ab da einer anderen Fraktion beitreten kann, so muss man nicht wieder von vorne spielen. Aber, wer will kann natürlich immer einen neuen Run starten und so gute 400h in diesem Spiel verbringen. Ein Level-Cap scheint es nicht zu geben. Also, ein sehr hoher Wiederspielwert. Ich habe die Welt aufgesaugt und oft einfach die Landschaften bestaunt. Hier kann man toll versinken. An die Mechaniken und die Steuerung muss man sich gewöhnen. Weiter darf man nicht scheu sein, vor einem komplexeren Level- und Aufstiegssystem, welches jedoch super ist. Craften, looten und erkunden. Einfach super! Wer frustresistent ist und Herausforderungen sucht, kann hier nichts falsch machen. Für mich eine klare Empfehlung, wenn man auf die Art Spiel steht. 7.9/10

I really liked ELEX for several reasons. The exploration was one of the strongest aspects of the game—roaming across a large, open world filled with varied environments, hidden secrets, and unexpected encounters always felt rewarding. The verticality and freedom of movement, especially with the jetpack, made exploring even more fun and unique. The battle system, while a bit clunky at first, grew on me over time. It offered enough challenge to stay engaging, and I appreciated the different combat styles and weapons you could choose from. Whether going melee, ranged, or using special abilities, there was room to tailor combat to your playstyle.

ELEX II, like all games Piranha Bytes did after Gothic, is Gothic with a new coat of paint. So, if you like their other games—I do—you'll probably like this one. Except ... * It isn't finished. And I don't mean in the sense of being the second part of a trilogy that'll never be completed, but in the sense that ELEX II itself isn't finished. It screams »there was supposed to be more content here, but we ran out of time/money and had to release what we had« all over the place. Random examples would be Jax's [spoiler]sickness mechanic[/spoiler], which never actually does anything, and the [spoiler]treatment procedure[/spoiler], that just fades to black. Lots of cutscenes don't use the right armour, weapon, etc. From act 3 onwards NPC dialogue only rarely changes based on the world state. Case in point [spoiler]Caja doesn't even react when their son is killed[/spoiler]. * Acts 1 and 2 are as good (or bad) as ever, acts 3 and 4 are just a succession of mindless "kill 20 rats" quests. Except it's more like 80 rats per. Now, PB games aren't exactly known for their engaging combat mechanics. For the last couple of hours I just wanted it to be over. Possibly related to the previous point. They can't have taken more than an afternoon to add. * The ending ... is non-existent. It's 90 % sequel bait and 10 % hastily thrown-together epilogue consisting of a couple of stills and a few lines of text. ELEX I was much more self-contained than this. So, yes, it's a Piranha Bytes game, no question, but I can't in good conscience [i]recommend[/i] it.

absolutely not worth $70

I'm leaving a positive review, but that's solely from how much fun I had at the start of the game. The last half of the game is straight garbage and I'm immensely dissappointed. The Graphics are fine, the environment is pretty beautiful, the characters are incredibly stiff and uncanny-valley, a ton of the animations - especially cutscenes - feel floaty and disconnected, hands passing through objects they interact with, nothing ever feels like it was fully designed as one scene, it always feels like they animated every character individually and then at the very end stuck them all in the scene together. But it looks fine enough that you can ignore it most of the time and it rarely drags you out of it too far. The World, it's a real strong point of the game, I think, it was cool to explore. It's by no means perfect - aside from the great views there's almost nothing in the world. I was astonished at how pointless it all felt from a progress standpoint - nothing you find anywhere is remotely close to decent or useful, it's all junk you sell for very little that's incredibly time consuming to pick up. There is, however, a decent number of audio logs or written notes/journals to grab, and I enjoyed just exploring for the sake of exploring. The Story, it started good and then got so insanely rushed it makes Game of Thrones' ending look like best television mankind has ever made. I don't know what happened, obviously there was an unreal crunch on the developers, I'm sure none of them are happy with how it turned out, but I don't know why it was released like this. It's one of the most disappointing stories I've ever experienced. Nothing is resolved decently, it's rushed like crazy, it feels disjointed and buggy, the dialogue is all kinds of bugged out with characters having converstations from like six different time periods all at the same time - they'll mention events that have already passed like they're coming up in the future or just completely ignore the elephant in the room. I won't spoil the ending, but there's something that happens at the end there, that gets no reaction from one character who should ABSOLUTELY have a reaction, and it just feels insane to not do something. The RPG elements, they're pretty disappointing. There's a level system, and stat points that you allocate, weapons all have certain stat requirements to use them, like you need X Strength and X Dexterity to equip this Crossbow. I enjoyed the system at the start of the game, everything was a challenge and as I levelled up I could clearly feel myself getting stronger. But you hit a point where you kind of reach the highest tier of weapons available and there's just no movement from there. The different stats all give you bonuses to character, but maxing out Dexterity, which increases ranged damage, increases the damage you deal by +20. That takes ages to get, and by that point all the weapons you're using are dealing out 500 damage. Dealing out 520 instead is not something you can even notice. None of the actual bonuses from the stats feel remotely impactful. The Skill Trees you can get are neat, and there's some powerful upgrades there, but you can max that out pretty early on. I found I quickly hit the point where I had the best weapon, the best stats, and maxed skills - I was at my absolute peak power - but because enemies scale with your level every fight just got harder and harder. You still end up as an immortal killing machine, but it wasn't fun to feel like I was stuck stagnant forever. Decisions rarely had any real impact on the game - though there were a few! Overall I found it really felt like you were railroaded into a pretty linear story, with only a couple real decisions the whole game. The Factions, I both liked and hated the factions. Every single faction had something about them that I deeply disliked, which was neat from a writing and story perspective - it's nice when it's not just black and white clearcut "good guys" and "bad guys". Every faction felt like they had their own goals that very strongly led them. But, in the end I ended up going solo because I just couldn't stand the various factions and their leaders, and you can only join one. Overall, they felt incredibly pointless. They don't do anything in the game, you can get FAR stronger than any of them pretty quickly, and every single one takes an attitude like they're gods while struggling to beat even low level enemies in combat. It just really feels like they're out of place. One thing that is quite cool is the faction-specific skill trees, you can only level them up if you join the faction, and locked behind the skill trees are all forms of "Magic" as well as a ton of useful and cool perks. Unfortunetly, that means you can only access one skill tree at a time, but it's the only benefit they've got. The Bastion and 6th Power. I was super excited for the Bastion and 6th Power, it sounded so interesting to inhabit an old broken down fort and start your own new faction. And right away you're taske with fixing the Bastion up, so I set to it right away, looking forward to bringing life back to the Bastion. But it just doesn't go anywhere, at all. You don't fix a single thing on the Bastion, you just unlock the ability to buy a cosmetic change to your living quarters. You start with every crafting station in the game, you don't unlock those as buildable upgrades. You don't fix a single broken wall, you don't build one new house, you don't invite a bunch of new and interesting merchants to come to your settlement, travelling merchants don't start showing up, the Bastion remains exactly the same throughout the whole game. And the whole 6th Power new Faction stuff is a joke. You do recruit people, but it's a handful of companions that are fully built characters, so they're insanely overpowered early on and then fall off to just average mid-game before becoming dead weight by the end of the game. But you can also recruit various people that you meet and help around the world of Magalan - which is super cool - except that they all just sit there in one single spot, not moving, and have at best one line of dialogue they say when you first talk to them at the Bastion - some of them don't even get that - and then they just repeat a generic line after that. They don't do anything, they don't appear in the final battle, they don't even comment on the events afterwards. None of the factions even seem to really recognize the 6th Power as a real thing - which makes sense - but there's no missions to make them recognize you either. There's no real negotiations, there's no building up your Faction, there's no special training or techniques, it feels so completely and utterly pointless it's wild. It fully and completely feels like there would be absolutely no difference in the outcome of the game if it was just you and CRONY. Overall, the start of the game felt great. The world was open and wide, the choices were endless, the dialogue was interesting and felt responsive - characters commented on recent events and the world felt pretty alive. But as the game progressed, everything narrowed down further and further. I suspect it was to try and make sure that everyone got the same ending so they could make Elex 3 and have it pick up from one common point. But it felt incredibly, incredibly obvious that you were being funnelled into one neat point, and the ending felt like they just closed their eyes and chopped the game off with a butcher's cleaver just so they could resume it in the third game. In every other game series I've played that has multiple connected games with direct sequals, they've opened with a big problem, extended from the previous game, explored that problem while finding other little hints of future stuff over the course of the game, and then resolved that main problem at the end of the game while using the loose hints to create the setup for the next game. In Elex 2 there is no resolution.

poopoo