I recommend buying this game for the current experience it provides. That said, if you're a PB fan like me, read on, as you might find out something very useful.
As a fan of Pyranha Bytes games, this game is both great and terrible in all the ways PB has so diligently managed to maintain throughout all its games. Exploration is great and the RPG mechanics feel truly rewarding and fun... Sometimes. Other times you're stuck in a seemingly impossible to win fight, reloading for the 30th time, trying to figure out why you're still trying to finish this heap of garbage. And then you remember you're nearing the end game so you should probably power through. Yes, PB games are phenomenal, up until a certain point when the story reaches the mid-late game. After that, the game's quality takes a downright horrifying leap in quality. Complex quests with multiple solutions turn into mindless chores that involve getting random items from needlessly far locations which require a ♥♥♥♥ ton of walking and with an unfairly increased number of enemies sprinkled along the way. A cheap way to ensure the player gets enough XP to meet the increasingly high requirement in order to level up.
The story and quests also take a dive, as they turn from moderately interesting to nonsensically rushed. For example, the entire first half of the game, I'm being told that the leader of the berserkers has disappeared into pilgrimage and that no one knows where he is. There is all this mystery around him which makes you wonder what role he'll play in the story. Enter chapter 3, where you get tasked with "finding" him and instantly receiving a quest marker showing his live location (???). He won't do much other than sit on a rock and tell you to close the oblivion gates... I mean disable the converters around the map. Truly masterful quest design.
When I reached this point I realized all quests onwards involved me fighting 6+ enemies at a time, which is an impossible feat in ELEX, as the combat is simply not fit for it. The animations are too slow, enemies have infinite stamina and stunlocking is all too frequent.
Alas, this is a problem that has always plagued PB games. Call it lack of resources or laziness, but the issue persists. They rush the ♥♥♥♥ out of their games midway. Perhaps they get bored mid-development. Or maybe they don't manage their development time well. Either way, you'd think after 20 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ years in the business they'd be able to deliver a product of consistent quality.
A frequent meme in the PB community is that all of their games are Gothic 2 with a different coat of paint, and that's painfully true. They hardly innovate or improve. The combat system changes every so often, sure, although it always ends up being bad (except for Risen 1). New mechanics are being added with every game, yes, but they end up falling kind of flat on their face (risen 2 is filled to the brim with those).
PB doesn't think about improving it's games' most important aspects such as story or combat. They just add new things that are meant to impress you in the short term, things that you'll definitely not see be improved upon or see at all in a future game. Whenever you play a new PB game you'll think "oh, this is new" while simultaneously thinking " wait, where is that thing from the previous game?".
Gothic 2, in a new coat of paint, but worse.
