Review for Elex. Game for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 17/10/2017 The version for PC came out on 20/10/2017 The version for Xbox One came out on 20/10/2017
The fantasy and science fiction fanbases are often the polar opposite: the former love myths, legends and totally unreal phenomena such as magic, while the latter love to hypothesize about rather unlikely futures but with logical foundations, and it often happens that Tolkien's readers do not go for nothing agrees with those who live on bread and Star Trek.
If the question ever arose as to who would win between a wizard capable of controlling the force of nature and a soldier of the future with the most advanced weapons, Piranha Byte invites you to choose the answer with Elex, an RPG that crosses fantasy, science fiction and even dieselpunk. Mixing such different genres is as fascinating as it is risky, but that's not why Elex ended up not impressed.
Malagan, the planet where the game is set, is a contemporary world hit (literally) by an apocalyptic event: a meteorite has annihilated the entire human civilization, reducing the world to a desert expanse. The meteorite also brought with it an unknown element: the Ellex, whose properties have transformed many of the creatures and people who have come into contact with it into mutants.
However, Elex is also a powerful energy source with incredible properties, leading the survivors to split into factions divided by their respective ideas on how to best use the new material: the Berserkers, who repudiate technology and have discovered how to use the Ellex to obtain magic and give new life to the desert by transforming it into a forest; the Clerics, convinced that the Elex is the gift of a divinity and that it should be used for the most extreme technological advancement; the Outlaws, essentially the classic desert punks from Mad Max, totally disinterested in the reconstruction of civilization and whose sole purpose is to live in freedom and accumulate wealth at the expense of the weakest; finally the Albs, technologically advanced as the Clerics but addicted to the Elex, which they use to increase their logical and cognitive abilities at the price of their emotions, and enemies of anyone who does not accept to become like them.
For the first time in a Piranha Bytes game, the protagonist has a name: Jax, a high-ranking member of the Albs, who at the beginning of the adventure is accused of treason by another member of the faction, then hit and dropped into a precipice (the reference to the first Gothic is obvious). Nearly mortally wounded, Jax completely loses all the abilities given him by the Elex and is also robbed of his armor and equipment. Without revealing further details about the first part of the game, Jax ends up alone in a world full of danger, eager for revenge against unjustified punishment, and forced to hide his identity from anyone.
The formula of this action RPG is one that the fans of Gothic and Risen know very well: a huge world to explore and completely produced "by hand", without the abused procedural generation, three very different factions ( in this case more than ever), ample freedom of action, an infinite amount of quests and things to do, and lots of structural defects.
The game begins in Berserker territory, where we have the opportunity to test the most fantasy component of the game in the midst of a society halfway between the early Middle Ages and the tribal age, hidden in an environment where wild nature takes over and the devastation of the rest of the world seems a distant memory. As usual, the climb to success starts from nothing e the first goal is to find a way to survive more easily: in fact, at the beginning of the game, any creature is able to kill the player. This leads us to talk about the first conceptual flaw of the game: the three playable factions (Berkserker, Clerics and Outlaws) are geographically very distant from each other, and there is no path between the bases without enemies able to kill with one shot.
The difficulty is not a problem in itself, but in fact it forces the player to have to spend time with the Berserkers even if he is not absolutely interested in joining them (for clarity, we specify that at some point in the game you are forced to side with a faction) in order to at least be able to withstand a few attacks before stupidly perishing while trying to avoid any contact along the way for the desired faction. But why does everything kill the player so easily?
Let's talk about the combat system starting from the beginning that, incredibly, Piranha Bytes has managed to worsen itself. When fighting each other there are warriors, wizards, archers, soldiers of the future with laser weapons, drones, mechs, junkies with chainsaw swords and rocket launchers, dinosaurs, mutants, giant spiders and anything else possible, it is obvious that you have to get off at incredible compromises to balance everything. Elex's combat system is divided between melee and distance: the first is based on stamina, used for quick or heavy attacks, dodging, parrying and running. Each hit scored helps to increase the damage dealt and allows you to conclude with a particularly damaging special attack.
Ranged combat, on the other hand, is nothing more than a scope with which to shoot arrows and shoot: for the record, the balance between factions in this case has been leveled by giving the bullets the same speed as the arrows. The player also has a jet-pack that dramatically increases vertical mobility. Beyond the woodiness and poor gratification of the system, the real problem lies in how the AI behaves: whenever Jax comes across a hostile creature or NPC, it will start chasing it and, as previously mentioned, it will most likely kill it on the first shot . The jet-pack might seem like a practical solution for escape, however Piranha Bytes has thought of a "brilliant" solution to eliminate the possibility that a player is always saved by taking refuge on a roof, a rock or, more generally, on a ' greater height than the enemy (which often happens in many open world games): equip almost any opponent with ranged attacks.
You will discover that overgrown moles are able to spit acid, that some mutants shoot clouds of plasma, and that velociraptors (because, of course, there are velociraptors) spit blobs of blood that can kill you.
However, there is a solution that almost always guarantees survival when escape alone is not enough: adventure companions. There are several recruitable characters within the game, who will have a different reputation level than you based on the faction you support and how you behave towards other NPCs. Their contribution to the story is very limited and generally they are not efficient fighters, however they perform a very important targeting function for you as you run from side to side, since they cannot be killed. Of course, at some point in the game Jax will be strong enough to roam freely without having to worry too much, but until then the frustration and forced semi-linearity are felt.
Another factor causing various headaches is the technical backwardness of the title, especially in the PlayStation 4 version (the one we tested). Although the landscapes are breathtaking and the world is rich in detail, Elex in no way compares to any modern open world game, and the console version has had to compromise such that it has to obscure the long-distance vision. Furthermore, the care in the arrangement of elements in the game world is sometimes undermined by textures or models that, for some reason unknown to us, have been clearly less cared for than others. We do not express ourselves on the animations: raw and sometimes unreal, they have always been the Achilles heel of Piranha Bytes, which clearly has no intention of remedying the situation. Sometimes quite serious bugs appear on the menus that force the player to close the application and restart it, but we are confident that they will soon be resolved by the patches.
As now evident, Elex is a problematic game: we often speak of "The Witcher 3 syndrome" to indicate the difficulty of appreciating open world role-playing games with a qualitative level that is objectively inferior to CD Projekt Red's masterpiece, and in this case technical, graphic and design defects only accentuate the difference in height. However, as much as we have continually expressed disappointment until now, Elex is still a product with undeniable qualities: the game world is studied in detail, without ever giving the impression that its elements were created only to fill empty space. , the quests are generally interesting and hardly repetitive or too similar to each other, there are many ways to develop the skills of the character following completely different paths, and the evolution of the same goes hand in hand with exploration thanks to the need to find characters willing to train Jax in order to gain new abilities.
The proverbial German rigidity is fully manifested in video games: genres such as turn-based strategy and, more generally, titles with little immediate mechanics and hardly appreciated by the general public today, still have great success in Germany. The same goes for production: why should a company like Piranha Bytes choose to upset the formula for which its fans have always supported it? The logical answer is “to be able to gain more players and not bore the fans”, but evidently the company is very confident.
► Elex is an RPG-type game developed and published by THQ Nordic for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 17/10/2017 The version for PC came out on 20/10/2017 The version for Xbox One came out on 20/10/2017
