{"id":14623,"date":"2022-04-22T04:50:43","date_gmt":"2022-04-22T11:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cyberpowergaming.com\/elix-2-review\/"},"modified":"2024-01-24T18:10:55","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T02:10:55","slug":"elix-2-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cyberpowergaming.com\/elix-2-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Elex 2 Review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Back in 2017, the original Elex became somewhat of a cult hit. It was a massive game, and Elex II is more of the same in that regard, but less of a hit. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The drawback to this is that your choices from the first game are thrown away. No matter which companion you favoured and who you romanced, the game begins with Jax having a child with Caja. 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 \u2013 a choice compounded by an altercation with an alien beast that bites him and gives him a debilitating infection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further advancing with their proprietary Genome engine once more, Elex looks similar to its predecessor. What it lacks in cutting edge looks and atmosphere, it makes up for with a coherent visual design. Environments and creatures fit well together, even when you have both futuristic and fantasy structures within clear sight of one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Performance has generably been stable for me with a constant 60fps on High settings running an Ryzen 3600 and an RTX2060. This shouldn\u2019t be a surprise given the age of the engine but it\u2019s always a pleasant experience nonetheless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But while the visual stylings work well, the tone of Elex II is absolutely all over the place. In the first few hours you\u2019ll bounce between running away from every combat encounter while scavenging to raise funs to having inane conversations with your annoying child.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019ll see characters getting interrupted mid-conversation by combat and then complain that \u201cI wasn\u2019t finished yet,\u201d as if it was your fault. 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. You can stick to slowly levelling up by fighting smaller enemies, but where\u2019s the fun in that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As far as exploration goes, it\u2019s all standard open world fare, aside from the return of the jetpack. This one addition makes the whole world feel so much more open and exploitable. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, this generally means that you end up in areas you aren\u2019t prepared for, but jetpacks are also useful for making a speedy escape. Almost everywhere you go contains some useful items, but it\u2019d be an exaggeration to say that the world was well populated. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This isn\u2019t a class-based game\u2014instead you\u2019ll be customising your character\u2019s attributes to match your style of play. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As equipment is linked to stats you can\u2019t 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. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A large part of your interaction with the characters of Elex is backed up by a morality mechanic that is unfortunately clunky. Characters will straight up ask if you prefer creation or destruction (the game\u2019s version of good and evil) rather than there being any finesse or subterfuge to the decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is such a shame as there are some interesting moral choices to make that would have benefitted from a more subtle system being in place. The overall story is standard fight the alien intruder stuff but the mixture of approaches and fighting styles does keep your attention throughout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Overall, Elex II is a decent continuation of the Piranha Bytes RPG formula, but it is unlikely to win over new fans. The graphics and gameplay are very similar to the first game and are beginning to feel increasingly dated, a feeling exacerbated by all the fantastic games released in the last few months. If you\u2019re already a fan of Piranha Bytes then this is exactly what you\u2019ve been waiting for, for good it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RATING: 6.5<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in 2017, the original Elex became somewhat of a cult hit. It was a massive game, and Elex II is more of the same in that regard, but less of a hit. Jax returns as the payable character, and there is clearly an expectation that you are familiar with the events of the first… Read More »Elex 2 Review<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":12547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2741],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaming-reviews-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberpowergaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberpowergaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberpowergaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberpowergaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberpowergaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14623"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberpowergaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18158,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberpowergaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14623\/revisions\/18158"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberpowergaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberpowergaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberpowergaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberpowergaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}