ELEX Review

Elex takes place on the planet Magelan, which was once a high tech world until it was hit by a comet in a world changing natural disaster. The comet brought with it the element Elex which the survivors found had many uses like upgrading the current technology that survived and that if it's consumed it grants magical powers (not sure how this was discovered, oh I know I just found this glowing rock like thing that was in this giant space rock let's see if it is edible in any way) but too much consuming is detrimental and robs the user of their emotions whilst turning them into the equivalent of mutants.

The survivors split into 4 major factions The Beserkers who hate technology and are a typical medieval society who are adept with magic. The Outlaws are predominantly scavengers who can scrap unwanted gear and can also craft and upgrade weapons and armour. The Clerics are your high technology specialists who hate the idea of consuming Elex and they have access to Psi Powers and then you have the Albs who are the typical bad guys with cleric like abilities and they have taken enough Elex to remove their emotions. Unlike games like fallout you can only join one of the three factions but are free to do the missions for any of the factions up to joining them. Joining a faction grants access to faction specific stores and skill trainers.

The game starts with your character Jax (there is no character creator at all) a male high ranking Alb who is sent on a mission and shot down in enemy territory, He survives the crash where he meets a fellow Alb who shoots you for failing the mission and you fall off a cliff and are left for dead. The game picks up after you have been robbed by scavengers and leads directly into the tutorial. Elex is completely open from the get go and is a game predominately about choices. These choices can change everything be a dick and people will remember and it will return and bite you in the ass in the most inconvenient times. You can kill anyone including Key NPC's so be careful and think before you act.

The game world itself is very large and is made up of different biomes with no loading screens between areas unless you use the fast travel system available once you have unlocked the various teleporters scattered around the map. I would like to say the the game has a steep learning curve, in fact its nearly fucking vertical if you haven't played any of the other games by Piranha Bytes. I have dipped into risen which gave me a handle on the basics but I learned a lot of things from trial and error. For instance the attributes are used to see what weapons and armour you can use as well as which abilities you can unlock, I was level 8 before I upped an attribute high enough to unlock my first ability as I split the points equally amongst the attributes. The Controls are very sluggish when compared to other action Rpgs and they do take a while to get used too.

All in all Elex is a solid old school RPG and whilst not visually anywhere near as good as some of the triple A titles that have shown up this year like Horizon Zero Dawn on the PS4 and Assassins Creed Origins it still deserves a chance if you're looking for a classic RPG to pump loads of hours into. If Elex had arrived 12 months before it would have been a great game but as previously stated it has some tough competition this year and it was a shame the game released in between two of this years most anticipated titles.