ELEX II

Review

Developed by Piranha Bytes and released on PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One, ELEX 2 brings you back into the world of Magalan, where alien invaders known as Skyands are trying to enslave the inhabitants of the planet. Taking once again the role of Jax, the main hero from the first game, you are forced to abandon your peaceful life in the countryside to fight against the alien invasion and find a cure for the infection that is spreading through your body.

As in the previous game, you start with nothing but a broken pipe and a few healing potions, trying to reach your family in the near-by settlement without being devoured by these new alien lifeforms. If the end of the world is not enough, then get ready for some poorly-written family drama with your ex-wife Caja, who only has harsh words for you despite being a famous hero (but not a good father, apparently). On the contrary, your son Dex is a genius who speaks like an adult and understands everything that happens in the world. After this cringy reunion, you will meet a certain character who will ask you to unify different factions against the common enemy, by completing their quests and gaining their trust.

If this premise doesn’t seem original to you, well, it’s cause it isn’t. It’s an outdated narrative formula that Pyranha Bytes have been using in most of their games, proving to be bland and plain stupid. This is the case of ELEX 2, with its underwhelming narrative that constantly fails at making you interested about events, characters and even yourself. As an infected who is going to die soon without a cure, the last thing you would want to do is deliver a message to a distant outpost or kill x-number of monsters for each faction, yet that’s what the game requires you to do more often.

While the storyline is really generic and basically deletes every progress achieved in the first game, the game still manages to create a believable world and gives you plenty of freedom through multiple choices you can make during quests. The world of Megalan looks nice and it’s fully explorable, that’s why you can easily run into deadly monsters since the beginning (which will be marked with a skull icon near their health level). Combat, as per PB tradition, feels clunky as hell and doesn’t give you any sort of satisfaction. You hit, move back, watch your enemy fail its standard attack, and then you hit again. The enemy AI is rather poor, easy to evade and to abuse using your companions as distraction. After leveling-up from fighting and completing quests, you can spend points to increase your skills. All weapons and armor have a set of requirements, so you will need to increase your attributes accordingly if you want to use specific gear. Combat animations, as well the rest, are really terrible and the game recycles many NPCs (including their voices), just like most of the building interior assets.

The User Interface is pretty barebone and uses the same generic font for everything (from dialogues, to menus and messages). You can only track one quest at a time, which is rather annoying too, considering the great number of available quests. Somehow it really feels like playing an early 2000 game, but not in a good nostalgic way as going back to play Gothic. While many developers today improve themselves with each new game, Piranha Bytes have always persevered with the same gameplay formula, afraid of taking risks and expanding their boundaries. This is pretty much visible on ELEX 2, which features the same old clunky combat, primitive UI, lacking narrative and with technical limitations.

The only, most visible, improvement is the enhancement of the jetpack functions, which make travelling through the world much more interesting, allowing you to reach high buildings, mountains and towers more easily. This greatly expands the game’s verticality, but the true potential of the jetpack can only be reached once you have upgraded its stats to make it last longer.

Other minor improvements are only visible in the graphics department. The world looks much more colorful than before, with improved lighting effects, textures and bio-diversity. Once you have travelled enough though, you will find Megalan to be a huge, empty and lifeless planet, with not much to do except visit the faction outposts to take errands. The worst thing is that the game doesn’t really respect your time, forcing you to complete silly tasks that add nothing to the narrative and only ruin your experience. Performance-wise, the game is plagued by multiple frame drops down to mid 20s, even at the lowest settings. I also encountered a few common bugs and glitches, like the infinite falling below the terrain, which forced me to reload (fortunately the game has an auto-save feature).

Love it or hate it, ELEX 2 is the classic conservative Piranha Bytes game; a more-of-the-same that only adds minor improvements to the RPG formula. Perhaps it’s time for Piranha Bytes to move forward and develop new ways of creating old-school RPGs without limiting them to clunky and barely playable gameplay mechanics.

Review written by Sonic Punk for Zeepond.com

ELEX II Steam Store Page