HomeReviewsElex II
Schlock for your system
There is no context for this cameo. Billiam doesn’t feature as an NPC. In the 40-ish hours I spent playing the game, I had no reason to return to the amphitheatre. It makes no sense whatsoever and the only explanation I can come up with is that someone involved in the game really likes Billy Idol and just wanted him in their game. It’s the sort of random that I can respect, and I only wish the game had more.
ELEX II - Announcement TrailerWatch on YouTube
ELEX II - Announcement Trailer
At first glance, this kind of “why the heck not?” attitude is all over the place. Elex 2 returns to the post-apocalyptic world of Magalan, which looked a lot like modern day Earth until a comet carrying the eponymous substance smashed into the planet. 160-ish years later, we’re left with a handful of different groups who have all learned to use elex in different ways. The mix of factions is wonderfully bonkers and makes me think of a bunch of LARPers who all turned up to a game expecting entirely different settings. The Outlaws are the most stereotypically post-apocalyptic in theMad Max-cum-Falloutvein, all scrap armour and conventional weapons. The Clerics are a hi-tech religious order who have definitely been playing too much Warhammer 40k. They birthed the pasty-faced Albs, the baddies from the first game, who you can now align with. Multiclassed hippy-vikings the Berserkers reject technology and have figured out how to convert elex into mana which allows them to cast spells. And last up are the Morkons, the new kids on the block, who lived out the apocalypse underground, worship a god of destruction, and dress like the Cenobites from Hellraiser.
I understand that this is a sprawling, open game from a relatively small developer, but it’s also a developer that has been making the same sort of game, right down to the levelling systems and the combat, over and over for two decades. All that time and they still haven’t got the fundamentals right. At the same time, it’s all starting to feel a bit stale. As much as I like the formula, and as much as I enjoy the setting and the jetpack, there’s no real surprises for anyone who has played Gothic or Risen. Before writing this review, I looked back over RPS founder Alec Meer’s (RPS in peace) writing on the Risen series to make sure I wasn’t misremembering and, sure enough, found him experiencing the same issues, making the same complaints.
Speaking of Jax, he isn’t any better. No matter what options you choose, he will be rude, angry and shouty at every opportunity. For me, this came to a head during a late game conversation with his son, Dex (who is, for the record, seven or eight years old at most) where I was presented with the option to threaten to beat him. Worse still, at least one of the companion characters will approve of that decision. Even with the general nastiness of the characters in the game, this blindsided me, forced me out of the game and away from my computer for some time.
There is certainly room for games that deal with child abuse as a subject matter, or that have such deeply flawed people as protagonists, but that requires care and tact. Neither of those are on display here, or anywhere else in the game. Instead it’s a throwaway line, with no real consequence, that exists for you to show off how eeeeeeevil you are. There’s also plenty of interesting discussion to be had about what sort of behaviour games allow us to portray, how they choose to condone or condemn and why we react viscerally to some actions and not others, but this review is already far too long.
