The difficulty is all over the place. It starts off hard because protagonist Jax is rubbish, gets way too easy once you figure everything out and then just inflates the damage and health of all the enemies until everything takes an age to die, but can kill you in a few hits. Balance isn’t even an afterthought, it’s just nonexistent. I was still using a mid-game shotgun on the final boss because it clearly did so much more damage than my magic powers, or my supposedly endgame quality unique weapons. The downside of said shotgun was the lengthy reload time, but since all ranged weapons instantly reload when holstered, that could be circumvented by tapping the hotkey a couple of times. Sometimes quests require you to go back to the quest giver before they’re listed as complete, as you might expect. Other times they’re marked as complete when you’ve killed ten spikepoodles or whatever, but you still need to go back to the quest giver to get a reward and advance the story. The pacing is flat out terrible, with the last few hours of the game just being an endless slog requiring the slaughtering of dozens upon dozens of the same handful of enemy types.
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.
If it was just a case of jankiness caused by a small, overambitious team then I’d be happy to give Piranha Bytes a pass at least one more time. Sadly, that’s not the case. Elex 2 is, by far, the most unpleasant, mean-spirited and plain nasty game I’ve played in a very long time. Almost everyone you encounter is just a horrible person. They’re generally rude and abrasive, and even the friendlier ones are just annoying. One of your party characters, literally named Nasty, is flat out abusive. I’m assuming that this is supposed to be “mature” or “realistic” but it’s neither of those things. The game is like a twelve year old who thinks that being rude and swearing constantly makes him well ‘ard. These aren’t nuanced, well-rounded characters, they’re flat automatons who are unrelentingly awful instead of having any personality.
It could be argued that something was lost in translation, since Piranha Bytes is a German developer and I’m playing the game in English, but I think that’s just being terribly unfair to all the lovely Germans I’ve encountered in my lifetime. It would also ignore the fact that the same unpleasantness isn’t restricted to NPC dialogue. Elex 2, like its predecessors, has a problem with women. It’s not quite as front and centre as in earlier titles from the developer, since there are a good amount of fully clothed female characters, but the attitude on display is shockingly backwards. The women in the game are bitchy harridans, jealous and spiteful. When I decided to have Jax continue his relationship with Caija (a character from the first game who he had since had a child with and then abandoned) both of the other women in his entourage reacted negatively, losing loyalty. That’s one character who I’d hardly interacted with, and another who verbally abused Jax at every opportunity. I had no idea they even were potential romance options, but of course they hated Jax hooking up with another woman. As you may be able to guess, none of the male characters had the same reaction.
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.
Cyberpunk 2077 is the game that sprang to mind while I was mulling over how to approach this review. It’s also a janky, overambitious RPG full of sweary, violent people doing horrible things to each other. The difference is that, by and large, the characters in Cyberpunk are compelling, well-rounded characters with depth and nuance. They’re frequently likeable, even caring, forcing us to deal with the contradictory aspects of human nature. Elex 2 has none of that, it’s just a game filled with deeply unpleasant people.
