The combat in this game is truly utterly indefensible. I've put it down for a while to cool off, and am currently playing The Way instead. For reference, The Way is like Another World, except twice as brutal and utterly infuriating.
Maybe it's just that I'm trying to melee stuff and dodge with a new character, when I should be doing something differently. It seems to me that the telegraphing of creature melee attacks is way off, and by "way off" I mean that by the time I see that they're about to occur, it's too late to dodge; and if I preemptively dodge, I get hit anyway. The difficulty also seems uneven. The enemies at the very beginning are no problem and I can typically avoid all hits; but then while exploring the Berserkers city, the four weakened rotboars that appear in the World Heart field can each take off 4/5 of my health with one combo. They didn't kill me because I let that one dude do most of the fighting and carefully took out one and a half of them. Actually executing combos myself hasn't been a problem, which I dimly recall wasn't the case in earlier Piranha Bytes games (but weirdly, I also dimly recall having LESS trouble in say Gothic II than in ELEX).
I'm going to guess that exploring and scavenging around as much as possible, completing some quests, and avoiding combat almost entirely like a bitch for a while is an ideal approach, getting enough XP and Elexit saved up for some decent skills (which I gather are more important than attributes), decent gear, and perhaps crafting recipes, so that there's at least a small margin of error.
That or I might brute-force it, save the game right in front of some enemies, and just reload (win or lose) until I can consistently dodge in melee. I don't doubt that it's possible. I suppose I could seek out a ranged-only approach, but that feels like cheating.
Anyway, I hate all of you, because I probably wouldn't have bought this game if not the for the Codex. It's all your fault, really.
