I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where my first interaction with a key character was to lose a big chunk of reputation, simply because I tried to talk to them while they were otherwise engaged in a conversation with another NPC. Your role, as the person essentially in charge of building an army that can repel the alien invaders, one alliance at a time, is an influential one, but NPCs also have their own lives to get on with. There’s a heavy focus on player agency in ELEX II, with different factions to join and a huge array of quest branches that influence how everything plays out, but you’re not the only person in Magalan. What really drives that feeling home is how much the world and its people seem to respond, not just to your actions as a player, but to each other. It’s still filled with wondrous sights and plenty of things to discover, but they feel less handcrafted-and by extension, more believable.

Where more polished games always struggle to hide their artificiality, rough edges give the world of ELEX II an organic quality-it doesn’t feel like a playground meticulously crafted to evoke particular responses so much as just… a world, in all its beauty and ugliness, to explore and exist in. And beneath the jank, there’s a substance and depth that the more polished games ELEX II will inevitably be compared to almost always lack.įirst and foremost, we have an open world that feels well and truly alive.

It’s messy, often frustrating, and sometimes things break a little bit, but it’s far from unplayable, and approached with the right frame of mind, there’s fun to be found in the unwieldy nature of the game. There’s something oddly appealing in that, though-these games have their followers for a reason. It’s far from the messiest Eurojank we’ve seen, from Piranha or anyone else, but it’s jank, through and through-if you expect anything else, you’re going to be disappointed. The story of a sudden alien invasion in a world already dealing with the warring factions of a post apocalypse is right out of a pulp novel, with comically cringeworthy (but occasionally genuinely funny) dialogue to really capture the mood. Sometimes you’ll accidentally swing your sword a little too haphazardly and accidentally strike a gas tank, blowing yourself to pieces in the process, but that’s just life.īizarre animations, especially with characters’ faces, make uncanny valley ELEX II’s home, even when they’re not being hindered by rendering glitches or other strange graphical oddities. Odd physics, animation quirks, and a lack of any real heft behind attacks makes combat an unwieldy affair at the best of times, and any semblance of trying to fluidly evade attacks and take out your enemies with well-placed strikes quickly gives way to mad flailing that mostly gets you through. Make no mistake, ELEX II is janky, through and through. The studio has come a long way since then, but they’re still championing the kind of messy charm that makes Eurojank such an intriguing prospect (at least, to people who don’t expect AAA polish), and ELEX II is a case in point. Nobody does Eurojank quite like Piranha Bytes-after all, the pretty much invented the style with Gothic. They’re a curious thing, those games that are unwieldy, unpolished, even slightly broken, yet fascinating in the depth of their systems and creative ideas they entertain.

Elex 2 characters