Hi and Welcome to Danklord vs Games.
My name is Kevin and today we'll be taking a look at Elex made by Piranha Bytes.
Elex is a single player rpg more appealing to those who has a history with the Gothic
1 to 3 games, made by the same developer.
I'll begin by saying; I am not one of those people but that doesn't mean I'm going to
hate on the game.
Not this time.
But this video is going to be a lot more spread out in topics as I discuss the game than normal.
Let's start with story
Your ship is brought down by an unknown perpetrator and you're left presumed dead.
Your armor ends up being stolen and thus you are left stranded on a ruined planet called
Magalan dominated by three main factions.
The Outlaws.
The Berserkers and The Clerics.
Your first main task becomes obvious straight from the start.
You want to recover your armor and seek out whoever wanted you dead.
But in order to do so, you need to start from scratch regaining equipment.
The factions all have their unique preferable way of combat and your goal is to join one
of them in order to learn their specific skills and gain access to their unique armor.
But you can only join one of the three available factions and your choice is permanent.
They're all situated in different regions of a large map and most of them are friendly
at first to newcomers like yourself.
They all have a unique agenda of their own and before they'll even considers letting
you join, they all have a bunch of tasks for you that needs to be done in order to gain
their trust.
Elex is a new element brought to Magalan when a comet struck the planet.
It's the mineral the game and story is based upon.
The mineral was discovered to be valuable in many different ways and the people quickly
started using Pure Elex for spellcrafting and weapon forging.
Of course the element turned into a drug able to create half-synthetic hybrids of human
beings, enhancing their overall powers and genetics.
The downside to taking Elex as a drug is that one of the withdrawal symptoms is agonizing
death.
These hybrids, known as the Albs, is part of your characters history.
He used to be a part of them, but somehow survives with Elex in no longer present in
his system.
Skills and economy is equally important as questing and leveling to your character, if
not more.
Money, or Elexit as it's called is essentially just rock with trace amounts of Elex,
but it's the most valuable resource you can find.
With Pure Elex you can craft exp, attribute points or skill points to infinite amounts
if you so desire, assuming you have the funds to do so.
Some personal talk...
At first, the game is weird as hell, weird like Fallout: New Vegas as a first person
shooter without the V.A.T.S. system.
Weird like brushing your teeth with baking soda.
It just doesn't make any sense but for some reason, even though your gum is bleeding,
it actually works.
I mean, just look at it…
I'm not doing this intentionally.
Despite all this I stuck to it and decided to dive deeper to see what else the game had
to offer besides a neanderthal approach to combat.
While it seemed like most players couldn't stand the task, I was determined to finish
this game like no other m-fr.
Let me try to explain why most people approached the game in a way that made them resent their
first experience, only to never look back.
And also why I kind of liked it..
After your first quest where you meet your first of many available companions you'll
quickly be overwhelmed by the amount of quests and lack of directions you're given.
If you expect the game to hold your hand, just forget it, it'll cut your hand off.
After you're introduced to The Berserker stronghold, you're truly free to do exactly
what you want from this point.
Normally you'd go into the town to and start looking for people to talk to.
You start gathering a bunch of quests and then head out to try and do one or two, but
you're quickly getting killed by monsters that seem to hint that maybe you should try another
quest until you repeat this over and over and eventually hit a brick wall.
Combat is taught to the player straight from the start leaving anyone to assume that this
is a normal action rpg that just suffers from terrible combat animations, but that's not
the case at all.
If anything, it's another hint that combat should be avoided at all costs.
Elex truly tries to give you a sense of being underpowered for everything, even rats kills you
You really have to earn the strength to be able to fight creatures on your own, so the
game provides you with a companion to do most of the heavy lifting.
But if you miss that first quest and don't get a follower, you're going to have a tough
time, if not, an impossible one.
You're supposed to run away more than you're supposed to fight things, and that's quite
the opposite of most games within the same genre.
Your companion technically tells you this within the first 5 minutes of the game, but
when he says that "these woods are dangerous, I've been attacked countless times, stay
close to me", no one expects that it should be like that throughout the first 30 hours
of the game.
But it is.
And if you once again forgot to get that companion, I mean.. you..
I mean, I'm sorry you're fuucked.
There, I said It, I tried not to swear in this video.
You're given a jetpack within a few minutes and there's a reason why it exists.
Altitude and kiting enemies are your best ways of surviving in this harsh environment.
The developers chose to not stick to conventional means of having linear progression and decided
to almost randomly scatter clusters of mobs ranging from level 1 to impossible, all over
the map, and that's essentially how the game starts out for everyone.
When you first teleport to your hub and explore the outer perimeter you're going to come
across reapers that shoot you down the minute they spot you.
There's even a huge mob nearby that throws rocks at you, reinforcing the idea that you
really shouldn't mess around with anything just yet.
Like 15 to 20 levels yet, and when you do.
Don't exhaust your stamina by smashing your attack like a spaz.
As I mentioned before you're able to craft potions through alchemy that either gives
you experience, attribute points or skill points, but alchemy and many other skills
require a bunch of points in intellect, reinforcing even further that maybe strength and dexterity
isn't that important just yet.
The problem is that all skills are neatly tucked behind a terrible user interface that
makes almost anyone be like "Yeaaah..
Maybe I'll look at this later" Except for the attribute points, which are
as straightforward as ever.
But it doesn't help that each category requires you to find and talk to a specific trainer
scattered throughout the different cities if you want to level up in each category up.
The first two hours of the game is by far one of the slowest experiences you're going
to come across in a game and I honestly think it's because of the Steam refund policy,
and that's all it is.
There is so much dialogue in this game, dialogue which isn't even good by the way, but it
all serves a purpose.
Not only does it provide you with information, ideally you'd realize that you can talk
your way out of almost every situation if you have the stats to back it up, but the
dialogue is so damn boring and monotonous that I honestly skipped 80% of it.
My strategy was to put subtitles on and just read faster than they spoke, skipping everything
else, but I feel like I missed out on so much information of why I was doing certain things.
The acting isn't terrible per say but it's somewhat apparent that the voice actors were
detached from what's happening inside the game, leaving them with very little to no
context.
Sometimes it works.
Most of the time it doesn't.
Most of the time the camera couldn't handle the situation at all and went through walls
or just couldn't put my player in frame.
Sometimes it did this..
Piranha Bytes are known for their specific type of gameplay that seems to be present
in their titles all the way back to 2001.
Innovation and quality of life seems to be uninteresting to the developers in favor of
keeping the game "true to it's predecessors" but it cost them a great deal of players sick
of the same old flaws.
To many players, it's not a valid excuse to cripple the mechanics of the game in order
to keep things true.
It comes across as lazy and frankly, unacceptable in the year of 2017.
I on the other hand that never had to play any of their previous titles, so I quickly accepted
the game for what it was.
A game made by a small group of overly ambitious developers that I had to outsmart and complete.
I also had Fallout new Vegas horribly boring world design in the back of my head thinking
that this world is diverse and lush enough to keep me interested in exploring every inch of it
Elex is still unconventional in every single way when it comes to RPG's but the overall
package works.
If combat wasn't as clunky as it was, killing two enemies in a quest wouldn't feel as rewarding
as simply plowing through hordes of enemies.
You see, games are made for you to feel a bit like a superhero.
Even though the challenge increases, you're still on top of the enemies at all times.
You're better and stronger.
Most importantly you don't have terrible AI, but in Elex you're brought down to a level
lower than the enemies themselves until you start gearing up, and even then, you'll
be pretty terrible.
It's like they want you to be a caveman.
Embrace your inner caveman for god sake!
You'll need a lot of patience and you're going to be looking at the same armor for
quite a while until you establish an economy and a rank within your faction.
I rarely found armor by looting and not having fun loot in an rpg is just…
Bordering on illegal.
Also, if you haven't played this game, looting itself is a bit tedious and clunky as you
have to target the physical item on the ground, or on a shelf to pick it up.
Yeah, there's not a whole lot of clickable surface to an arrow, so don't bother with
a controller..
But once you do start getting armor, it feels rewarding as hell getting to look like the
NPC's you've come across around the world.
If only the stats could reflect that.
The increase you get is so minute that it barely makes a difference if not for the overall
aesthetics and there's no page where you can see how much health you have or damage
you deal.
Hell, you can't even tell how much experience you have into your level in numbers.
There's just a small progress bar that fills up as you go, and there's no indication
of level besides a skull meaning - run forrest, run.
But there's so much content in this game for you to explore, the options you have for
going about your questing is just amazing but at the same time nothing new.
I honestly think that the game would have been better off financially if it was called
Gothic 4; New and Unimproved; but hey, they wanted to bring in a new audience without
ever taking the time to lay down the basic rules for all of the new players to learn.
I can't put my finger on exactly why, but I enjoyed my time with the game once I realized
how it should be played.
But neither could I understand Fallout: New Vegas.
I hated the game as much as I loved it for it's terrible gameplay outshone by the incredible
story behind its back.
Elex isn't going to give you a story worthy of exploration but it's going to give you
a world worthy of one.
To start to come to a conclusion.
The first city you come across are run by The Berserkers and they've decided to ban
all use of technology.
The map and interface is all supposed to be integrated technology into your sleeve and
thus, opening the quest logs, maps or attribute panel will trigger the guards or npc's to
comment on your use of technology.
Another way of the game trying to tell you that you should explore other cities and see
what they think of you.
You're not supposed to make a choice early on in the game of what faction to join.
You're supposed to take advantage of all of them one by one and gain experience in
the process.
You're not supposed to forget that your allegiance originally was with the Albs.
The mistake you can make that you would traditionally do in a game is that you want to finish one hub or a
city one at a time
If you do that, you're going to get stuck and when you get stuck, you try to grind mobs
for XP.
Mobs that once again, kill you.
Because none of this is explained the game comes across as a difficult game with horrible
mechanics, but there is so much more to it than that.
The first few quests have you run some outrageous distances
making you believe that they are meant for later in the game, while they're not, if
they're given to you, they can all be done, even if you're level 1.
On this save file I got kidnapped by the Clerics while on my way to do a regular quest and decided
to join them for the fun of it.
For my next playthrough I'm going to try and take over an entire city by joining them
and killing their leader.
I'll see what happens for the fun of it and I think those "sandboxy" type of elements
are enjoying.
It's unfortunate though that the process to get there is sort of tedious.
But if you stick to it and you enjoy rpg's where you can pickpocket everyone at night
and destroy a faction from the inside out, you're going to enjoy the insane amount
of time it takes to complete this game.
There's not many games out there nowadays that can give you that sense of grandness
when you think that you're ready to take on the last boss only to have the game hit
you with "Chapter 2" after almost 40 hours of playing.
I mean come on...
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