You can trigger short ? usually very, very short ? conversations with most of them, but otherwise they?re just scenery.Īnd, of course, this wouldn?t be a game from Piranha Bytes unless the character movement was all wonky. There are people scattered here and there, but they seldom acknowledge your existence ? which is doubly odd when you consider that they?re mostly just standing around in one place, waiting for you to talk to them. It also doesn?t help that much of the game takes place in the wilderness, and it?s hard to tell one bit of rocky terrain from another ? which means you?re really relying on those useless maps.įurther, while the world may be large, it doesn?t feel very alive. What?s worse, the map is pretty much useless, giving you little idea of what is where and how far apart things are. While there are plenty of quests available, the distances between them vary wildly, and seldom make sense ? sometimes the game will make a big deal about having to find someone who?s just a few steps away, while others you?ll be sent across huge distances for some minor task. I haven?t played the first ELEX, so it?s quite possible that first game gave all these things unexpected depths ? but given how silly it all is and how seriously it takes itself, I doubt it.ĮLEX II also features a sizable open world that?s not exactly well-planned out. Armed with his trusty crowbar, he smashes his way through monsters named Morkons and alien invaders called Skyands, and has angry conversations with characters named Drabak and Gardok. Of course, in most other ways ELEX II still feels like a throwback to a decade ago, starting with the fact your character is a bald space marine named Jax. Admittedly, a modern game where the characters all talk using the same facial movements and hand gestures over again, but a modern game nonetheless. It?s not dazzling to look at, and it certainly doesn?t push the Series X to its limits or anything, but just like the first ELEX didn?t look too out of place on the PS4, ELEX II can pass for a modern game. To be fair, ELEX II looks a lot better than Risen did back in the PS3 days. Nearly a decade ago, my colleague Dustin was lamenting the death of ?B quality games” when writing about Risen 2 ? but here we are, ten years later, and that same developer, Piranha Bytes, is still around, putting out games that could charitably be described as AA experiences. It?s kind of comforting to know that games like ELEX II still exist.
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