The game does have a few difficulty options but by and large, the game is hard. Speaking of gameplay, I want to share a forewarning I received from the developers before I played the game, which pretty much said that ELEX II is not easy. This is a shame because the jetpack is one of the best gameplay mechanics in the game. In the later hours of the game, this encouraged me to just use fast travel.
Enemies are scattered around randomly waiting for you to walk by and NPCs mostly exist in half-empty towns. That being said, the world can still feel empty. I felt that some of my decisions could really impact the land and its people as I played. The sense that the Magalan in ELEX is an ever-evolving world can be seen with the changes made from the first game to this one, as well as with the choices you make in ELEX II alone. For those who played the first game, the map size isn’t much different in ELEX II, but a lot has changed in terms of how it looks and what factions are in power. Magalan is an expansive setting, though that isn’t always for the better. Of course, to see all that (side) content, you have to explore. The game is certainly playable without prior knowledge, but with so many returning characters and referenced events, it’s easier to go in with a general idea of what happened on Magalan six years ago. Due to may lack of knowledge about the first game, I spent a lot of time on the ELEX wiki getting caught up on the lore and story. There are lots of twists and turns, but overall, I found some of the side storylines more memorable than the main narrative. A similar note can also be said about the game’s overarching story.
Luckily, there is a rather colorful cast of characters that accompany Jax on this long journey, and their stories, struggles, and sentiments were much stronger motivators to accomplish the mission. Despite having spent all this time with him on this journey, I just didn’t find myself rooting for Jax in his noble mission to save Magalan. You shape Jax’s character with the dialogue decisions you make but, at least in the low destruction path that I took, that doesn’t change him much past his gritty emotionless war hero. In the time between the last game and this one, Jax is married and even has a child, though he is estranged from both as the game starts. The game takes place a few years after its predecessor and follows Jax, a war hero whose efforts to warn everyone about forthcoming dangers have fallen on deaf ears. The first, are those who didn’t know what eurojank meant until this introduction, and the second, are those who are already fans of the genre.ĮLEX II from Piranha Bytes is a sequel to the 2017 vintage open-world RPG called ELEX. Though I knew little about the game or its niche genre when I stepped foot on Magalan, after over 20 hours into my playthrough and several more spent browsing related webpages, I have come to realize that this review has to address two separate audiences. A step into the latest game from a developer behind Gothic one of the most famous “eurojank” games ever made. For me, as someone who has not played the first game, going into ELEX II was a journey into the unknown. It’s that very same community that made the original ELEX sort of a cult hit.
Players who see the game’s bugs as charming and ones who accept the technical shortcomings as part of the package deal. (Which was coincidentally also published by THQ Nordic.) At first glance, it may sound almost offensive to use the term, however, there is a niche audience that really adores games in this genre.
And, interestingly enough, last year we actually covered a game that fits that description called Biomutant. That’s a new word I learned since I started playing ELEX II and, in my understanding, it refers to AA games that are as ambitious as AAA titles but without the budget.
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