Elex II

Elex II is the kind of game that a major studio would never greenlight, and that is precisely why it exists. Piranha Bytes builds sprawling, rough-around-the-edges open worlds stuffed with factions, moral compromises, and systemic weirdness, and this sequel doubles down on everything that made the first game a cult oddity. You return as Jax, a former Alb commander trying to hold together a crumbling coalition of factions against a new alien threat. The setup is pulpy sci-fantasy comfort food, mixing medieval knights, mutant berserkers, and laser rifles in a way that sounds ridiculous until you are three hours deep into a faction questline and genuinely unsure which alliance is the least awful option. The core loop is classic Piranha Bytes: talk to everyone, get sent on an errand that turns into a murder mystery, find out the murder mystery connects to a conspiracy, repeat. The writing is uneven - some of the faction-specific dialogue is sharp and shows real thought about post-scarcity politics and tribalism, while other stretches feel like placeholder text that somehow shipped. Combat is third-person action with a mix of melee builds, ranged options, and ability trees tied to how much Elex your character consumes. Elex is the in-world substance that powers mutations and magic, but leaning on it lowers your Morality stat and changes how NPCs interact with you, which is genuinely the best mechanic in the game. Build variety is real: an Elex-pure cold warrior plays completely differently from a Mage flush with substance dependency, and both feel meaningfully different past hour 40. Where the game struggles is in the seams. The animation budget is visibly limited, companion AI is erratic, and early-game difficulty spikes are steep enough to feel like the engine is daring you to quit. Jetpack traversal is better tuned than in the first game, which helps, but the open world still has large stretches of filler encounters padded between the genuinely interesting stuff. The faction system - Berserkers, Outlaws, Clerics, Morkons, and Albs - rewards loyalty but punishes completionism, so players who need to see every questline in one run will hit dead ends and feel cheated. That is a design choice, not a bug, but it is worth knowing upfront. For RPG players who tolerate jank in exchange for systemic depth and a world that feels hand-authored rather than procedurally smoothed, Elex II earns its mixed reputation more through ambition than failure. The mixed Steam score reflects a real tension: fans of Gothic and the original Elex will find exactly what they want here, while players expecting Witcher-level production values will bounce off it fast. The narrative payoff for sticking with a single faction all the way is legitimately satisfying, the world has actual internal logic, and the Elex consumption system gives your character arc a mechanical backbone that most action RPGs skip entirely. Just go in knowing the first four hours are the worst four hours.

Monika · Scout Team

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