In truth, though, most of Elex’s progression boils down to fights. Sadly, though, this is the exception rather than the rule-it only happened to me a few times. You can stumble on some of the end-stage characters or set piece encounters of a quest before you even know it exists-like myself, who found a conspiracy in the making and was forced to deal with it before I knew most of the people and the situation involved. You can stumble on some of the end-stage characters or set piece encounters of a quest before you even know it exists.Ĭonversely, the openness of the world and quests can be great. Social options, then, seem designed for those who will play the game multiple times, consulting a wiki before opening any given conversation to ensure they’ve got the right skill totals to choose the dialogue options they want. Like anything else in the game, these requirements vary wildly-one of the first characters in the first town has a dialogue option that requires a whopping ten points in a skill category. You might be able to intimidate a guard because you have a handful of points in combat skills, or repair a robot because you’ve sunk every point you have into crafting. There are interesting social and dialogue choices that any given character might access because they only require you to have spent points in a specific category of skills. (Sorry about your urgent problem, see you in three weeks when I can do something about it!) You’ll get a quest and try to solve it only to discover it’s something you’ll have to come back to in ten or fifteen hours. That inaccessibility can be frustrating because most quests you find will involve or require combat. Playing this game, even on its easiest difficulties, you will save constantly and re-load just as much. Enemies have the same stats from hour one on, meaning that much of the world at start-90% or more-is totally, brutally inaccessible to you on pain of death. The most effective way that it communicates this independent nature is by a complete lack of scaling mechanisms. It’s designed to appear as such using a variety of tricks that are standard to the open world RPG, like a day-night cycle that gives characters routines to follow. The game plays into this, instead of the normal moral compass of good-bad that RPGs use, your character’s spectrum runs from cold and emotionless to passionate and explosive.Įlex’s primary conceit is that this world doesn't care about your character. The main character in particular, once an emotionless Alb mutant but now betrayed by his people and without his powers, has had so little interaction with the real world that his behavior is an entertaining parody of stiff, boring scarred white guy videogame protagonists. It’s a reductive, transparently gamey faction system that should be one of the worst things about the game, but actually fuels odd stories and endearing fish out of water interactions between characters.
#ELEX WIKI CLERICS FREE#
To progress, you must join one of the groups of the Free People-technology loving Clerics, barbarian magic-using Berserkers, or drugs-and-explosives obsessed Outlaws. On the world of Magalan, there are four kinds of people: People who think technology is Jesus, people who think technology is evil, people who are emotionless mutants, and people who want to get really wasted. Instead of the normal moral compass of good-bad that RPGs use, your character’s spectrum runs from cold and emotionless to passionate and explosive. What you can’t scale with a jerky climbing animation and a few jumps you can reach using your jetpack, allowing satisfying open world exploration where you can pick a point on the map and go straight to it, no matter the height you must climb to do so. In return for this lack of coordination and stiffness, Elex gives you an open world that’s both densely packed and easily traversable.
![elex wiki clerics elex wiki clerics](https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/elex/images/b/ba/The_Pit.png)
Characters are visually interesting and pretty well acted, but their writing and behaviors are wooden. Frankly, it’s no worse than the much-loved PUBG, but since Elex lacks that game’s fast pace it’s much more noticeable. Individual animations are smooth, but they fit together very poorly, making action scenes look sloppy and indistinct. After 54 hours with Elex, playing well into its endgame, I was still curious about its world and the things in it, but in the process I was so often frustrated with the actual play that I doubt I’ll go back for more. More an unapologetic genre mashup of post-apocalypse, fantasy, and sci-fi videogames than a straightforward science-fantasy game, Elex’s cobbled-together tropes and genres are an astonishingly apt metaphor for its cobbled-together systems and stories.