ELEX II is the sequel to ELEX, an open-world RPG from Piranha Bytes, this got a lot of players hyped and excited for the release, promising the continuation of the story from ELEX where Jax defeated the Hybrid, but a new threat has come to earth with the power of Dark Elex.
In ELEX II they provided us with unprecedented freedom and a Jetpack to travel across Magalan, an interactive world filled with unique NPCs who will react in a similar fashion to us humans as their opinions will differ depending on who you have spoken to, allied with or how you treat and speak to them.
Other players are more excited for the part of being able to be killed that will affect your storyline and engage in a fluid close range and ranged combat with an improved control system.
The story starts off with Jax just going about his normal business, when suddenly his small cosy home gets torn apart and he meets the first new threat, after being chased you suffer a bite from one of these creatures and with the help of an old man you manage to survive after being out cold and suffering a bit of memory loss.
As you progress through the story you will experience flashbacks of ELEX to help the newer players understand more why your reaction and actions are the way they are, with this being said, that takes us to an important part of any game usually overlooked, the objectives.
You immediately get dumpstered with a bunch of quests so one would do the sensible thing to attend to the nearest one 1st, although when interacting with important NPCs it feels like you need to use all the available voice lines even though you feel like it is not needed to get to the next stage of the objective, it is also worth mentioning that it feels like the objectives could have given us a bit more information on what to do or what needs to be done.
Another point with regards to the objectives is that if you have an objective of killing 5 monsters, you will have all 5 markers, but as you kill the monsters you will still have all 5 markers until you have killed all 5 of them then all of them will disappear, which could cause confusion if you had to log off during a long and tiresome objective.
With the 30 Series GPUs being on the market and the 40 series being announced, one would expect a game such as this to make your PC sweat, but on a 1660TI you are able to run the Video settings on high, which some players would appreciate as it would make it playable for a lot more players, but the players that spent thousands of Rands/Dollars/Euros upgrading their PC that would make Crysis scared to run on your machine, might have expected more Graphic wise.
The audio was a job well done, with being able to not just see but hear the emotion in the voices of the NPC and Jax, along with the fighting there is no delay on the audio at all.
When it comes to fighting it is a new challenge, as you believe you might have gauged the opponent and read his movements but once you dodge they throw their attack directly after, and trust me, IT HURTS.
Overall feel I would say if one did not play ELEX, I’d recommend playing it before moving onto ELEX II as it feels as if they do not entirely explain everything completely, especially with regards to the skill points, initially you will have a couple of weapons in your inventory, but you are not able to equip them as you will just see in red that you do not have enough strength or Dexterity but the game does not tell you how much you are short to be able to equip this weapon, which could leave players frustrated.
Final Thoughts: Possibly overhyped, Audio was a job well done, no other way to put it, some players on higher-end PCs might feel that the Graphics could have been pushed a bit more to suit the higher-end PCs, the fighting and crafting mechanics do take some getting used to, And the story will give new players insight from ELEX on what happened and why this is the current situation, although we would recommend players finish ELEX before moving onto ELEX II
