If you’ve ever played a Gothic or Risen game before, then the content of ELEX won’t be much of a surprise: Clunky melee combat which deals notably more damage than ranged or magic attacks, no character respec option, large open world with pre-leveled enemies, uneven voice acting, and a choice between several joinable factions.
I’m almost level 17 at the moment, having explored a chunk of Edan, some of Abessa and the Volcano area, and a small part of the Desert… and I do not think I’ll get much further. The main problem is the combat, which is the second worst out of the developer’s catalog (Risen 2‘s being the worst). You see, in addition to the clunky combo system they’ve added the requirement that attacking, dodging, and blocking all use Stamina… meaning you’ll often find yourself utterly helpless to avoid enemy attacks which, and here’s the real killer; do not require Stamina. Creatures don’t lose Stamina from attacking period, and NPCs can attack/parry even at 0 Stamina (though, admittedly, they usually won’t).
Ranged attacking does not require Stamina, but the trade off is that those attacks are only as strong as an equivalent melee weapon’s fast attack. There is no equivalent to melee’s strong/heavy attacks, which is a major problem since that’s where most of your damage is coming from. So ranged, at least in the early/mid-game, is worthless unless you want to spend like 5 minutes slowly whittling something’s health down.
Even were the combat less unfun though, there’s another issue: The conversations and quests. You literally have to exhaust all dialog options in order to receive and/or advance quests, and the dialog choices range wildly in tone. Aggressive lines that sound like you’re trying to pick a fight are all mixed together with understanding/passive and uncaring/cold responses making the protagonist come off as schizophrenic at best. In a way the dialog is nearly as painful as the combat.
So I can’t really recommend playing this game.
Speaking of which: The Age of Decadence. I heard a lot of good things about it and finally got around to playing a bit earlier. Didn’t get very far though because while the combat is fine the way text-adventure-like events kept popping-up almost like QTE‘s quickly became infuriating.