![]() I don’t inherently hate this system- Sekiro does it to great effect. But the combat is so poorly implemented in melee that you’d prefer it to be turn-based instead.Īll enemies have a yellow stamina/stance meter, and attacks will do damage to that before opening them up to damage their health. The game tries to go for a Souls-esque combat, complete with the white-dot-of-Lockon and rolling. I briefly touched upon it earlier, but combat in Elex II is just not great. You spend more time Skyrim-Horseing your way up slopes with the jetpack than doing anything meaningful or fun with it, and it’s a shame. Unfortunately the Jetpack feels like a late addition to the game’s design, and more of a solution to the problem that the game’s uneven terrain just isn’t fun to traverse. The one original thing they tried to add- the idea that he tried to warn everyone abotu the alien threat before they came- comes off as whiny and belligerent since the start of the game is just him stamping his feet that no one listened to him.Ī new feature in the game is the jetpack, which actually makes decent use of the PS5’s adaptive triggers. It’s almost amazing how the developers have threaded the needle through every generic protagonist trope from 10 years back and included none of what makes any of it interesting. ![]() He’s a buzzcut white soldier man with a scar over his eye and a kid he has to neglect to show he cares about. It’s personified by the main character, Jax. Even the regular enemies- mutated animals looks more discount Fallout than anything worth checking out. Nothing about Elex II screams visually interesting, instead looking like a mish mash of generic concepts you could buy off the Unreal marketplace. No one’s asking for the Blade of Awe to be in a starting chest- but in a game as open as Elex II, it’d be great if you could have that same player acknowledgement extend to your equipment, too.Ī huge part of the distaste also comes down to Elex II’s art direction- I’m not gonna mince my words, it looks generic. It’s not like grinding’s easy either- you have to go looking for new enemies to kill and at the end of the day it’s better to just get XP from doing quests. Every piece of gear you pick up tends to be so over your level that it just feels like the developers forgot to turn off debug mode when testing the game. There’s a variety of weapons and playstyles in the game, from guns to bows to melee weapons. It’s not helped by the fact the game drags its feet on you. Unlike other open world games that are good about having something that you’d want to work your way towards, Elex II just gives you a dull forest while your milquetoast soldier man says he should get somewhere, but never really says what. Unfortunately the world of Elex II just isn’t fun to explore- screen-by-screen the game is just dull to look at. The game tries to go for a mix of sci fi and fantasy- with factions like the Berserkers looking like regular nord-punk people and things like Mana being a thing in the game. So a huge feature in Elex II is its open world, with various factions to try and appease. It just takes you out of what’s mechanically the best system in the game by a country mile, which is a shame since the game’s NPCs are actually really good about acknowledging your agency as a player. Characters just don’t talk like people, often feeling like the voice actors suddenly got direction mid-line. On the flipside, though, the game’s writing is pretty abysmal. These are really great for roleplay reasons, since they’re totally acknowledging your agency This acknowledgement works in friendly dialogue too- I’d started a questline before the main story required it of me, and you can just tell the big questgiver “yeah, I’m already hanging out with Wulf”. But just the acknowledgement that I *could* have snuck in, had a guard not seen me is a nice reminder that this is, in fact, a game and respecting player agency always feels good even if you don’t get your desired outcome. I don’t mind that the game forced me to listen to Gardar be a dick to me- fair game, that’s what you want. Unfortunately, as soon as a guard saw me they acknowledged that I’d snuck into the fort and threw me out. Rather than hit me with an invisible barrier, the game to its credit totally let me in. I was meant to do some busy work to get approval to be let into the Berserker Capital, and I tried to skip the quest by using the new Jetpack feature to vault the wall. Follow I really like about the quests is that even if it doesn’t always allow you to use various solutions, the game does make the effort to acknowledge your choices.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |