ELEX II

Плюсы для меня в Elex II по убыванию значимости: Крутой джетпак, без вопросов. Понравилась квестовая линия берсерков. Графика стала лучше: больше зелени, крутая вода. Первая треть игры в принципе норм. Персонаж управляется приятнее. Минусы перевесили: - Много промашек в дизайне. Внешний вид берсерков вызвал острое недоумение. Часть оружия плохо выглядит. - Брутальный Джакс стал каким то сопляком-оленем. Это вызывает сильное раздражение. В игре много моментов, где Джакс либо поступает как тупой слизняк либо "уровень разрушения значительно повышен". Игра резко осуждает вас если что то не по её. Когда изгой трясет с вас деньги на "Ясли" - сразу понятно что это развод на деньги. Можно ответить "я тебе не верю иди с миром". Но опции такой нет. Есть опция "отвали тупой урод" - уровень разрушения повышен. - Кайе хочется влепить трубой по лицу как только она открывает рот и далее всю игру. Это вообще другой персонаж. Многие персонажи при знакомстве ведут себя как тупые уроды а Джакс может только мычать себе под нос что то невнятное. Игра называет это "Уровень разрушения снижен" и считает такого персонажа дофига творческим. - Сильные орущие благим матом без причины женские персонажи - их тут много. - Система улучшения оружия выше уровня навыка 1 - однозначно дизлайк. - Последняя часть игры - долго тупо мочим много толстых мобов. - Морконы отвратительны. - Квесты напарников на 50% - штамповка. Я в целом за доброе прохождение. Но та же Кайя непрерывно поливает Джакса помоями, при этом просит помощи. Но когда от Джакса ожидается, что он слёзно начнёт просить вернуть отношения, а он не просит - обижается. Какого хрена, Кайя ведёт себя всю игру отвратительно, а у Джакса откуда то должно появиться желание на какой то конструктив, ради чего? Лучший напарник - Крони. Ну и Чморилла пойдёт.

characters look very weird and changed from elex 1. it looks like they dont have shadows around theirs faces and things. nothing in the modding scene to fix this kinda thing either. couldnt get past the graphics and performance compared to elex 1 so i dropped it.

I have mixed feelings about this game. It has some nice ideas. But also has a bunch of questionable or annoying things that weight it down. Graphically it looks OK at times, especially the environments. But the character models have this uncanny doll-like look to them. It’s rather distracting. The animations are stiff. Cutscenes are awkwardly directed most of the time. There aren’t many of them which is probably for the better. The writing and voice-acting don’t help much either. Some of the lines seem completely unconnected to what was sad before or after them. Maybe it’s a translation issue. The mission design is rather simple and repetitive. Most story and companion missions consist of talking, going to fight a bunch of enemies and talking some more. Most of the dialogue choices don’t seem to affect anything either. You can choose be nice or mean, but the result is often the same. I found side-quests more interesting since there is a bit more variety in gameplay and you can sometimes affect the outcome with your choices. The world is massive and would take a while to explore. You can go pretty much any direction you want from the very beginning. The loot you find however is not so great most of the time. Sure, you can find unique weapons or nice pieces of gear. But the world is so large that like 99% of the time it’s just toy cars, brooms, toilet paper and singular pieces of elexit. Even chests and safes often contain simple junk. Even in endgame areas. The reason for that is probably lies in jetpack. It’s both fun and convenient to use, but also breaks traditional exploration. Since you can just fly past enemies and reach endgame areas early. So there is no point to concentrate good stuff in endgame areas. Instead it’s spread evenly across the world and masked by all the other trash items. The leveling system has some issues as well. Unlike the previous game stats now give bonuses like damage and such, but they are so minor they might not exist at all. What’s +20 damage bonus from 100 Dex when your bow deal 500 damage? Same with skills. A lot of them add like 5-10% to damage or resistance. Some might not work at all and I wouldn’t notice it anyway. And in the end I never felt overpowered or even that strong at level 60 with all skills learned and all stats at 100+. The combat is janky. Enemy hitboxes are weird and often you’ll miss the opponent that stands right beside you. Even with lock-on. Normal melee attacks don’t stagger enemies and do little damage. Charged attacks are a bit stronger but also way slower. So slow that enemies have the time to cancel their own attack, dodge to the side and counterattack before you finish your charge. That doesn’t happen often though, since enemies are dumb and follow simple and predictable patterns most of the time. These a-holes teleport around like they play an MMO on an asian server through dial-up connection. Jetpack combat is even more janky and chaotic. Mostly you just lock onto enemy, spam attack and hope for the best. Ranged combat isn’t much better. Most ranged weapons don’t feel good to shoot. They are weak, slow, and hits lack impact. Laser rifles are especially disappointing in my opinion. And the only somewhat fun weapons are shotguns and grenade launchers. They deal decent damage at least. The ranged combat can be easily broken as well. Simply going backwards while shooting will break most enemy AI, and they won’t be able to hit you. I only tried Alb magic and it seemed underwhelming to me. It takes like a third to a half MP bar to kill a generic enemy. But Albs can only replenish mana from dead bodies and only roughly 5% at a time. There is also an AOE spell that is very awkward to control. So it doesn’t seem to be viable to go full mage in this game. As an Alb at least. Overall combat isn’t that hard, but most of the time it feels like you abuse the stupid AI rather than fighting a competent opponents. Unless you mess up the controls or get stuck on terrain 1 on 1 battles are easy. Problem though is that you don’t often fight 1 on 1. The game loves throwing dozens of enemies at you. The whole second half of the story consists of fighting hordes of enemies that have way too much HP. It gets tiresome really fast. Companions don’t help much either. They can distract some of the enemies in a group fight. But when you fight a single opponent, more often than not they just dance around them doing nothing. Or even get in your way. The game took a while to beat, so all these flaws slowly but steadily lowered my opinion of the game. Gothic 1 and 2 are my favorite RPGs of all time. They were very immersive, especially for its time. And weren’t overly long. All the other Piranha Bytes games are a hit or miss for me. This one is the latter I’m afraid. Not only it didn’t improve in some aspects over it’s predecessors. In some ways it’s arguably worse. It saddens me that the last PB game turned to be such a disappointment.