{"id":7804,"date":"2022-03-04T01:16:02","date_gmt":"2022-03-04T01:16:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.xtremeservers.com\/blog\/elex-2-review\/"},"modified":"2022-03-04T01:16:02","modified_gmt":"2022-03-04T01:16:02","slug":"elex-2-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xtremeservers.com\/blog\/elex-2-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Elex 2 Review"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It’s been a while since we checked in with the inventive sci-fi world of Magalan and its standard-issue bald video game protagonist Jax in 2017, and while the landscape has changed, a lot has stayed the same. I wish more had changed, to be honest, because the hold-overs from the original Elex<\/u><\/a> are most of what makes Elex 2 a disappointment. Underwhelming and sometimes confusing character writing undermines an interesting main quest scenario, graphical glitches sabotage an often beautiful post-apocalyptic world, and straight-up terrible combat tears down everything else.<\/p>\n

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I’ll get this out of the way right up front: I can’t think of anything positive to say about the combat, and that makes it very hard to recommend Elex 2 in spite of anything else it gets right. It feels clunky, imprecise, and annoying. The hitboxes are ridiculous. Many enemies repeat these glacial, downright silly attack animations where it’s almost impossible to tell when it’s actually dangerous to be standing near them. Jax, who has already saved the world once at this point, can still be killed in two hits by some random varmint along the side of the road. They do at least provide helpful skull icons on each foe’s health bar this time to let you know when you’re fighting something that is currently out of your league, so I had fair warning that whatever stray rodent just murdered me is meant to be a certified badass.<\/p>\n

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Fight Club<\/h2>\n
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Combat in Elex 2 is not bad because it’s too challenging \u2013 take that from someone who\u2019s currently loving Elden Ring<\/u><\/a>. It’s just badly designed. The poorly-balanced stamina system makes it difficult to smoothly transition between attacking, defending, and maneuvering, even after you upgrade your stamina regeneration much later on. This creates an almost turn-based feel, and not in a good way. I attack, then I stand back and watch the bad guy swing ponderously at the air, then I get to run back in and attack again. Standing your ground usually gets you killed, since even basic enemies are flush with hitpoints and it takes Jax dozens of levels to feel more robust than a wet sheet of paper. Much like the original Elex, the scarcity of ammo and mana potions makes it very difficult to go for a pure ranged build \u2013 though being able to craft your own ammo helps a bit. On top of that, there are too few effective options when you\u2019re getting ganged up on in melee.<\/p>\n

Shields are all but useless until much later on, with some of the early ones only allowing you to take three direct hits instead of two. I often had to farm money for potions to get through tough encounters, which is a drag. The one thing that’s been improved from its predecessor\u2019s combat system is that you don’t have a lot of encounters where you’ll get 360 noscoped by a firing squad offscreen, thus being forced to kite melee troops around a cliff for ages to break their line of sight. So that’s nice.<\/p>\n