Beat the PS4 version of Elex on PS5 yesterday. I love the original Gothic, I also very much like Gothic 2 though I never actually beat that one. Anyway, concerning Elex I always thought "sci-fi Gothic? what's not to like!". The meh reviews didn't scare me off because I know that Piranha Bytes' games have always been rather polarizing - I figured that if anything it's confirmation that it's good ol' Gothic. Well, no.

I never played any Piranha Bytes game developed after Gothic 2 so I don't know how much Elex has inherited from the Risen series but when comparing Elex to the first two Gothic games I can say this: it feels like they have learned almost nothing since Gothic 2 and also forgot a ton of things that made Gothic so great.

Superficially Elex has inherited a lot of things from Gothic like starting out as a wuss who can barely even handle the weakest critters at first or the need to join one of three factions, all of which ask you to perform a number tasks before they let you in and so on. I do appreciate some of it. Just earlier this year I beat The Witcher 3 and even though TW3 is a better game in almost every regard there are areas in which I actually prefer Elex. For one: in Elex there's actually a steep progression and substantial challenge. Witcher 3 was a game that I, with rare exceptions, kinda just floated through without any hiccups. The narrative kept things interesting but other than that it was a pretty boring experience that did not require much focus or thinking. In Elex I did regularly have to make a fight or flight decision, learn which enemies to steer clear of until I've substantially grown in strength - in some quests I actually had to sneak around or make a run for it because the enemies guarding the area were just too powerful. And while many enemies are reskins of other enemies, their strength is generally determined by their species or rank and not some totally abstract level. And exploration did feel quite meaningful here - even in the early game you can find some powerful endgame weapons just by exploring random locations (though you won't be able to equip them for a long time). GREAT!

But sadly other than that I have trouble finding any redeeming qualities in this game. Almost all of its content is utterly devoid of any originality or personality. It follows the most generic fantasy and post-apocalypse tropes just with a very thin and equally bland sci-fi layer slapped on. That could still work if the more personal content like the individual NPCs and their dialogue were interesting but they aren't. All of it made me feel like I'm playing a generic mid-tier fantasy RPG from over twenty years ago. Gothic also suffered from these things but made up for it with wittiness and black humour which gave it its personality and made it fun. Elex does not have those. It takes itself so seriously that it isn't fun but it also just isn't clever enough to work as a serious sci-fi epic. The quality of the writing and the voice acting and also the overall production quality made moments which were supposed to be epic and emotionally engaging underwhelming at best and cringey at worst. I probably could stomach the barely animated generic looking unemotional NPCs if they told interesting things but they don't. There are a few interesting ideas in the game's world and lore but they are utterly underdeveloped, instead you're almost entirely busy handling tasks that feel like you've done them in hundreds of other RPGs already.

And also the actual gameplay and overall execution are shockingly bad for a game from such a veteran studio. The melee combat is about what I expected, a very poor Souls wannabe which neither got the stamina economy nor collisions quite right but the shooting combat is just barely functional. The quests are unimaginative, there's no sensible flow to them, the quest log is the most clunky and confusing thing I have ever seen, the balancing is just all over the place. Especially in the beginning it's just a vicious cycle where you have neither the stats for solving quests with combat nor peacefully because also the peaceful solutions are practically always based on personality tests which require you to level up your character first. As a result Elex is the first RPG I've played in ages where I literally had to spend a few hours farming XP and money by slaughtering generic mobs scattered throughout the game world without making any other meaningful progress. In retrospect I know a few strategies that I could have pursued for smoother progress in the early game but I think it's quite easy to end up in a situation where you just need to grind.

Visually it's very meh, there are very few character models (there's only one female face, everyone is white and dressed in a tiny set of clothes), the music is bland, the sound design is bad and also technically the audio is botched with some sounds just missing. Technically it wasn't that terrible, it crashed only once or twice for me, but there were some serious issues here also like textures taking ages to load (often I would literally talk to floating toupees because the faces haven't loaded yet) or the inventory / map menu taking longer to open over time - without restarting the game once in a while opening the panel would eventually just freeze the game for somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds.

Now, I didn't hate the game. There were quite a few frustrating moments but nothing so serious that I would ragequit. And the steep progression, while not nearly as steep and satisfying as in Gothic, kept me motivated and going. While not particularly original or pretty, I did enjoy exploring the world. While the characters were underdeveloped and not particularly well-acted or written, I did grow a little bit attached to some of them. And even though the plot and lore were bland as hell, I did want to get to the bottom of the different mysteries and find out how it ends. It's just so much less than it could and should have been. I was counting on Gothic but got sci-fi Two Worlds.