I love Elex.
Is absolutely outstanding in many parts.
The world is detailed, colorful, wast, expansive and absolutely interesting.

Surprisingly, the the countless fetch quests, are way matured in their development.
Often I was expecting trivial resolutions or "run of the mill" investigations, while the dialogs and script show a way mature, and less cliche, development.
I'm genuinely surprised.

The skill tree matured from previous PB games, and character growth is more sensible. Overall.

Lack of bugs or other crappiness, makes the game flow to be good.
A solid, extensive and intriguing experience.

The game is a solid thumb up!

Combat.
Combat never changes.

From Gothic 1 to Elex combat is terrible.
For some masochistic reasons, I can't fathom, I still enjoy the combat... but is objectively bad.

* Everyone, aside you, is blindingly fast, to a point of nearly teleportation.
* The amount of times enemies hit thin air, while still damaging you, is countless
* I fired 500 (five hundreds!) arrows to a troll...
* Monsters that took ages to kiil, and one shot killed me... +20 EXP WTF...
* You go from bows to flamethrower. Nothing in the middle.
* Armour. Why I should use one?
* I upgrade a weapon, just to have it unusable? :D God....
* Stats progression is generally broken. You stick to the same crappy thing you've got. By the time you can use the higher tier weapon, the upgrade of your olden weapon, that now you can use, is more powerful.. really?
* You kill NPC with shining, energized weapons and amazing full body armours. When you loot: 39 Elexit. Cheater developers....

It's been awhile since I played, but I had two playthroughs: an aborted "good" playthrough and a completed "evil" playthrough. Like a lot of games in this particular sub-genre, you have to learn how it works and exploit the hell out of it, and it has sort of an inverted learning curve where the earliest part of the game is the hardest.

Here's what I did to beat my run (but in retrospect it feels a bit like "easy mode"): if you don't mind being "cold," drink as much Elex as you can get your hands on, especially the ones that give you stat bonuses and skill points. It's basically free XP. Higher stats will let you access better weapons and better skills will let you hit harder and survive longer. Then make sure you join a faction and get a hold of their armor. That makes a world of difference. And you need to plan your build and go straight for the skills that matter and leave the "nice to haves" until later, when your absolute domination of the game makes grinding for XP a casual after thought.

Seriously, you go from "Oh crap, TWO rats!" to "It's just a pack of raptors, you stay back, I'll be done in 30 seconds." But getting over that hump to get to that point is hard, and in my first playthrough, I got trapped with bad skills and stat distribution. If you're not built well, you'll struggle more and more with less and less resources.

I think it's fair to call that "bad game design," especially in the modern game space, but it seems to be a hallmark of PB games.

I agree the combat is clunky, and feels much better with a controller than M+KB. I do also agree that the game is awesome.