Elex

[Blood Brain Barrier]

Played it about halfway through, its fucking trash. Pirahna Bytes have lost their touch and to be honest I actually think its insulting of them to put out a 60 dollar game with THAT combat system.

The combat system is fine. It's just in the first half of the game, you've lost your powers and are not a good fighter. When you increase your stats that changes. I don't get why games like Dark Souls are praised as "difficult" and then games like Elex are said to be "clunky".

This is Piranha Bytes best game yet.

Have you played Dark Souls? I feel like anyone who had played both Dark Souls and Elex would "get it". For a start the animations in Elex are terrible, just terrible. Then theres the weird combination of having to chain 4 or 5 attacks to do any damage and an endurance bar - this is the video game equivalent of mixing orange juice and tooth paste. Saying that the enemy design leaves a lot to be desired is almost too kind since their AI is terrible and most of the non-humanoid enemies have serious trouble if the player moves from left to right, since their attack pattern is just straight ahead every time. The dodging is also just blegh - not responsive and snappy but really sluggish and slow.

Its worse than in Gothic (where most of the complaints about combat come from people who insist on using a mouse when its better to play it just with a keyboard as the developers intended) and somehow even worse than in Risen because of the endurance bar addition, something which I didn't think was possible before playing. Perhaps you're the one person on the planet who thinks Elex combat is great but the fact is players - among those some of the most fervent PB fans out there - have been complaining about this combat system since Risen 2. And in all that time PB haven't bothered changing the combat system in any real way. Arguably, they've made it worse. If you go and look at Elex steam page or even the German PB forums the biggest criticism people have is the terrible combat, even positive reviews will blast it.

Considering a very loyal and dedicated community have been telling PB what to change about it for half a decade now, thats why I feel its insulting. Even major, mainstream game review sites in Germany and Eastern Europe cut Pirahna Bytes a lot of slack and now it feels like they're just happy to rest on it - our community will buy the game anyway, our friends at major outlets will give us a good score anyway, why bother changing this terrible combat system?

Yes, I've played Dark Souls. Hated it. I've also played The Witcher, and some of The Elder Scrolls games.

Piranha Bytes are still the only ARPGs I enjoy. So "clunky combat", "poor animations" etc don't seem to mean a thing to me.

And that isn't even surprising to me. How much of the game is spent fighting? Certainly less than 20%.

And before you say "the rest of the game isn't even good", to me it is. I enjoy the campy dialogue, the overbearing masculinity and tribalism, the sense of exploration and discovery. It's not just good, it's fucking fantastic. No other game can offer anything close to it.

The only thing I dislike is the need for a "boss battle" at the end of every game. I'd rather a series of puzzles or something.