elex

It’s actually pronounced as in elixir, not as in election

Publisher THQ NoRdic / DeVeloPer PiRANHA ByTes / forMat XBoX oNe / release Date ouT Now / Cost £40

the rPg melting POt Martin kitts

A world of ogreslaying knights will usually suffice for an RPG backdrop. If not there’s always the shiny jetpacks and laser guns sci-fi route, or the dusty post-apocalyptic wasteland scenario. Or you could try cramming absolutely everything into one enormous game…

Elex certainly isn’t short of ambition. Amid the ruined truckstops and incongruously well-preserved car wrecks of the planet Magalan, four factions have quartered the world into the four classic videogame settings: forest, fire, desert and ice.

They’re fighting for control of the eponymous Elex, a kind of magical element brought by a comet that long ago devastated Magalan and gave rise to a new world order. At the top of the food chain are the Albs, a high-tech militaristic society from the frozen north, and the Clerics, who build robots and live in volcanoes. Scrabbling around at the bottom we have a band of desert-dwelling scavengers, the Outlaws, and some technology-shunning forest people, the Berserkers, who wear fantasy armour, fight with swords and look like they belong in a different game.

You play a disgraced Alb commander who survives a botched execution, loses his Elex-given powers and is forced to start again at the lowest rung of the ladder, joining forces with the Berserkers. Or any group you want, supposedly, although you’ll have a hard time getting anywhere beyond the opening area without making that initial Berserker alliance. Magalan is crawling with creatures that will instantly complete the job the Albs and their super powerful weapons failed to do.

While it does sound like a recipe for a unique and epic adventure, it’s simply not put together very well at all. The story is confusing, the writing and acting are poor, the animation is shoddy, the combat is clunky, and it’s riddled with glitches. It’s a blockbuster concept on a straight-to-cable budget.

right Scouting the desert territory of the Outlaws. here be minefields.

BelOw Ask a silly question, get another question instead of an answer.

short cut

What is it?

Genre-blending post-apocalyptic sci-fi magic fantasy RPG. What’s it like?

Very much along the lines of Bethesda’s big guns, without the big budget. Who’s it for?

Fans of the developer’s previous series, Risen, will know what to expect.

“The combat is probably the single worst flaw, slow and clumsy”

Jaw-jaw not war-war

There are loads of dialogue options that never seem to get narrowed down as you move through a conversation. Sometimes there doesn’t appear to be an appropriate response to a question from a character, only a long list of more questions from which you’ll have to select every possible line in order to move a quest to the next stage.

We can put up with small glitches like floating characters and lip sync that suddenly cuts out in the middle of a speech – Fallout and The Elder Scrolls are both notorious for this sort of thing, so it almost gives the game an authentic Bethesda look – but there are bigger annoyances such as various pages in the menu screen randomly freezing the game for about 20 seconds.

The combat is dreadful, and given the amount of it you’ll have to do, this is probably the single worst flaw. It’s slow and clumsy, limited by dubious collision detection and a stamina bar that means you’ll often waste energy on hits that look like they should have connected. It makes exploration hard work, and we suffered plenty of deaths from the attritional effects of slipping off small ledges while clambering around trying to avoid yet another horrible fight.

If you can tolerate the shoddiness there’s a lot of game in Elex, but for our money it demands far more from the player than it ever gives back. n

oXM VerDiCt

A wildly ambitious fantasy fighter that’s sadly lacking the fundamentals.

6