ELEX Is A Weirdly Compelling Open-World RPG

ELEX, the ambitious open-world RPG from Piranha Bytes, makes one of the most worrying first impressions I’ve ever come across in a game. Opening with a rickety-looking flight that is quickly grounded by a projectile, our hero, Jax, who looks like he’s definitely related to inFamous’ Cole McGrath, stumbles out at of his downed ship at the rate of five frames per second before immediately and unconvincingly getting shot by his clan kin.

From there, it quickly settles into your typical RPG intro: kill rats with a weak weapon and pick up all the things in sight. But then you get a jetpack. Not just a pitiful jetpack that acts as more of a double jump; it’s a full-blown bit of tech that propels you upwards like a scientifically enhanced basketball player. ELEX had gone from giving me cause for concern to strapping me in for the weird ride in the space of five minutes.

Marketed as an open-world RPG that doesn’t pull any punches, ELEX certainly lives up to its billing: a stranger punches you immediately in the face and then becomes your friend. From here, the game opens up and draws you into its fascinatingly janky world. If you’re looking for arbitrary comparisons (which I know you guys love), think of ELEX as the oddly enthralling lovechild of Ark: Survival Evolved and Fallout: New Vegas.

The story is incredibly dense, which is established from the off: you’re in a post-apocalyptic world where factions are fighting for control with ELEX, a powerful substance, at the heart of all the conflict. You have the Albs, who you used to belong to before you were betrayed, the Berserkers, who eschew all technology and have control over magic, the Clerics, who are as tech-obsessed as the people who buy every new iPhone, and the Outlaws, who live in the harshest areas of Magalan and thrive off reclaimed and rejigged weaponry. They all have their uniquely stylised areas of Magalan, which comes across in-game as a strange mish-mash of different themes that really shouldn’t work, but they somehow do.

ELEX’s USP is that it does pretty much everything most open-world RPG fans clamour for. With many mainstream RPG titles dialling back on some of the more hardcore elements of the genre and going for a more streamlined and broadly appealing experience, ELEX pretty much says “fuck that” and throws everything at you. I am not being cute here: you’ll go from picking up mugs and fending off rats to fighting off velociraptors within the space of a minute. It’s utterly mad, and I kind of love it.

The mechanics are a little overwhelming to begin with as there’s simply so much to try to understand. It doesn’t exactly lure players in; ELEX almost has a roadblock checkpoint where it asks for credentials before letting anyone through. It’s seriously unforgiving, making your life miserable after an impossible fight without warning at such an early level to joyous the next when you jetpack to a roof and watch your companion cut through the nuclear toads that were giving you grief.

ELEX is very prudish with what it allows the player to become from the off: I am many hours in and still don’t feel my Jax is any better than when he crash landed. Levelling up is simple enough with you getting ten points for reaching new levels which can be distributed across a ream of different possibilities, from strength to cunning and everything in-between. However, all of the juicy equipment and abilities are withheld behind higher levels so it’s highly likely that your starting weapon or something similarly weak will be your best friend for the game’s first ten hours.

Likewise, the game promises that you can join one of the four factions and play the game how you want, but it doesn’t feel that way because of a steep learning curve and a lot of attrition to join the factions. I’ve done a lot of legwork for the Berserkers, including travelling halfway across the map to give someone a weapon, repairing relationships between clans, finding missing people, and all kinds of mindless fetch quests, yet I am no closer to passing the test.

The disparity in ELEX’s hodge-podge styles are almost worth the price of admission on their own. There’s little rhyme or reason behind anything, just a case of “more” all-round: if the aforementioned raptors feel out of place, just don’t be surprised when you turn a corner and see a giant scorpion humanoid, a massive sentry bot, and what looks like a pissed-off dodo relatively close to each other.

ELEX is also a very janky game, which is understandable given the scope of the game versus the comparatively modest production budget. NPCs will regularly walk on the spot, enemies will sometimes fly into the air, “jetpacking” will often lead you into some strange places, and the animations don’t look entirely smooth. Also, this will happen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixQ6EcpW_xA

There are plenty of strange design choices that seem destined for a patch at some point in the future. The mini-map certainly confuses more than it helps with very little detail apart from similarly-coloured waypoints, which will result in a lot of hopeless wandering around and dipping in and out of the menus. Weirdly, the menu where you access all of your items doesn’t also pause the game, so looking at it out in the wild is a serious risk – it felt like a survival horror because it was intense as all hell to leave myself prone in a world where there’s something trying to kill me every five seconds.

Despite a few frustrations, I can’t help but feel utterly endeared by everything ELEX tries to do, even if it only gets halfway there for most of them. I’ve got a lot more time to spend in this captivating, maddening world, and I can’t wait to start shooting dinosaurs with laser beams.