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It ups the stakes and provides a more personal angle, but it doesn’t take long before you’re given a familiar overarching, multi-phase goal and given free rein to head out in any direction.
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The opening hours also introduce Jax’s new priorities - his wife Caja, his son Dex, and their strained family life. You can upgrade it as you progress, funding new fortifications and facilities for your army, and recruit leaders to manage them. This was a feature you could miss right up to the end-game in 2017’s ELEX but is now essential to confronting the alien menace. Early questlines are more linear and cohesive, with fewer difficulty spikes (just don’t push main quests too hard, too early) and Jax quickly establishes a base of operations - “The Bastion”. You’re welcome to take on the invaders straight away, but your excursions will end in swift defeat without decent gear, companions, and preferably an allied army.įor both new and returning players, Jax’s slow rise to power is made more tolerable thanks to a streamlined opening. That said, there are plenty of recurring characters and call-backs to past events, so I’d suggest newcomers at least watch a detailed story synopsis to get the most out of the sequel. For new players, this means you’ve got a decent amount of background lore to cover but you can still enjoy Jax’s new adventure without playing the prior game. The nature-loving Berserkers have come out on top, but all factions are fragmented once again, aiming to conquer territory and push their ideology on others.
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The surviving factions - which include the free Albs and a brand new one - have come to accept and ignore an ominous celestial body orbiting Magalan. Jax, despite his actions in defeating the Alb threat, has failed to convince the factions of the impending alien invasion revealed in the final moments of the first game. It’s great on paper but, if you’re a fan “AAA” RPGs - lavishly written and cinematic but carefully directed and mechanically homogenized - there’s a lot of jank in ELEX II that might put you off.ĮLEX II’s story picks up several years after the events of the first game. Interconnected quests, lots of player-choice, competing factional interests, slow and stat-heavy progression, and risky exploration are the highlights - and all with little hand-holding. Sure, there are gameplay and visual refinements, and the narrative is designed to help new players catch up quickly, but this is a Piranha Bytes’ game through and through. For more advanced visuals, you could be looking at anywhere between $1500 and $2000 thanks to the higher cost of pre-built PCs relative to their performance.To preface this review, I need to state upfront that ELEX II is a game for fans of the first - which I am despite notable issues. On the other hand, if you’re buying a pre-built machine, you’ll need to spend at least $1000, if not $1200, to get a machine capable of running the game at an okay framerate at 1080p. For something smooth framerates and advanced features, you’ll need to spend $1200 or more. If you’re self-building, a PC around the $800 will probably be enough to get the game up and running at 1080p, though you may struggle to get a consistently smoother framerate for that sort of price. Since Elex II has medium-high system requirements, you’re going to need a semi-decent gaming PC to be able to run it.
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What Gaming PC Do We Recommend To Play Elex II? GPU : Radeon RX 5700 XT or Geforce RTX 2060.GPU : Radeon RX 5600 XT or Geforce GTX 1060.Elex II System Requirements Minimum System Requirements Eurojank is a term that means European-based games with a lot of ambition but not enough budget that, as a consequence, come out a bit janky. If you don’t know, then let us tell you that both of those games are full Eurojank, and the original Elex was a lot like that as well. The connection should be pretty clear, as a lot of the developers also worked on those previous games as well. If you don’t quite meet the requirements needed to play the game, then you’re going to have to get your hands on a new PC, or at the very least think about upgrading some of your hardware here and there.Īt its heart, Elex II is a 3rd-person action RPG that owed a lot to games like Risen and Gothic 2. You can follow our guide on checking system requirements if you want to find out for yourself. Well, truthfully that’s a tough question to answer without knowing how powerful your rig is. With Elex II on its way, and looking like a considerable upgrade over the visuals of the first game, there are probably some folks out there wondering if they’re going to be able to run the game on their rigs.
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