ELEX II - Review @ Kordanor's Gaming Lair

Kordanor has reviewed ELEX II:

Elex 2 - Review / Conclusion [EN] by Kordanor

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Conclusion & Rating:
While the story-transition from Elex 1 over to Elex 2 has a bit of a problem in regards of plausibility and some quests aren't exactly convincing and they kind of degreade in quality closer to the end, I think the story overall is rather well done. It's a bit of a shame that the English localization is way inferior to the the German original. It's not full of errors, but where the original has lots of humor and properly directed voice-overs, the English version is just bland in comparison, and has almost nothing of the humor left (you can especially see that if you understand German and compare the dialogue joining the Berserkers with the one of my German review).
The issues with the questlog aren't as much of a problem, although it's still annoying to handle and to find any resolved quests. Character development feels nice for the most part, but loses relevance after about the first half of the game and that's also true for most of the item system.
Despite of that the exploration aspect is the biggest strength of the game in my opinion. Because even if a lot of the items you are going to find, aren't super relevant, there are still some left which do have some value for the player, and besides of that it's also just fun to explore and discover all the locations the developers put together in so much detail. If you are traveling around in the world, it just feels like it's somewhat alive and it's not just consisting of different spots which were designed to tie quests together. You can often see that the developers went an extra step when they implemented these quests, really making them part of the game world.
While neither the controls nor the combat is great, they are manageable and aren't really standing in the way to enjoy the game.

My overall rating for the English Version of Elex 2 is a three quarter thumbs up. And I am explicitly mentioning the language, as I think that the significantly better Dialoges in the German version push that one towards the Full Thumbs Up rating.
Still, if you are mostly looking for Exploration and doing Quests in a vast open world then Elex 2 should be just the right game for you. If you are mostly interested into character development, combat and loot, then...this game is probably not your best choice.

For more details (and the answer to the question whether you should have played Elex 1 beforehand), check out the full video.