[PAX East] Hands-on with ELEX and its fantasy apocalypse

ELEX is an interesting concept for a game. It’s open world, an RPG and reminds me a lot of some of Bethesda’s epics. It’s also set in a post-apocalypse, so thematically it can be aligned to the “end of the world, let’s figure out how to survive” genres.

Oh, and there’s also magic.

At PAX East, the latest demo of the game throws us into a relatively early area. The key focus of our time consists of playing with its countless mechanisms: guns, melee weapons, and terrain traversal. With a deep story, it would take too long to dive into it during one short demo. Instead we get to experience the flushed out mechanics that make up the game’s current state.

We start next to a broken highway overpass, attacked by a scavenger. Armed with a sword, we make short work of him and move on, running and avoiding collapsed sections on the highway and hopping off into the brush as needed. A stamina meter determines how much we can attack, and balancing light and heavy attacks can mean life or death. The visuals aim for realism, although the developers know that trying to replicate actual Earthen cities is a difficult task. Missing city details would undoubtedly lead to fans wondering why their town isn’t accurately represented. With ELEX, it’s realistic and Earth-like, leaving a lot to play around with environment-wise. That should equate to a huge open world, one in which “whatever we see in the distance, we can go to,” so exploration and survival will be necessary. The controls feel like what you would find in Fallout 3, in that they’re not super precise or action filled, but focus on more general movement.

While hiking off to a dirt road, we come upon an encampment site and two gun-wielding scavengers, both intent on murdering us. Not so fast! We’re pretty good with our guns, and we can run fast, so picking them off isn’t much of an issue. We alternate between types of guns, holding the LB button and tapping on the d-pad direction for which one we want next. It’s a bit like a hot key, allowing us to switch on the fly. It’s helpful, because different weapons have different draw, fire, reload or swinging speeds, so managing which ones have ammo and which ones are easiest to pull out in a tough situation is important to learn. After destroying every ounce of their being of their bodies, it’s time to get back up onto the highway… but how?

“You have a jet pack.”

I have a what now? A jet pack?

Launching into the air with a jetpack consists of jumping and then hitting X again until we reach a considerable height… only to land back down with a life-ending thud because heights and gravity and the human body don’t mix well together. It takes a couple of tries to perfect using it without injury, but the jetpack is a nice addition to the game. It especially helped when I was being chased by giant mutant rat-wolves and needed a quick escape, or when I had to take down a massive ogre from a distance.

That’s where the magic comes into play. ELEX takes place after a meteor filled with magical power crashes into the Earth, both destroying everything and unleashing fantasy elements. That gives the developers room to play with every fictional genre they’d like to. Want orcs? Sure. Want national highways? Why not. Want sci-fi spires sticking out of the ground, patrolled by mechs, hunting fictional beasts? Probably. Why not? It’s probably what Westeros would look like today, if its people adopted technology more.

One of the more interesting elements that the game employs is the ability to kill almost every NPC we come across. If we see a merchant we don’t like, we can murder and rob them, though not without repercussion. Bounties will be placed on our head, and the world will try to hunt us down if we kill people we’re not supposed to.

ELEX feels like it could be another huge game to explore, and one similar to a thematic mix of Fallout and Elder Scrolls. It layers a lot of ideas, and a lot of mechanisms, but the demo is promising of where it could end up. ELEX is on track for release on PC, PS4 & Xbox One later this year.