ELEX Laptop and Desktop Benchmarks

For the original German review, see here.

The fact that ELEX is a game designed by the German developer Piranha Bytes is clear after just a few minutes. ELEX has inherited almost all the same strengths and weaknesses as prior Piranha Bytes productions – both the Gothic and the Risen series.

Let us start with our criticisms. The choppy controls are definitely one of the open-world RPG's greatest shortcomings. The battles are often chaotic, and the climbing passages feel unpolished. The character tends to get caught on small protrusions, forcing the player to use the jump key. On the whole, the animations are no longer in step with the times – to the point that the player often feels somewhat embarrassed on behalf of the developers.

Along the same lines, the texture quality does not measure up to some other RPG games, such as The Witcher 3. The level of detail on ground and object surfaces is generally mediocre. In addition to all this, the game is plagued by a variety of clipping and gameplay bugs. In one case, ELEX completely ceased to show in-game text, though restarting the game rectified this problem. The sometimes-exaggerated depth-of-field also irritated us.

Nevertheless, turning our attention to the title's positive characteristics: The game world is elaborately crafted – teeming with thick vegetation, diverse and realistic landscape architecture, and a wide range of vision that encompasses gorgeous panoramas. Many RPG competitors' worlds feel very generic by comparison. Alongside the great level design, the game also offers fluid changeovers from day to night and vice versa, a weather system, and lovely light-and-shadow play. The overall package is rounded off by the game's exceptionally original style that – as previously mentioned – brings sci-fi elements into a post-apocalyptic fantasy world.

In the realm of graphics options, Piranha Bytes pulls out all the stops. The menu includes over 10 settings, most of which can be regulated across a gradation of levels. The settings range from anisotropic filtering to render distance. The fact that the image freezes for a few seconds after a change in shader quality is normal. In the realm of anti-aliasing, ELEX utilizes the post-process FXAA and SMAA techniques. As usual, these do a mediocre job (grasses still flicker, for example) and make the image faintly blurry.

Because all settings changes are immediately adopted, the game does not need to be restarted – very commendable. Load times – at least on an SSD – are completely reasonable. The same goes for the game size, which comes to around 27 GB. Meanwhile, the lack of explanatory notes regarding the various settings proved quite frustrating. The dearth of presets was also somewhat irritating, given that all the options need to be hand-tuned.

As the screenshots further down reveal, there are massive differences between the individual quality settings. While ELEX looks quite ugly at minimum settings (extremely muddy textures, hardly any shadows), starting at medium details the world begins to come into its own. At the high and maximum settings, the textures and shadows sharpen once again, but the intensified sharpness is not substantially more pleasing to the eye. The built-in fps limit means that the game maxes out at 122 fps – regardless of chosen settings. VSync was always deactivated in our tests, and the scaling option (also located in the video menu) was always set to 100%.