ELEX 2 Best piranha bytes role playing game since Risen

ELEX 2 was released in March 2022, and the version I'm reviewing here is 1.05c from GOG in DirectX 12.

I'll try to stay objective, as I've been a BIG fan of PB games since the very first Gothic!

Piranha Bytes: A History of Games Released Too Early

This review was last updated on July, 16, 2026 and was Revised and Corrected by Claude.

If you're not familiar with Piranha Bytes Studio, they're German and well known for...

The Gothic series of role-playing games, mainly heroic fantasy (humans vs orcs, magic, creatures...)

Then the Risen series, where they turned to pirate fantasy (islands, pirates, ships, magic, creatures...)

And finally, they moved on to the ELEX series, set in a post-apo world with swords, magic and technology!

Why these changes of direction ?

Well... Gothic was great! Gothic 2 was still very good, and Gothic 3 should have been the cherry on top! Unfortunately, despite the great plans they had for Gothic 3 — and its awesome soundtrack recorded with the Bochum Symphony Orchestra — the game had to be released too early (and it's a recurring issue with Piranha Bytes...)

and as a result it was completely broken... Only years later, thanks to the great work of some community members, were all of Gothic 3's issues finally addressed in the famous community patch. But by then it was already over... So they had to create a new franchise, and that's where Risen came in 😏

The Risen series started great: the first Risen was like Gothic in its prime, a little jewel from PB! That's exactly what players wanted... But then they took some risks with Risen 2, going into "pirates and guns"... maybe to surf on the Pirates of the Caribbean wave... Except it wasn't balanced, as guns were far too powerful. And then came Risen 3, whose reviews were good, but not as good as the first Risen — just like Gothic 2 and 3 weren't as good as Gothic in their time.

Even if... and I'll repeat it over and over... for me, Gothic 3 with the community patch is a GREAT game!

The Gothic series was over, the Risen series was over as well... and that's where ELEX arrived 😅

2026 edit : If you're not aware, there is now a Remake of Gothic 1 ! With awesome critics as well, so it's another subject but the game was very well received, and when something is working good, you can expext in the future the remakes of Gothic 2 and Gothic 3, and even a hypothetic Gothic 4 which had nothing to do with the original series when it was released.

What i mean is, there is a lot of hope and a brighter future for ALL the old games of R.I.P Piranha Bytes.

So, enough history — let's jump into ELEX 2!

Is ELEX 2 Playing on Dark Souls Territory?

That's the first thing I thought when I saw that "savegames were automatic" in ELEX 2... I was like "what the hell?". Automatic savegames in a PB game? And then I started the game and saw a health bar and a stamina bar.

Health bar, stamina bar and automatic savegames are usually very representative of a "Souls game".

But in the end... after digging into the settings, I saw that we could still save manually, or use the quicksave and quickload features, and that automatic saves could be disabled. So I'm wondering — since I'm only playing it now, in 2023 — whether players were mad about this at launch, and PB eventually had to put the usual saving methods back into ELEX 2?

Fighting a creature, then admiring the landscape! (PB games are well known for exploration!)

Important: PB Studio still uses their proprietary engine, called the Genome Engine, which they've had since Gothic 3. Of course, over time they improved it to render games with the latest technologies available on modern graphics cards, but it's still not as powerful and optimized as the famous Unreal Engine 5. So many players complained about the lack of FPS...

We can still praise the old-school style of PB, as the graphics are quite good on Ultra!

That said... with my RTX 4070 Ti / Core i5-13400 / 64GB DDR5, everything ran fine on Ultra graphics — but I can understand that many players out there don't want to upgrade their computers too often. (I kept my old computer for 10+ years 😊)

Old School Forever — And Why You Should Play on Ultra

Everything in ELEX 2 feels and smells old school! And I don't mean that in a negative way...

• Quests will most of the time involve killing creatures at a specific spot
• If you come across a bandit camp, you can be sure to find a chest or a safe to unlock afterwards
• If you come across a creature den, you can be sure to find a vein to mine or some lost treasure
• If you explore remote parts of the world, or unreachable heights... you'll find lost things as well! 🤩

Everything in ELEX 2 is designed to reward you for your efforts, whatever you did! And everyone likes being rewarded after spending hours exploring the world, or after an intense fight where you nearly died...

If you manage to kill the outlaws, then search the area... a chest or safe shouldn't be far! 😎

Speaking of rewarding experiences... I encourage you to play on ULTRA difficulty!

Role-playing games in general are well known for becoming too easy at some point... meaning your avatar gets stronger and stronger, to the point where he can literally pulverize anything in his path! Fallout, Dragon Age, The Witcher, The Elder Scrolls... It's rare to find an RPG that challenges you until the very end!

Well, there are a few, but generally from independent studios...

So I'll speak from my own experience with ELEX 2... Knowing what usually happens with difficulty in RPGs, I deliberately went for ULTRA right from the start... and I think I was right to do so. I'm at nearly 100 hours into the game as I write this review, and I'm still not invincible! Of course, fights are much easier now, but I did struggle a lot for at least 40 hours! I even had to use everything in my inventory to prevail in some fights 👍which is something i rarely do...

When it's not too easy, you soften them up from a distance before going melee!

I don't know about you, but for me there's nothing better than knowing I'll actually use everything in my inventory — grenades, food, healing potions... Whereas if the game were too easy, I'd just draw my sword and hack'n'slash my way to victory. Not really an enjoyable experience when all you do is click hysterically!

Combat: One Step Higher, Still Not Perfect

PB games have never been pioneers of "interesting ways to fight"...

Apart from the first Gothic and the first Risen, which had real fighting techniques and a kind of "rhythm" to master that was genuinely exciting, all their other games — including Gothic 3 (without the patch) — were more like "click click click...", so not that interesting at all. And back then, the only way to make fights more challenging was to raise the difficulty...

Well, I'm glad to announce that ELEX 2 has gone one step higher in terms of battles and difficulty. It's still far from perfect, but at least the fights stay enjoyable for a good 40 to 60 hours. Because after that, you'll know the different patterns of the different enemies, and it won't be as challenging as it was before.

Shield bash, slash, kick, evade, charge your attack! Stay focused on your enemies' movements.

Still... if you're playing on ULTRA difficulty, you'll always need to be careful! I'm level 38 right now, with very good armor and strong gear... and I can still be killed in 2 hits by a Troll, or 4 hits by a Skyand tracker (a kind of corrupted dog). So even if you know their patterns, if you lose focus and try to rush the fight, they will punish you!

Also, the further you advance into the game, the more enemies you're likely to encounter! At the beginning, a group of 4 enemies will be hard to deal with... 40 hours later, you'll be running into groups of 10+. Of course, by then you'll have new skills and even area-of-effect spells, but remember that on ULTRA difficulty they only need to hit you 4 times and you're dead. So don't run blindly into danger.

My own suggestion for ELEX 3: PB should give humanoids a few more dangerous patterns, because once you learn their moves (and it's like 2-3 different attacks, no more...), they're easily dealt with. For example, we can charge our attacks and rush towards enemies, covering a good distance in the process... but humanoids can't do the same!

The only enemies who can are the dog / spider / raptor types. Humanoids can't: their power attacks are telegraphed, don't cover much distance, and we just need to roll away. It would make fights even more intense to add some kind of rush attack to humanoids. But then, this is my own point of view as a "Dark Souls" player who likes a challenge... and maybe adding these kinds of attacks would make the game too hard for the average RPG player.

edit 2026 : Reading back all the suggestions I made for ELEX 3 in this review... they'll never be read by the people they were meant for. That's the part that stings. See the end of the article as Piranha Bytes is no longer existing...

Exploration & Questing: No Dead Zones

As in every PB game, exploration plays a big part! If you're the kind of person who likes to explore every corner of the world, trust me, you're going to spend 100+ hours on ELEX 2, if not way more. There are no dead zones in PB games... if there's a place to explore somewhere, it means there's something to be found!

And I liked the fact that the quests encourage you to explore little parts of the world piece by piece. That means you may have explored a big zone, but perhaps not a few buildings... or specific areas you might have missed. Well, don't despair — there will be a quest, however small, asking you to go back to that specific area you hadn't fully explored. I guess it's also a way for the designers to work as a team with the devs, like "We have a nice place over there to explore, but unless there's a quest for it... I don't know if the player will ever travel there. Can you create one? 😏"

Whatever you can see, you can explore — yes, even unreachable heights! Thanks to your jetpack!

The PB team also likes to add a few fun things to their games, like real actors and bands from real life!

Recognize Dacre Montgomery from Stranger Things on Netflix? And Billy Idol on the right!

Little tip: the Billy Idol concert isn't just a background detail 😉

— it's an actual hidden side quest! You trigger it by listening to a radio broadcast in one of the camps: the announcer eventually mentions the concert, and you get a quest marker. There's no reward apart from an achievement called "Festivalgoer"... but honestly, a post-apocalyptic Billy Idol gig is reward enough 😎

Leveling, Level Scaling & My Wishlist for ELEX 3

Leveling in ELEX 2 is a little slow at the start, but tends to get faster and faster as you become stronger. The experience required between each new level isn't that big — it's not like Dungeons & Dragons, where you need double the experience compared to the previous level. It's more like 11,000 instead of 10,000, then 12,000 instead of 11,000. So once you're a little further into the game, you just kill a few groups of enemies and you're good.

I don't think there's a level cap... I've never experienced one in a PB game. And anyway, at some point the wildlife mobs — critters, jackals... — all respawn, so players can grind endlessly if they want to. Not that there'd be any benefit, since there aren't thousands of abilities to master, and by level 50 you'll already know every skill there is to learn...

Use Berserker magic or traditional weapons, it's all up to you! (Magic is stronger?)

So don't worry, the experience will never dry up... and don't grind: there will be more than enough creatures and enemies to kill along the way to satisfy your hunger for learning every skill.

Now, is there any level scaling? Not everywhere... There are spots scattered around the world where a creature spawns according to your level. So if you're level 40+, these spots will obviously spawn a TROLL, the biggest creature on the planet! But apart from these specific spots, all the rest is handcrafted, and you'll experience the joy of pulverizing mobs that were once a big threat to you, but are now mere insects against your power 😎

As you become stronger, you'll take on groups of enemies — and powerful ones!

Suggestions for ELEX 3: (if anyone plans to design it one day...)

• There aren't enough skills in ELEX 2 — we need either a bigger choice, or more levels of passive skills!
• There are clearly not enough attribute checks in dialogues — we need WAY MORE of them!
• I think the ELEX potions should be nerfed a little; we can gain too many points from them!

Apart from that, I was glad to see that the merchants ask HUGE prices for their stuff! Not a problem, since we usually have TOO MUCH MONEY in RPGs... so at least now we can spend it all!

All in all, ELEX 2 definitely reconnects with the quality of the 2 best episodes PB created so far, meaning Gothic 1 and Risen 1. It's confirmed by the Mostly Positive votes on the Steam page! Still, there's room for improvement, and if they keep going in the same direction... then ELEX 3 could be the perfect RPG we've all been waiting for from PB for so many years.

ELEX 2 Savegame Limit Bug (optional read):

This doesn't count towards the final score — it's just a bug I noticed after hours of gameplay. ELEX II is limited to 100 savegames... That means once you reach that number, you can't save manually anymore. Quicksaves still work fine, though. It's a bug, and there's no reason from a dev perspective to limit savegames to 100, especially with the powerful computers we have these days. So for ELEX 3, please don't limit the save slots.

Also, you can't just move your savegames to another folder — if you do, the game kind of loses track of your save history... I know because I tried it; it normally works in every game, but not in ELEX II. You have to copy-paste them into another folder if you want to keep them, then delete some of your existing manual saves (to re-enable manual saving), and from then on, whenever you want to save manually, you'll have to overwrite your previous saves, one by one.

The ELEX II save location is: C:\Users\Your Profile\Saved Games\ELEX2\SaveGames

ELEX 2 October 2023 update:

At this point I have 100+ hours in ELEX 2, and despite the fact that I gave it a score of 75/100, I have to say that the end game is particularly boring... That's unfortunate, because I had a LOT of fun for 80 hours or so — which was already more than enough entertainment for the price of the game.

Still — and someone already said it on the ELEX 2 Steam store page — the end game is pretty much "go there, kill these 20 mobs, and come back". There aren't even any interesting rewards, since by the end of the game you'll be level 40+, and by level 40+ you've already got all the interesting abilities in the game. Meaning the end game is just a long, boring grind. So, taking this into consideration for the score, it's lowered to 60/100.

For ELEX 3, there would definitely be room for improvement on the end game.

Piranha Bytes info (2026 update):

Piranha Bytes doesn't exist anymore. The studio was shut down at the end of June 2024 by its parent company Embracer Group, which had failed to find a buyer after the funding ran out. There wasn't even an official statement — after 27 years, the studio behind Gothic, Risen and ELEX went out quietly. They had been hoping to secure the money for a new dark fantasy game built on Unreal Engine 5... it never happened.

But Björn and Jenny Pankratz — the creative leads, and a married couple — founded their own indie studio, Pithead Studio, and released a new game, CRALON, which I reviewed on this website. It's completely different from what they made before, and it's only a 2-person team... Still, it wasn't well received by the community. I'll let you read the review 😉

+ Reconnects with the quality of the first Gothic / Risen!
+ At last, a better fighting system! (not perfect though)
+ Strong lifespan — at least 100+ hours of content!
+ Old school the way we like it (quests, monsters, treasure!)
+ If you feel like an explorer, you're going to love it!
+ Handcrafted as always with PB (less AI / more humans!)

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- Not enough special patterns for enemies
- Not enough passive skills to learn
- Not enough attribute checks in dialogues
- There's room to optimize the engine / improve performance
- 10/23 update: The end game is one of the worst I've seen