I was actually kind of blown away by the scale and verticality of the open world in Elex. It has some jank (as most AA games do), But surprisingly in the end, it actually honestly soured my feelings towards Bethesda games somewhat because in Elex, your choices matter far more.

It always annoyed me in Bethesda games that if you do one factions quest line, you can still go and do the other factions quest lines and no one ever mentions it. It doesn’t change the game whatsoever except the ultimate ending. In Starfield, for example, you can do the entire United Colonies Quest line, and then go join the freestar collective and literally nobody mentions it, or trys to stop you, or treats you literally any differently because you joined their erstwhile enemy. Each quest line is a separate game in itself. For example (spoilers for Starfield…) When you’re trying to get the Freestar Collective’s cooperation to get access to some data, if you’ve previously become a Freestar Ranger, that should have mattered to the story in some way. But nothing you do in a Bethesda game has any bearing on anything else that you do except in the most cursory of ways.

Elex doesn’t play by those rules. Once you join a faction, that’s it… And the other factions treat you very differently as a result, with different dialog and different options. None of this “essential character” garbage either. If you kill them, you’ll get a notice on screen that says ("x"s death will change the story moving forward…) and stuff like that. Sometime that change is immediate, and sometime it comes back to haunt you hours and hours later in a completely different quest line.

It’s also HARD because it doesn’t lock off areas until you’ve reached a certain level. You can go anywhere and do anything right from the beginning, but if you stumble upon an enemy that is twenty levels above you, tough luck. Often, getting to a quest requires going through those areas, which means early on, you’re not necessarily fighting all the time. You pick your battles and you pick when to sneak by at night and when to just run like hell.

It was honestly a very refreshing open world experience. And the world was extremely “vertical”. And by that I mean you could jump off a mountain and fall into a valley that’s about as deep down as some other game maps are wide, with absolutely no loading screen. Really impressive for a AA game. Can’t speak highly enough about it.

A couple of other one’s that I enjoy but not on the level of Elex is the Spider Software games, The Technomancer and Greedfall. Fun enough for what they are, but not nearly the same scope as Elex.

Mad Max get’s not nearly enough love either.