ELEX II on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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In this sequel to the vintage Open World RPG ELEX, Jax must once again unite the free people of the Science-Fantasy world of Magalan against a new threat - the Skyands, who want to change the face of the planet forever.
ELEX II is a open world, singleplayer and rpg game
developed by Piranha Bytes
and published by THQ Nordic.
Released on March 01st 2022 is available only on Windows
in 9 languages: English, German, French, Polish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Italian, Spanish - Spain and Japanese.
It has received 6,383 reviews of which 4,696 were positive and 1,687 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.2 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 49.99€ on Steam, but you can find it for 4.48€ on Gamivo.
The Steam community has classified ELEX II into these genres:
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 3 3100 / Intel Core i5-7400
- Memory: 12 GB RAM
- Graphics: Radeon RX 5600 XT / Geforce GTX 1060
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 90 GB available space
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Definitely not a game that a company should have gone under upon releasing it. Very very very good Piranha Bytes-style CRPG, exploration is among the best you'll find in the genre, a truly huge map to explore that is densely packed with goodies and hidden caches, so much content and Skills and LOOT and... well you get the idea. Top shelf CRPG if you ask me but I'm just a nobody who loves RPGs... RIP PB Long Live Piranha Bytes and greatly looking forward to their new work as Pithead, which the owners of PB put together as a new dev studio. Cheers guys thanks for reading! P.S. Should also make a comment about the Bestiary in the game, soooo freaking cool, not only the actual text-based Bestiary which describes all the monsters, but the huge variety of creatures in the game to discover and fight against, really remarkable stuff they pulled off there and makes the open-world a real joy to explore. Def had to mention that!
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JANKTASTIC! If you’ve never played a Piranha Bytes (PB) game before, playing Elex 2 will be akin to filling your eye-sockets with vinegar and razor blades, then setting your head on fire. No matter which of their games you played (and they’ve been making variations of the same game since 1997), PB were Teutonic sadists who seemed to take very real pleasure in punishing their players mercilessly. Your character had all the survivability of a blind man in a minefield. Animations were janky, awkward and frequently hilarious. Dialogue was stilted, wooden, nonsensical, and occasionally seemed to bear no relation to what was actually happening on-screen. Characters looked like the horrifying aftermath of either genetic experimentation or severe chemical burns. Their melee combat system, which they insisted on using in every game they ever made, was the most counter-intuitive, infuriating, dysfunctional mess I’ve ever had the displeasure of suffering through. I died so often the experience seemed less like a game and more like some perverse psychological obstacle course designed to both break my spirit and massively expand my vocabulary of offensive words. And yet… I grew to love them, particularly Elex, which had a fantastic world to explore, loads of great loot to find, and an initial difficulty curve that was almost vertical. And that’s the thing with Elex 2 — if you can push through the first ten to fifteen levels of unrelenting death, your competence ramps up fairly quickly and you’ll soon find yourself tearing holes in even the toughest opponents. Elex 2 forces you to earn your power. Nothing is simply handed to you without you first enduring some measure of suffering beforehand. It IS easier than the first game (it even has a ‘story’ difficulty setting), but it will still bludgeon you into a pulpy smear and have you howling with incandescent rage if you’re not accustomed to the PB brand of gratuitous masochism. If you like your games to be pleasantly challenging rather than sphincter-clenchingly brutal, then PB games are not for you. And that’s totally fine. I don’t play Dark Souls or Elden Ring because they compel me to hurl profanities at the screen and damage expensive peripherals. If you have played the first game, you’ll be able to pick up the narrative threads fairly quickly. If you haven’t, things can seem a bit disjointed because Elex 2 doesn’t give you much in the way of backstory other than the initial introductory slideshow. You’ll find notes and audio logs that’ll fill in the blanks to an extent, but many NPC conversations tend to assume you know all about what’s gone before. If you don’t, you’ll spend a lot of time muttering, “Uh… what was that all about?” What IS it all about? You’re Jax. Formerly ‘Commander Jax’ of the Albs, a high-tech army of elex-addicted albino soldiers in thrall to ‘The Hybrid’ (mentally unstable scientist, Charles Dawkins, hard-wired into a giant mechanical exoskeleton), the Albs were Elex’s dominant faction and Jax was their preeminent enforcer. Once nick-named ‘The Beast of Xacor’, Jax was a merciless scourge upon the world of Magalan, ruthlessly executing the Hybrid’s orders to harvest other denizens of the planet for their elex. Elex is a glowing blue mineral that appeared on Magalan after a comet impacted the surface and wiped out the previous civilization. When ingested, it endows the Albs with various supernatural abilities, but it divests them of their emotions, leaving them cold, logical and calculating. After being betrayed by one of his own and left for dead, Jax was forced to start from scratch, forming alliances with various factions in exchange for information, equipment and allies. This culminated in a confrontation with the Hybrid, during which Jax defeated Dawkins, uniting the Free People, throwing off the shackles of Alb oppression, and bringing peace to the world of Magalan once more. However, as Ron Perlman is so fond of saying, “War never changes.” And peace never lasts. Before his demise, Dawkins was able to send a signal into space. Jax, being an inherently pessimistic sort, rightly harbours a sense of ominous foreboding. When Elex 2 opens, Jax is a recluse, living alone in a shack in the woods. His efforts to warn the Free People of Dawkins’ signal and the very real possibility of an extraterrestrial invasion have fallen on deaf ears, and the factions have once again resorted to bickering amongst themselves. In due course, Jax is proven right, the invasion commences, and Magalan is soon awash in aggressive purple mutants with an annoying habit of corrupting the local environs with ‘dark elex’ and mutating the local fauna. Your task is to once more forge the Free People into some semblance of a united front, and drive the Skyands (the purple mutants) from Magalan. Elex 2 looks a bit nicer than the first game, at least in the environmental and creature art departments. The characters still look like weird, clay-faced genetic anomalies dredged from the darkest depths of the uncanny valley. Even Jax seems to have regressed, which is disconcerting given he’s the game’s protagonist. Also, the game runs like a bicycle with square wheels and no handlebars, even on some high-end rigs. Frame rates are all over the place, but they’re especially bad in any of the game’s major settlements. Running the game in DX11 gives you a more stable experience, but dire performance. Switching to DX12 will give you additional frames, but weird graphical artifacts, occasional crashes, and a persistent glitch whereby it’s just as bright at night as it is during the day. The worst aspect of all this is that even if you crank the graphical options to their lowest settings (dropping the resolution to 720P and the scaling to 50%), Elex 2 still runs like a man with a broken pelvis… but now the game looks like an explosion in a Lego factory. Frame rates would fluctuate wildly between 25 and 45 whenever I ventured inside the Berzerker’s Fort, and the visuals were so pixelated it resembled Minecraft. The optimisation is embarrassingly bad, and Piranha Bytes aren’t likely to fix it given they’re now defunct thanks to the grubby antics of the debt-riddled Embracer Group. If you can get past the woeful performance, you’ll have some fun, but this will be a deal-breaker for many gamers who have come to expect decent frame-rates, especially from games that don’t look that great in the first place. The game’s also unnaturally quiet. Scampering about the lush wilderness of Tavar, I was struck by the lack of environmental sound. I could hear the odd insect or animal cry, but I didn’t hear the wind in the trees, or the sound of a waterfall despite standing in close proximity. The music is repetitive and low-key, only really being noticeable when combat is imminent or during narrative cut-scenes. Voice acting could best be described by the phrase “they did the best they could with what they had to work with”. Most of it is passable, but some of it is bizarre and borderline incoherent (because both Elex and its sequel were written by people who were either drunk, or abusing psychotropic drugs), particularly the spontaneous remarks Jax and NPC companions make, seemingly out of nowhere and completely lacking any sort of context. Weirdness abounds. If you can forgive all of this, and it’s a big IF, you’ll find a game that is engaging and addictive almost despite itself. Much of this is down to the hand-crafted world and the way the game makes you work for every attribute point and skill increase. Also, the jetpack which, once upgraded, is ridiculously fun to use and makes exploration a joy. If you’ve played and enjoyed other PB titles, you’ll probably enjoy this. If you’re not prepared to endure a little pain while you get to grips with the world of Magalan, or you can’t stomach anything that doesn’t run at a solid 60 frames a second, give this a hard pass.
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This is is an edit from my original review, I've finished the game since. Again, I'm ONLY recommending this game on the sole basis that, if you're someone like me who doesn't like to leave stories unfinished, you want to know what happened to Jax from the first game. Some PROS: - Settlements feel larger. - Exploration is easier and more fun now with an upgrade-able jetpack. - The Sprint mode on the jetpack adds a new dynamic to combat. - You get to continue the story of Commander Jax...yeah, I said this already. A lot of CONS: - First jarring experience is how different Jax sounds now from the original game. I love Taliesen Jaffe as a voice actor, especially in Critical Role, but his more sardonic and cultured tones don't seem to fit Jax, not with that face and coming from the rough and gruff voice acting from the first game. - Some graphics issues. Maybe it's just my GPU or my settings, but I've gotten transparent walls (which helped me see where enemies are in some instances so I suppose that can be considered a plus too...), Jax collapsing in on his own body weight when not wearing armor and standing at a weird angle, monsters you killed earlier falling from the sky when you revisit an area too soon before the bodies have time to vanish, etc. - Distance between locations feel like they have been dialed down from the first game. - Weapon modes were taken out from the first game. - With a few notable exceptions, NPCs seem to have their personalities defaulted to cranky and disagreeable. - An attempt was made to add a degree of drama to certain plot lines (and it's a travesty to call them that) but it falls flat. The writing is horrid. You can pick up a sense of panic due to impending doom from the little notes you picked up from the first game which added flavor to it. Not so here, everything feels bland. - The story twist is lame but I guess you see the writing on the wall early in the game. - Much like the original game (...almost like a template...), there's a similar cliffhanger feel to the ending but too bad (or maybe that's a good thing?) we won't get to see it since Piranha Bytes has closed and Elex 3 cancelled. TL;DR - Get only if you want to continue the story of Jax. Only buy this at a hefty discount.
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I don't understand the negative reviews this game received from folks who normally like PiranhaBytes games. For me, this hit the sequel sweet spot by balancing the familiar and the new, with a handful of QoL improvements thrown in. My only significant complaints are the simplification of the combat and crafting systems, but they weren't game-breaking, and there is still a noticeable power curve in character progression. The game also had an unfinished feel to some aspects, as if the Suits demanded release before the developers were ready. All in all, I enjoyed it as much as Elex 1, and I look fwd to re-playing it in another faction. The Good ----------- - The world: as with previous games, the love and attention to detail of the world is the shining star of the game. I rarely used fast travel because just walking through the countryside was so visually rewarding. And once again exploration of out-of-the-way places almost always yielded some material gain or at least a narrative tableau. Also, they did something clever for a sequel by having half of the map be new territory and the other half being part of the old world, yet changed in interesting ways. - Similar tactic taken with NPCs and factions, where there's a mix of old and new friends. - The jetpack now has a skill tree that allows it to be significantly improved. - Markers can now be added to the map. - Improved graphics, especially running water. - Background music that is evocative without being too invasive. - Map markers to help find corpses yet to be looted. - A convenient headlamp. - Variety in NPC companion quests - not all just fights. - Ability to mark/unmark items as junk, for ease of selling. - Creature sound effects. The Bad --------- - Simplified combat and crafting. - Can't combine smaller potions into larger ones. - Limit on the number of markers that can be placed on the map. - False sense of urgency in the plot at times, especially a recurring 'infection.' - Can't remap some frequently-used keys. - A sense that the game was rushed/unfinished. The Ugly --------- - The closure of PiranhaBytes Studios, meaning that the significant story setup for Elex III will never be realised. Here's hoping that the new Pithead Studios can continue to create games of this ilk.
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The graphics aren't the best, but the gameplay is flawless, the dialog is fun and entertaining, and the quests are creative. What's not to like? I don't understand the bad reviews. This game is a lot of fun. 9/10
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Frequently Asked Questions
ELEX II is currently priced at 49.99€ on Steam.
ELEX II is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 49.99€ on Steam.
ELEX II received 4,696 positive votes out of a total of 6,383 achieving a rating of 7.19.
😊
ELEX II was developed by Piranha Bytes and published by THQ Nordic.
ELEX II is playable and fully supported on Windows.
ELEX II is not playable on MacOS.
ELEX II is not playable on Linux.
ELEX II is a single-player game.
There is a DLC available for ELEX II. Explore additional content available for ELEX II on Steam.
ELEX II does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
ELEX II does not support Steam Remote Play.
ELEX II is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for ELEX II.
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Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 27 July 2025 15:19 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 29 July 2025 13:39 |
| Steam price | 30 July 2025 12:19 |
| Steam reviews | 29 July 2025 22:03 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about ELEX II, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about ELEX II
- SteamCharts - Analysis of ELEX II concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck ELEX II compatibility
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Game modes
Features
Online players
50
Developer
Piranha Bytes
Publisher
THQ Nordic
Release
01 Mar 2022
Platforms
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