Still on ELEX, now on chapter 4. 45h in. It's a good game but i still have that feeling that the world is a little bit.. dry/boring. One glance at a new area (e.g snowy area) and you have basically seen all the meshes and textures that particular area has to offer. It has extremely low variety in for example flora and some of the textures can be highly questioned (huge rocks as totally flat textures - i thought we stopped doing that in ~'99..).
The world mesh itself is very, very low-poly for a modern game, reminds me a lot of Gothic 2 - very blocky hills, cliffs etc. It's not what you expect in a modern game. I can also tell from looking at e.g tree trunks that they were once more hi-poly and and as some quick remedy for performance they have reduced the polycount on them. The trunks are square and have the typical stretched texture parts (which are introduced when you run meshes trough e.g "Polygon Cruncher".) It's not their best looking game.
Overall i think the game is way too drawn out, but this is a problem for many or even most games. I much rather have a 25h good focused, non-BS game, than a 50-100h one which is just drawn out for the sake of it. "How can we make these conversations as long as possible?", "how many of these types of quests can we do before the player is getting too pissed off and bored?" I wish game devs would not have to do that, but unfortunately there's a demand for so called "long" games. These games aren't long, they are drawn out. It's never considered a good quality for books, it's not considered to be a good quality for movies. But somehow, for this industry it's always good.
Half-way though, the game would have benefited greatly from introducing something completely new to the player. In this game it would have made a lot of sense to make something fun with the jetpack, like being able to fly long distances horizontally. But nope, you get nothing (so far), it's the usual upgrades in armor and weapons. Joining a faction does very little to change the gameplay in any way.
Overall i like it, but it's not Gothic 2-fun, much due to it feeling less focused and being more sloppy overall (which comes almost naturally with the much bigger world i'd say).
(wow, this got way too long..)