Playing Elex 2 right now (along with short bursts of Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Watch Dogs: Legion and Far Cry 6.. that's a combined 500 hours right there!).
I'm biased as hell since I'm a huge fan of Piranha Bytes ever since Gothic at the beginning of time, but I must say that Elex 2 is a return to form for Piranha Bytes in my opinion. Elex was.. ok. It introduced a new setting, a new main character and it was a good try at something new for the team (mix of tech and magic). It just ended up being so bland. The gameworld was colourless and repetitive, the enemies were the same as previous games except less colourful and the story was.. let's call it un-memorable (better than forgettable, shut up).
Elex 2 started off horribly for me. The writing/editing in the first few minues was so bad I honestly didn't understand what was going on (I had forgotten a lot of Elex's story) and the starting area looked even blander than I remembered from Elex. But since I had pre-ordered (don't judge!) at almost full price, I pressed on. I fought a few weird creatures, climbed a few towers with my jetpack and lo and behold, slowly but surely I started getting that Piranha Bytes feeling back again. After a while I even started finding quests that were well written and the game started making sense. Not only that, some of the quests were actually interesting enough for me to want to solve them for reasons other than the reward at the end (not always a given, unfortunately)!
The world feels much more varied this time around, the characters feel more fleshed out (and the dialogue is so encompassing, it feels like the characters have something to say about every scene, no matter which companion you happen to travel with) and the combat feels much better now (especially ranged). I do, however, also feel that they might have eased up on the difficulty level a tad bit too much. I can understand why they did it (judging by the feedback from the first game) but I think they might have overshot it. The main thing though is that this feels like a proper Piranha Bytes game again: open world, no hand holding, secrets around every corner, no quest markers/map icons/Ubi towers or any of that crap, just pure unadulterated violent exploration. I love it. I should probably mention that the jetpack is brilliant this time around and you'll actually get to use it to its full capacity for some of the game's more hidden stuff. Farting about around decaying skyscrapers is awesome.
I've maxed out my character now and just entered chapter 3 so the game is starting to feel a bit long in the tooth. I'll probably stop running around so much and concentrate more on the actual story quests from now on. But it has definitely already given me my money's worth.
Also, and this is definitely worth mentioning, I haven't had a single crash for over 90 hours! I haven't even encountered any bugs! That is amazing and such a gigantic change from, for example, the release of Gothic 3 (if anyone remembers that disaster).
KUDOS TO YOU, PIRANHA BYTES!