I truly need to give this game another go, can't really say why I stopped playing it. But it is EuroJank all the way.
Funny tho, I noticed most of the character animations I saw in Elex are straight up the exact same they were in Gothic 3, possibly from even earlier games' of theirs. Nothing wrong with reusing assets, but damn they've gotten some mileage out of them :D
IMO, the game is better than it's reputation - at least in it's current state. After the .ini tweak to fix the alien ai-typo makes it a bit better - afaik, I can't remember if my group played it with the fix or not, we've played the campaign at least 3 times now.
The game's not a masterpiece by any means, though. It is pretty enjoyable action game in COOP and fairly high difficulty. Sure, arguments could be made that any game is, but game still more fun than not. Now, would I play the game on my own, as single player? Eeeeeeeh, dunno... But if my gaming group asks to play some ACM, I'm down.
Some random points about the game summarized:
Pulserifle goes BRRT, alien goes splat.
Could do with less of the human/android enemies though, or at least the parts with androids felt like they dragged on for considerable time.
Quite a bit of collectible guns, they're mostly sidegrades but they are different enough, imo.
runs on a toaster
goes for pennies on Steam sales, so gaming group funny hours per unit of currency -ratio is pretty good, imo.
it's essentially proton experimental with extra patches and more up to date dxvk etc etc. While it is the bleeding edge of proton experimental, and all the other components, it's pretty stable in my experience. But as always: experimenting with different proton versions is key, what works - works.
As cool as this is, to me this just screams security issues. If scripting in PDF can run doom, it can be (and is) used for nefarious purposes. Wasn't eg. LTT's channel compromized because of a PDF with some nasty stuff in it?
Not really a solution for the game specifically, but there's a spiritual-successor of sorts for it, "Golftopia". It is a bit scifi/neon themed, but does a similar thing.
I tested the game quite a bit and found it not working, and after some digging around I found some tidbits that 64bit windows' lack the old systems to run 16bit apps.
Kinda sounds like the installer supplied winevdm or similar with the game. Pretty nice of them, tbh.
I've mostly thought about playing Balatro, but haven't gotten around to it as I've only watched numbers go big in Untitled Space Idle (idler/clicker/absolute-timewaster).
It's been a slow gaming week for me. :D
edit: maybe I should actually elaborate a bit on the idle-game.
Essentially: you have space ship, space ship must fight other space ships, which get tougher and tougher the further you go. As you go, you research, build, etc. more things to your ship to make it sturdier, deadlier, and faster, then reset and do it again, but BETTER. Rince and repeat, the usual idle-game loop.
There's so many different ways to make the ship better - but you're gonna need them all anyway, having multiple systems you can/need to level up, but usually can't do so in one go is just a time sink.
It's a simple game but if you identify as "scandisk/defrag watcher", it's for you.
TBH, I kinda do prefer to run the game on Win 3.1 I have installed in my dosbox (and neatly transport the whole "C:" around my systems with Dropbox sync :D), as the UI of CoTW gets kinda too small without pixel doubling/tripling - and afaik that's one thing Wine doesn't do.
Sidenote: BTW I have looked what the game Castle of the Winds is about. Man its from Epic. This company was such a cool company back then.
published by Epic, but not developed by them. Anyhoo, they were cool once upon a time. :)
edit: apart from nostalgia trip, I would say you don't need Win 3.x if you already have Win98 set up in dosbox - should run all 16bit windows apps from stone age just fine as is.
Wine is kinda magical. I really like this old 16bit Windows 3.x game "Castle of The Winds" (topdown, turn based, roguelike) which doesn't run on any 64bit windows as is (though, you CAN, with https://github.com/otya128/winevdm, but iirc it was a bit finicky).
most people and/or critics hate witcher 3? o_O