Download ELEX II for macOS

ELEX II for macOS suits players who enjoy open-world RPGs where choices leave a visible mark — the kind of game where a dead NPC closes a quest line for good. Piranha Bytes, the studio behind Gothic and Risen, built a sequel that doubles down on consequence and lets you explore the sci-fi-meets-medieval world of Magalan on Apple silicon and 64-bit Intel Macs.

• A giant post-apocalyptic world you cross with a jetpack for fast traversal and short bursts of flight.
• Melee and ranged combat systems you can switch between depending on the threat.
• NPCs that remember what you did — and react accordingly.
• Mortal NPCs whose deaths can permanently alter the story.
• Full text localisation in nine languages including English, French, Japanese and Simplified Chinese.
• Voice audio in English, Russian, German and Polish.

Version 1.0.2 fix runs as a universal binary, so it feels native whether you are on an M-series chip or an older Intel machine. The game needs macOS 12.4 or later.

Real-time solo brutality vs. turn-based party banter

Put ELEX II next to Divinity: Original Sin 2 and the tone shifts hard. Divinity runs on turn-based tactics and party banter; ELEX II is real-time, solo, and far less forgiving when you misread a situation early on. Where Divinity lets you re-spec and experiment without much friction, Magalan expects you to live with your choices — no quicksave scumming to undo a companion's death.

Compared to The Witcher 3 on macOS, the difference comes down to polish versus raw systems. The Witcher delivers a tighter script and smoother combat curves. ELEX II feels rougher, but its faction reputations and NPC mortality create a kind of tension Geralt's story never quite reaches. If you bounced off the first ELEX because of jank, know that the sequel tidies up a lot — but it still carries that Piranha Bytes DNA where the world doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Against GreedFall, both games share a colonial fantasy wrapping, yet ELEX II trades GreedFall's diplomatic threading for something more chaotic. Factions in Magalan are blunt instruments, not nuanced political bodies, and the jetpack alone changes how you approach exploration in ways GreedFall's grounded traversal never attempts.

A wanderer's first week in Magalan

Imagine a player who loved Gothic II back in the day and just wants to get lost in a world that pushes back. They install ELEX II on a MacBook Air M1, skip the tutorial pop-ups, and head straight for the Berserker settlement. Within ten minutes they've insulted a guard, lost half their health to a critter they shouldn't have poked, and realised their only decent ranged weapon has four bolts left.

That's the loop. They spend the next session scavenging ruins at dusk, jetpack-hopping onto a crumbling overpass to snipe a scavenger, and accidentally triggering a faction event because an NPC they let live three hours ago reappeared. By day three they're juggling two mutually hostile quest lines, one companion has walked out, and they've stopped reloading saves to fix things. The mess is the story.

Kill camera smoothing for readable melee timing

A few tweaks make the Mac experience cleaner right from the main menu:

• Turn off camera smoothing. The default motion blur and acceleration fight against mouse precision. Disabling both makes melee timing far more readable.
• Set jetpack to toggle, not hold. You'll spend hours in the air. A toggle spares your keyboard hand during long glides across the valleys.
• Drop shadow quality before anything else. On integrated GPUs — especially the M1 Air — shadows eat frames faster than draw distance. Medium shadows with high textures keeps Magalan looking sharp without tanking performance.
• Enable subtitles with speaker names. Voice audio covers only four languages, but text labels show who's talking, which helps when faction dialects start blending together.
• Bind a side mouse button to dodge. The default double-tap directional input is unreliable in tight fights. A single button press feels snappier and saves you from rolling off cliffs by accident.

• macOS 12.4 or later
• Apple silicon or 64-bit Intel processor