I don’t know whether a game has ever left me as personally divided as Greedfall has. After spending dozens of hours exploring and questing around the island or Teer Fradee I’m still unsure whether or not I actually like this game and I suppose because in my head it exists in two separate spaces: The mechanical and the narrative.

In both spheres Greedfall is ambitious, setting out to not only design a role-playing system that’s unique from the hundreds of alternatives out there but in choosing to set its game in a period of time, albeit with fantastical elements, that very few other developers have approached. Yet how much weight should ambition alone carry in an evaluation of something? This has been one of the questions swirling around in the surprisingly empty void that exists within the confines of my skull because based on what Greedfall sets out to achieve, and in some cases sticks the landing, there is no doubt in my mind that it’s a good game, yet I don’t know if I actually enjoyed my time with it as much as I wanted to.

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The deathly sickness known as the malichor has taken hold of the continent and despite all the advancements in technology and medicine, no-one has been able to uncover a cure for the disease that’s slowly spreading throughout the city. The last hope for the country of Serene and her neighbours is the colonies, for within those strange lands may there be a remedy for this plague that’s tormenting your people. You’ll play as the legate (a diplomat, I had to look it up too) for Serene as you attempt to uncover any kind of help that you may send back to your family on “the continent” and from this point on the game’s a fairly standard RPG. You’ll have dialogue choices, experience points, various talents and attributes to specialise in; it’s a fairly standard framework for a role-playing game that evokes a lot of similarities to classic Bioware games. What separates Greedfall from other titles are its setting and its combat system, both of which do a great deal in providing the game with a unique voice.

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While initially seeming like a straight-up action game, with counters and dodges galore, combat can also be halted mid-fight to bring up a menu and assign different moves and roles to both you and your party. It’s fairly robust in its execution, providing far more options to the player than just mashing a single attack button until the thing is dead, yet I’d be lying if I said I actually used it. I suppose this is more a personal taste thing but I’ve always found real-time combat to be a far more compelling way to play RPGs; constantly pausing the action to assign orders just throws me out of the loop and divorces me from the actions I’m meant to be taking. The option to essentially make the game into a pseudo-turn based RPG at the click of button is a really cool idea and will do doubt be appreciated by a great many players, but given the amount of random enemy encounters you’ll come across while venturing through the games many (and often gorgeous) locations, it would be sluggish to resolve every situation through a menu rather than just getting dirty yourself.

The hotkeys provided for combat also seem to render the ability to pause everything superfluous; if everything I need for my character build can be accessed on the fly, why would I want to halt everything to trawl through a menu and find it? It’s a system that seems to fight against itself in an attempt to prove some kind of relevancy.

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Which, as strange as it sounds, goes for the game’s narrative as well. This, also, is where the brunt of my complaints with Greedfall take place and it really saddens me that I had to write that sentence. This isn’t going to be a paragraph complaining about how the game utterly fails as a post-colonial story because I think that would be expecting far too much from it. Rather, it’s a place to discuss pacing; specifically how bad pacing can absolutely ruin whatever intrigue you manage to establish in your story. Greedfall seems intent to butcher its own story by slotting in trivial quests in the middle of some of the game’s most intense and interesting moments.

What starts off as a genuinely compelling narrative becomes drowned in tedium as you’re forced into completing random quests for people before they let you progress with the main storyline. Many of these “inserted” quests have absolutely nothing to do with the main story and serve as a way of stretching out the experience far longer than it needed to be. Shave off ten hours by removing all the poorly implemented quest objectives and Greedfall would have been a far tighter, more cohesive story of colonial greed and the suffering that it caused indigenous cultures, but instead, it becomes a chore to slog through.

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This is when we have to come back to ambition and how important that is when evaluating something like Greedfall. This was a game made on a budget and it’s not difficult to see where money was saved. There’s a general “jankiness” to everything: from the awkward facial animations, voice lines being repeated during combat and the reused interior environments and while none of these detracted from the experience of playing the game, I have to wonder if a smaller scope wouldn’t have helped Greedfall’s quality.

It’s a game that places a lot on it’s shoulders as it tries to juggle complex mechanics and narratives and while mechanically it mostly succeeds on all fronts, it sadly has to sacrifice it’s narrative to provide the illusion of content for those mechanics to exist around. Walking away from the game, I’ll admit that I enjoyed my time and I applaud the developers for clearly going above and beyond to deliver an RPG that does its best to stand out from the crowd.

But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pleased to be done with it.

Last Updated: September 16, 2019

Greedfall
Greedfall is an ambitious RPG with several unique mechanical hooks, character builds and combat encounters that unfortunately buckles under the weight of a bloated and tedious narrative that often turns everything into a repetitive chore
6.5
Greedfall was reviewed on PlayStation 4
72 / 100

22 Comments

  1. Admiral Chief

    September 16, 2019 at 11:24

    Looks a LOT like TW3

    Reply

  2. Alien Emperor Trevor

    September 16, 2019 at 11:24

    So it’s a typical Spiders RPG. I’ve played them before & I know what I’m getting – interesting ideas, average execution, still fun to play.

    Reply

    • Llama In The Rift

      September 16, 2019 at 11:38

      Agreed…plus no stuff like lootboxes…we know Spiders games, they’re sub par yes but still somehow find it fun to play and i must say Spider studios have grown allot since the days of Risen …reminds me of a young CDPR.

      Reply

  3. Kenn Gibson

    September 16, 2019 at 11:38

    Completely disagree with the rating here it’s easily an 8 of 10 game for me. Playing it on PS4 i’ve enjoyed it alot. it is a AA game and not having had the money thrown at it that your normal AAA games do, the amount of heart and polish for in that respect is incredible. Spiders have made a fan for life, especially when all the AAA devolopers (bar CD Projeckt Red) are churning out crap. Is it perfect? Heck no. But I’d return again if they made Greedfall 2

    Reply

    • Llama In The Rift

      September 16, 2019 at 11:44

      Strange how a game that got copy and pasted like NBA 2K20 got an 8/10 with huge amounts of gambling stuff, pasted assests from 2K19 etc… ( Gambling Not availiable in SA does not concern me as its available in other countries) compared to this hard working made piece of content, mind bogling.

      Reply

      • Son of Banana Jim

        September 16, 2019 at 13:05

        And this year’s NBA2k game is particularly greasy and slimy….

        Reply

    • InCognito

      September 16, 2019 at 12:57

      I agree with your comment and dont fully agree with this review. I am really enjoying the game, for being an AA game and coming from such a small company it is a great game. I support companies like this as some day they will make the next great RPG. You cant compare it to the best like The Witcher 3 because they are not there yet, but it is a game I recommend playing if you really enjoy RPGs.

      Reply

      • Son of Banana Jim

        September 16, 2019 at 12:57

        Yeah, i absolutely agree with this, i mean they’re a small developer less than 25 people in an office, wheras CD projeckt red grew from a small developer to a decent sized one for witcher 3 (after the success of witcher 2). I think comparing the two is very unfair.

        Reply

    • Son of Banana Jim

      September 16, 2019 at 12:48

      Sounds like how the gothic franchise used to get hammered by reviewers but the Bethesda tripe got praised … I guess I’ll have to get this game and support the devs.

      Reply

  4. Yahtzee

    September 16, 2019 at 11:31

    “awkward facial animations”

    That’s a feature to me xD

    Reply

  5. Craig Lotter

    September 16, 2019 at 13:22

    So basically not much of a step up their Technomancer which I also found myself enjoying and disliking at the same time! 😀

    Reply

    • Son of Banana Jim

      September 16, 2019 at 13:38

      I need to put techomancer on my list too. Thanks for reminding me.

      Reply

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