September 2019 has been a pretty big year for game releases with the likes of Gears 5 and Borderlands 3 coming out. While another lesser-known game has also been released in the form of Greedfall developed by Spiders and published by Focus Home Interactive. Here’s our Greedfall Review.
Greedfall is basically an action RPG set in the 17th century on a newly settled island called Teer Fradee. This is not a realistic type of video game because there are huge monsters for you to kill and you can also wield magic. I thought the setting and tone of the game is quite unique, although at times the game does feel very slow-paced.
Before you begin playing Greedfall though, you have to create the appearance of the main character named De Sardet. You can choose to be either a male or female character, although they must be human. You have the option to select from three different class types at the beginning of the game. The three-class types include a Warrior, Technical and a Magic-user.
It goes without saying that choosing your class type is very important because it directly affects how you play during combat. I chose to play as a Warrior initially, but the melee attacks in this game weren’t so great so I had to restart with a new game and played as a Magic-user instead. I will discuss this in more detail later in the review of why I made the sudden change…
In terms of the appearance for your character, there are a lot of skin colors and hairstyles that you can choose from. It’s not a wide selection of options, but the variety is quite good nonetheless. After you have chosen all of the options, you can then finally start playing the game.
I will say that the start of Greedfall is painfully slow as you don’t even get to visit the island of Teer Fradee in the first few hours of the game. Instead, you have to do a lot of story and optional quests in the main city first before you get a chance to play the meat of the game.
The first few hours of the game introduce you to a lot of the game’s main mechanics, but it does get a little boring with you needing to do so many chores for NPC characters.
The story is essentially about your character of De Sardet going to the island of Teer Fradee to try and find a cure for a deadly plague called the malichor. When you reach the island, you realize things aren’t as simple as they seem as you are in the middle of a conflict between several different factions. The player can align themselves with the locals or the settlers and this affects the story depending on the choices that you make.
I didn’t find the story to be bad, although it does take a long time to get to the interesting parts as aforementioned. The thing that really brings this game down for me are the very long and uneventful dialogue sequences. The NPCs can drag on and on when you are talking to them and it gets boring listening to all of the dialogue. You have the option to skip dialogue, although you may not understand some of the stories if you skip too much of it.
However, the game has good voice acting despite having too much dialogue in it. I admired the developer used lots of British actors as it’s a fresh change of pace from the usual American voice actors that are often used in other AAA titles.
While the dialogue might get boring, things aren’t better when it comes to the visuals of Greedfall either. The character models look wooden and lifeless whenever you talk to them and the majority of the environments is a drab brown aesthetic. It’s not until you visit the island of Teer Fradee to see more vegetation does the graphics get a little better. That being said, I played this game on an Xbox One X, but the graphics never impressed me compared to other games I’ve played on the system recently.
In terms of gameplay, I thought the combat system is a mixed bag for me too. As I mentioned before, I chose to play as a Warrior the first time around, but the melee attacks feel slow and sluggish. It’s okay to be a Warrior when you are up against human enemies, but big monsters and bosses are hard to kill using this class type in my opinion. I ended up being a Magic user instead because it was easier killing enemies from afar using many spells.
You have the option to also shoot your enemies with a gun in this game as well, but I rarely did this because you need to find lots of ammo. I didn’t really use a gun in this game because I couldn’t be bothered looking for ammo to use up all of the time.
If you find yourself enjoying Greedfall, there is a lot to get through if you want to play the game until the very end. The main story lasts for around 15 hours while getting 100% could take you up to 30 hours of gameplay. Whatever the case may be, you are looking at a lot of quests for you to undertake.
Verdict
Anyway, Greedfall is an average action RPG offering lots of quests and a competent combat system. While the game’s pace is quite slow and the graphics aren’t great, there’s still lots of hours of gameplay on offer here for genre fans to sink their teeth into.
[Editor’s Note: Greedfall was reviewed on the Xbox One X platform. The game was provided to us by the publisher for review purposes.]
