Greedfall (2019)

Greedfall (2019), developed by Siders SARL, published by Focus interactive

Greedfall is not a great game. It's a decent game, that suffers from the simple fact, that it's far too long for its own good. Basically, it's one of those quite serviceable games, that are built around a decent concept, but it's marred by redundant open-world style gameplay, that doesn't really add anything to the mix unless what you really crave for is yet another overly padded RPG, where you can do a lot of stuff while ignoring the main story for a while. Not every RPG needs to be a 50-hour journey in a world filled with incompetent people, who can't solve their own problems.

You step in the shoes of De Sardet, gender and appearance depending on your choices, a young noble of the Merchant Congregation, who is sent with their cousin Constantin to an island of Teer Fradee, where Constantin is to take the role of the governor of New Serene, whereas De Sardet will act as his legate. It's not all about money though, as there's a severe sickness running through the population and it's hoped, that a remedy might be found from Teer Fradee.

The island itself is governed by three factions, The Merchant Congregation, Theleme, a deeply religious group modelled around Catholics, the Bridge Alliance with heavy scientific crusade and the natives of the island, who are fodder between the factions. Coin Guards are the mercenary faction that provides security to the island and the Nauts are the naval force that manages all sea travel.  

The main story can be summarised as such: De Sardet arrives on the island, begins the investigation and find that the islander worship a deity called En ol mil frictimen. Meanwhile, Constantine gets hit by the sickness and needs to be given some relief. De Sardet finally meets the deity and learns that the sickness is of the people's own doing as they have ravaged the land. It turns out that Constantine has turned evil and is trying to gain power by sapping the energy of En ol mil frictimen. Depending on how you've managed your relations, you can have the factions help you during the final battle, after which you have to choose to either kill Constantine or join him to become a new god.

Simplistic story aside, you spend more time running around the island solving every little problem you find, as that gives you more experience and levels, you need during the final stretches. There's also a lot of busywork if you choose to develop those skills, in the form of crafting, so all the pointless open-world exercises are catered for.  

Graphically Greedfall looks nice. The settings are good, though character models do vary a bit in quality. The music and the voice acting are serviceable, though I'm not a huge face of the native dialect used. As for gameplay, the main attraction is the combat and it works well enough. You have blades, axes and maces accompanied by simple firearms, potions and spells, which give some decent variation to the combat. So no problems there either.

My main issue with the game is, that you spend so much time running around the same locations, swapping out groups of monsters that are always found in the same place. While there's some interesting range on the missions you do, getting to the mission areas is often a rather boring task of rinse repeat. 

After having played several RPGs by Spiders it seems to me that this style of gameplay is their main goto. They seem to intentionally pad their games with uninspiring, repetitious combat, that offers nothing of interest to the players. It's basically scaled for scale's sake and not for bringing actual content to the game. Greedfall does have more locations than their previous games, but that still doesn't make their gameplay design a good or interesting fit, especially on a game that spans over 50 hours. 

It's something of a shame, that a relatively interesting setting has been ruined by poor gameplay choices. As I said, this is a decent game, which I did pay through mainly because I was intrigued by the setting. That said, despite you can play the game in several ways and it has 5 or so endings, I have very little interest in tackling the game ever again. 

For those interested, you can Greedfall from GOG and Steam. It's also available for consoles. 




  


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