Greedfall Review

Greedfall developed by Spiders and published by Focus Home Interactive is now available on Xbox One, PC and PlayStation 4.

Greedfall places you in the shoes of De Sardet, a noble of the merchant congregation who is about to travel to new and uncharted lands that are flooded with magic, riches and much more. The goal is to find a cure for the malichor, a plague that has ravaged your home town and affected most of the population. Now, I love a good old apocalyptic scenario in a game and Greedfall does well to show in the narrative that this disease is extremely deadly and is destroying everything in its path. During the story you’ll be faced with many choices that influence your reputation with factions, this in turn will either benefit you with certain ones or cause problems for you with others. I really enjoyed this choice system, on even the smallest of side quests it felt like you really had a choice on how to deal with it. One of the missions you face is whether or not to ship a pagan couple into the guards or not, now, you can either without hearing there side of the story throw them in prison, the higher ups would love that, or you can be reasonable and listen to their side and make your own decision on how to deal with it. During this one side missions there were a few choices to be made and I really enjoy a game that gives you the overall choice. Of course I chose to hear them out and they were in-fact innocent, the elders however of the faction that sent me out to find them was most displeased, and to be quite frank I couldn’t give a damn about his telling off. Little choices through-out the game will affect how it all turns out.

I have to add, the hat game is seriously strong in Greedfall, I quite liked having a laugh about the highly detailed and pretty awesome hats.

The game-play in Greedfall is very reminiscent of Dragon Age and that is a good thing. I did feel the combat was a bit tough at first but as you settle in to it it becomes a lot easier, I felt the same way about The Witcher 3 at first. The world of Greedfall offers many chances to test your combat skills and many chances to customise your character to your liking. Whether you like heavy weapons or rapiers, guns or science, Greedfall feels like it has a bit of everything for everyone. I particularly liked the one-handed sword with a gun combination, I was able to keep enemies at bay when I needed a chance to recover. As in any other RPG there is a leveling system and I thought it was very fair, the skills offered were interesting and I enjoyed forming my character into the most bad ass hat wielding noble man in the world. Other offerings are a host of side-quests that had some feel compelling and some feel a little annoying when you keep having to run back and fourth. There were a few that were very enjoyable and quite rewarding, I obviously spent the money on more hats.

Greedfall at heart isn’t exactly an open-world game as such but does have open environments, especially when you make it onto the island and first hearing it wasn’t open world put me off slightly but honestly, it works really well. When you first enter the game you are face to face with the city of Serene, now the detail in the city from the rich district to the slums ravaged by the plague are just so full of life and detail. Greedfall is a game that despite having a small team of 20 odd developers, absolutely full of detail and I really enjoyed being able to explore each area at my own pace. The island is also just fantastic. The world design is what brings this game to life truly and for that alone is worth a visit to the game. Greedfall on a Nvidia Geforce 2060 RTX ran like a dream at ultra and I didn’t run into any issues whatsoever. I rarely ran into any bugs really, it is an extremely polished game. The sound of the city as-well truly brings it to life and the enemies sound really fantastic when you start meeting the twisted monsters of the game. What I would say is the voice acting is okay but don’t expect triple A quality voice acting but none the less it is not bad at all.

Verdict

Greedfall is a must for RPG fans, I wouldn’t say it does anything new in the genre but it definitely is a good one. The selling points for me are it’s details, the choices and obviously hats. I think a few things could use little tweaks, perhaps the combat could be a little different at first to help newbies settle in a bit easier and perhaps the constant running back and fourth does get a bit tedious but it is a good time.

8/10