Greedfall Review: an exciting premise, but ultimately, directionless

The game Spiders’ newest release, Greedfall, wants to be is painfully apparent. They never hid their intent to be a sort of successor to beloved Bioware titles like Dragon Age, which was an exciting premise after the disappointment of both Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem. But the game has a problem with thoughtfulness and complexity throughout, and what it aspired to be, versus what it became, was lost in translation. 

You play as De Sardet, legate (a diplomat, basically) of the Merchant Congregation, and cousin to the future governor of your faction’s settlement on the island of Teer Fradee. De Sardet can be a man or a woman, and their appearance is customizable, as are their class, skills, talents, and abilities.

This is where Greedfall begins to stumble in its mechanical execution. 

In chasing the dream of a modern Bioware RPG, Greedfall attempts to take the systems we’ve grown accustomed to in the genre and innovate them, but their choices don’t work. The classes are still basically standard warrior, rogue, mage, but with different phrasing. In practice, they’re more freeform than something like Dragon Age, as you’re allowed to choose your own skills and stats as you see fit.

But there’s nothing all that interesting that comes with this deviation from the norm. I played as the rogue equivalent, and mostly felt that I was playing as a warrior but with traps. I never really had to use stealth mechanics to progress, and few of the traps and coatings I was able to use actually felt like they had a real impact on how combat was going. 

De Sardet’s abilities are the most frustrating part of this side of the game. Each of the six branching abilities you can choose from unlocks different aspects of the game. For example, science allows you to create alchemical mixtures that can blow holes in walls to ease traversal, and charm can help you sway a conversation in your favor.

Greedfall seems to pride itself on offering multiple ways to solve quests and get to where you’re going, but the reality of that is much more restrictive than the game would have you believe. Multiple times throughout my playthrough, I felt like I was being punished for investing in one ability over another when what I had invested in left me at a dead-end in a quest, and ability points are given out few and far between, so it’s not even as simple as grinding a level or two to unlock the point you need. I re-specced, at the very least, three times, which is a whole other mess. 

The nice thing is that Greedfall does allow you to re-spec through the use of memory crystals you obtain from looting bosses throughout the game. But the memory crystals don’t just affect your selections for skills or abilities, they affect everything, including your class and equipped items.

Even though I stuck with the trapper class for the whole game, each time I needed to switch up my abilities I was forced to choose it again, re-select every skill point, every talent, and every ability, then re-equip everything I had been wearing just a moment before. This became especially tedious as I approached endgame and had dozens of points invested into my skill tree that all had to be done again. 

While Spiders clearly tried to mix things up in some aspects of the RPG, they didn’t stick hard enough to other conventions. The communication in the game’s quests often leaves something to be desired, whether it’s a confusing solution not explained clearly in your journal, or quest markers that seem to appear and disappear arbitrarily.

This would perhaps be more bearable if each quest didn’t feel so long. There’s no real balance in the length or types of quests Greedfall throws at you. Each one ends up having multiple complications or twists that lead you down a long rabbit hole, which when applied sparingly, can add greatly to the storytelling and sense of the world. But in Greedfall? This mostly felt tedious. 

However, Greedfall’s narrative is where it falls the shortest. Largely due to its misunderstanding of what made games like Dragon Age such popular, problematic faves. The worlds and characters within Bioware games feel alive and full, which makes it compelling to get to know them and their history. Much like Dragon Age and Mass Effect, Greedfall borrows from real-world history to shape its core narrative and factions, and while there are certainly problems with how those games handled their source material, Greedfall takes it to a whole new level.

As advertised, this game is rooted purely in the colonization of Europe, an incredibly loaded concept that mainstream games still haven’t really managed to stick the landing on. In fact, coming from non-indigenous devs, it’s questionable as to whether we really even need games like this in the first place. But Spiders went for it, and there could have at least been something interesting or novel there, but instead, the game falls extremely flat in pretty much every way.

As I played, I kept thinking about Tyranny, Obsidian’s CRPG about being on the side of evil in a fantasy setting. While not perfect in its execution by any means, Tyranny at least has a very clear concept that it’s committed to, questions it wants to ask, and points it wants to make about the nature of oppression, colonization, and evil. Whether you like it or not, your character is an important cog in the machine of destruction, and their choices, even if they don’t end up being blatant human rights abuses, will always be working towards that end.

With a concept like Greedfall’s, this approach seems to make so much more sense. But Spiders didn’t embrace it, instead positioning De Sardet as a centrist colonizer, constantly looking for a middle road, never really choosing sides, even if the choices in-game would have you believe otherwise. 

The game constantly wants to excuse De Sardet and the Congregation from the colonial project, despite the revelation that the Congregation is arguably the most involved of all three colonizing factions. Instead, it frames the other two factions, the Bridge Alliance and Theleme as the blatant and harmful aggressors, the former engaging in horrific acts of human experimentation, much like real world governments have done across history, and the latter implementing conversion camps to turn the native islanders from their “pagan” beliefs, and burning those who refuse in the style of Catholic Inquisitions.

While it’s deeply problematic to try to keep De Sardet as some kind of compassionate hero in the face of what their own faction has done and is currently doing, the fact that the game won’t even let you really condemn the other two for their actions just adds insult to injury. 

Despite having multiple encounters with members of the other factions and butting heads with them over their actions, I was never given the choice to damn them for what they had done. Sure, I could free some prisoners or chase missionaries away from indigenous villages, but at no point was there an option for De Sardet to refuse to work with them anymore, or even start some sort of aggression or enact political consequences. Greedfall’s political setting is actually fairly interesting, so it’s a shame that they weren’t more willing to lean into that, or at least give players the option. Instead, De Sardet’s position as diplomat really just translates to “people pleaser” with no true convictions of their own. 

Meanwhile, in dealing with the indigenous people of Teer Fradee, who are strangely, not blatantly, based on real world peoples, De Sardet can still treat them horribly, side against them multiple times, and still ultimately get off scot-free by simply doing a side quest to help out a certain tribe. The islanders often speak about hating the colonizers and wanting them gone, but that never seems to fully extend to De Sardet and the Congregation, despite any previous harmful actions they might have taken against any of the tribes. 

This bland, wishy-washiness bleeds into every other aspect of the game’s narrative as well, leaving it feeling somewhat directionless and unimpressive. Multiple times in my playthrough, I found myself wondering what could possibly be coming from the next big story event, not because there was some engaging plot point or exciting mystery, but because the game just kind of kept ambling from point to point with no real narrative weight or conviction. This was true of my companions as well.

While Spiders made sure to market the fact that each companion has their own belief system that may clash with yours, the reality of that never really came into question for me. I know, for example, that if you’re too anti-indigenous, Siora will not be available to romance, and may even leave your party. But the game gives you so many opportunities to make everyone happy that I never felt I was in danger of losing anyone. Each companion is vaguely interesting, and clearly has some sort of personality, but unlike Bioware companions who each feel like their own people with agendas and beliefs, Greedfall’s companions ultimately feel like stand-ins for their faction as a whole. 

This is especially problematic in the case of Siora, your indigenous companion, who is ultimately framed as a fairly common trope surrounding indigenous people: the “Indian Princess”, a demure and sweet indigenous woman who is willing to help settlers on behalf of her tribe and often ends up deeply devoted to one of them romantically. That’s pretty much exactly what happens with De Sardet and Siora (in their first encounter, De Sardet literally calls her “Princess”), with no question or conflict about the reality of this or what it means for either of them in relation to their factions or beliefs. A mid-game revelation about De Sardet’s origins even works to excuse this to a degree, once again trying to wipe the settler legate’s hands clean. To have the only indigenous companion fit this trope so easily is lazy and negligent, something that clearly should have been approached with more thought, sensitivity, and care. 

Siora is the only romance option for queer women, so if you want to be a woman who exclusively loves women in in Greedfall, you have to engage with this. It was extremely frustrating in a game that marketed its queer romances to have to further marginalize others in order to be able to see myself in this game. This could have been avoided by simply allowing your other woman companion to be romanceable to both De Sardet genders as well, but as Spiders already told Gayming, they just didn’t think about it. 

And that kind of sums Greedfall up in a nutshell. There are a lot of complicated ideas at play, but ultimately, they’re just not that well thought through,and do little to nothing to actually benefit the story, rendering the colonial themes nothing more than an aesthetic sheen over a mostly directionless jaunt to a New World no one really needed. The political intrigue introduced before you leave for Teer Fradee is far more interesting than anything that happens upon arriving on the island, begging the question of why Spiders even felt the need to evoke such a contentious setting? Like most of the game, however, there really doesn’t seem to be a good answer. 

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