After grinding away at it for the better part of August, I finally put the wrap on Greedfall. What I played was enjoyable, but for the life of me I can’t really figure out just what it was that kept me going. Was it intrigue? Immersion? Was I having so much fun that I just couldn’t tear myself away?

In truth, I don’t think it was any of those things. The world of Tir Fradi was very beautifully and carefully crafted, and that went a long way into keeping me around. That said, the different zones, while undertandably so, were very similar to each other, with only slight differences between them. It’s an island, and not a huge one at that, so it wouldn’t make sense to contain vastly different geographical regions (although, living in Texas, I won’t say it’s impossible.) The downside of that is that the people and creatures don’t really vary much either.

There were a lot of thoughts rolling through my head during my quite lengthy play time. There’s no official counter in the game, but judging from my multitude of evening gaming sessions, I can estimate about 50 hours, easily. Either that or it just seemed so much longer than it was, which is also believable. For a lot of things the game did right, there were also a lot that really annoyed the shit out of me. So let’s get to it!

The combat is… not good

There’s just no way to sugar-coat it. The combat in this game is terrible. It works, and I was able to grind out victories against numerous beasts and bad guys by cheesing my way through various encounters, but by and large it’s the weakest part of the game. The biggest culprit for this is the lock-on system, or lack thereof. Now maybe I’m just a feeble-minded individual, but I never found a way to lock onto a baddie and focus on it only. The targeting system will pick whichever foe is closest to the direction your analog is pointing and that’s what you’ll attack.

This isn’t that big a deal when fighting the big boss monsters, or when encountering a few beasts here or there, but later in the game when you’re confronted with large groups of creatures that can all lay you on your ass with a simple tail swipe, you’ll be rolling around so much that there’s no possible way to remain focused on one creature. And so many times I had used my one-two combo of stasis and special attack, only to cast the stasis on one creature and do the special attack on another. While none of it was game-breaking, it was tedious at best and controller-throwing at worst.

They should’ve called it “People Suck: The Game”

The over-arching story takes place against the backdrop of colonialism, slavery, and the inquisition. In short, it puts a magnifying glass on just how shitty people can be.

Your character is tasked with being a legate of the Merchant Congregation, whose job it is to maintain relations with the other factions on the island, whether it is the various countries who also have claims to the island, or the original inhabitants; i.e. the “savages.”

The worst part is, you spend the entirety of the game trying to convince the island natives that your people are not walking pieces of shit, while being undermined at every turn by your people being walking pieces of shit.

Seriously. Everybody in this game, with the exception of a number of main characters, are awful individuals. And on top of that, in order to get the good ending (and have some help at the end), you need to remain on friendly terms with a few factions that really don’t deserve it. And by friendly terms, I mean Friendly. The game will track your deeds and let you know of your standing with the various factions. Anything less than friendly and they won’t help you at the end. Nice doesn’t cut it.

So there were many times that I had to bite my lip and take the diplomatic path when what I really wanted to do was put a bullet in someone’s head.

The atrocities that the various factions inflict on the native people while encroaching on their lands and trying to “convert” them is angering. To know that they’re displaying basically the colonization of the Americas and the Spanish Inquisition doesn’t exactly give you the warm and fuzzies, either.

Yet all the while you need to kiss ass and play nice, despite wanting to slit some throats. It was all a bit exhausting, and if I’m being honest, depressing. I wanted so badly to tell the Bridge Alliance and Theleme to both go fuck themselves.

The quest structure is borked.

Many times, you’ll have multiple quests running at the same time. Most of these quests have multiple objectives or “steps” that need to be completed in order to finish it up and move on.

A lot times these steps are in order, and the next one will only appear after the current one is completed. The problem is, sometimes the game will throw you a curve ball and offer you several objectives to tackle in any order… but the game will also give you either/or scenarios to pick from as well, and the game doesn’t tell you which is which.

I’ll try to explain as best I can, and I’ll use a vague description of one of the scenarios I came across. Let’s say there’s an attack about to commence, and the game presents you with two objectives: “Notify (Party A) of the attack” and “Notify (Party B) of the attack.” Now this can be taken two ways. Do you notify both, and have the luxury of doing whichever one first that you wish, or do you pick which one you will notify, at the expense of the other? The game will sometimes tell you this, and sometimes it won’t.

If it was just a decision to make before moving on it would be one thing, but on more than one occasion, the decision cost me reputation points with the one I did not choose. Since the end of the game very much depends on your standing with the various factions, this is the kind of shit I need to know about ahead of time. Wandering off and completing an objective, just to see the dreaded red X appear over the other objective always sucks. Always.

Character progression is wonky.

This game has three skill trees, when it really only needed one. They way they were broken up was weird, with things like climbing and shimmying through cracks being governed by skills that needed points. Some skills are just intrinsically more important than others. And to top it off, some of the skill trees only receive points ever two or three levels. When I get one point to spend every great once in a while, am I going to use it to improve my lockpicking, or am I going to use it on charisma?

Skills that govern speech options, like charisma and intuition, just aren’t as important. Most dialog in which they come into play usually have other means of persuasion as well (like bribery.) Since money was extremely easy to come by, I never hesitated to throw coin someone’s way if I needed to.

The one that really annoyed me was the Attribute tree, which decides if you can wield a better sword, a better gun, better armor, etc. When you reach the point in the game where you realize you’ve got the best gun, sword, and armor that your current skill levels will allow, it’ll be time to make the really hard choice the next time you get that one skill point.

Admittedly, as the game went on, these points were less and less important. Your character seems to have a level cap much higher than the game itself. At the time of completion, I had done pretty much all the side quests and companion quests and my character was sitting at level 37. But I was bummed that by level 25 or so I literally hit a ceiling with the loot. The last 12 levels of my character were just throwing points into random things because I already had the best armor and the best weapon, and everything I looted was just junk for the merchant. The armor was disappointing as it was all pretty boring stuff. I kept waiting for some epic set that would make me look like a true badass, but it just never happened.

I was a bit overpowered for the last quarter of the game, but that was probably for the best, because my patience with the game was already wearing thin and I just wanted it over with.

There’s a lot of game in a tiny amount of space.

This game is long, especially if you are like me and like to do every sidequest. The problem is, a lot (and I mean a lot) of this game consists of running back and forth talking to the same people over, and over, and over. I was so very tired of traversing San Mateus and New Serene by the time the game was done, and the natives, for as nuanced and interesting as they were, got really tiresome to talk to. I can applaud what Spiders was able to do in a relatively small amount of game space, but also think less talk and a lot more action would’ve helped. Fighting the same handful of creatures, using the same limited skill set was also a bit tiring, though it became less of a problem the more over-powered I became.

The end gave me flashbacks of GoT Season 8.

So the ending took a hard left turn in the last act of the game, and the wonderful, pleasant guy you’ve been trying to save suddenly goes mad and wants to kill the spirit of the island and take his power.

It was all explained over the course of the last few quests, so there was a definite rhyme and reason, but the fact that it happens so quickly and easily didn’t quite sit well with me. It reminded me of a certain other about-face by a blond chick with dragons.

It’s not that it wasn’t good, or warranted, I just don’t think that swinging the story into that territory so late in the game earned the gravitas it was trying to achieve.

In fact, I misunderstood what was happening at first, and when I finally realized what the story was actually saying, I felt my explanation was better!

What did I think happened? Well, okay…

When Constantin was infected with the Malichor plague, and the native shaman took him to be healed, he bonded Constantin with the island. That happened.

But then, when all the creatures started going berserk, and attacking everyone, I thought that when Constanttin bonded with the island, instead of being healed, he actually infected the island with malichor.

In truth, the answer wasn’t that interesting. When Constantin was bonded, he was healed of the malichor, but instead of being at peace, he had tasted the power of the island and it corrupted him. Now he wanted to rule the island by taking the power of the island god for himself.

This complete change of character goes against everything we had learned of Constantin at this point, and I didn’t buy the “being faced with his own mortality” excuse for a second.

In conclusion

I obviously enjoyed Greedfall, or else I don’t think I could’ve stuck with it to the end. Honestly, if you like games where multiple dialog choices and moral decisions, it’s a pretty good game. If you’re looking for a good ARPG with great combat and various environments, you’re better off looking elsewhere.