The following review of Greedfall may contain partial spoilers.
Greedfall is an action role playing game set in a 17th century fantasy setting. Your character is a diplomat for the Congregation of Merchants (think Dutch Golden Age) who is sent to New Serene, a city where your cousin is to be governor, on the newly discovered island of Teer Fradee to handle relations with their allies and the natives, as well as hopefully find a cure for a plague destroying your homeland.
Unfortunately in Greedfall all your allies hate each other.
Thélème, a religious society (Spanish Inquisition) are at war with the Bridge Alliance (Gunpowder Empires) and both are having open conflicts with the native tribal folk of the island the Yecht Fradi. There are also the Nauts, a faction who controls all the sea travel and the Coin Guard, a mercenary faction that is employed by the three main factions as body guards and local city peace keepers.
Greedfall isn’t Carnival Row, but if you liked that you’d probably like this game’s story.
I hadn’t really thought about playing Greedfall until recently when my wife and I completed watching Carnival Row. The Victorian era drama where humans and magical creatures exist in the same world. It’s a genre I much enjoy both for my steampunk and fantasy cravings and it’s what led me to take a look at Greedfall.
From the promotional materials the game looked to be similar to Bioware’s Dragon Age or CD Projekt RED’s The Witcher. Neither games I played, but have always been recommended to me by friends, family and Steam, Amazon and any internet ad that Google likes to keep repeatedly showing me because I clicked one time on a stupid banner.
From the start of the game I felt like the world was very much alive, random people would banter, people I completed their quests for would welcome me or wave as I would later be running by them. While the world wasn’t an open world like Fallout 4, its zones were very large and left me lots of room to explore.
Exploring was often a hit or miss as you may sometimes find an interesting location such as a fort that is empty only to discover later on that it’s a quest location which populates once you’ve triggered the quest for that area.
Romances in Greedfall are light but with an intense kiss goodbye at the end.
I played as Madame De Sardet, Legate of the Congregation of Merchants, early on my companions Kurt and Vasco had some tasks they wanted help with and after completing both sets of their quests and advancing the main story quest partially, they both wanted in my pants with heart shaped dialogue choices appearing.
However, my real interest was in the native Siora, who no matter how friendly I got rarely had anything to say to me until quite some time into the main story when she finally asked me to help with some missionaries in her village and the burial of her mother. After that quest and again advancing the main story partially she began to ask me about how people expressed interest in one another where I was from and ultimately her desire to spend the night with me. After a very PG rated fully clothed kiss scene we went back to the silent treatment, though she’d refer to me as her “My Minundhanem” along our journey together. Of course at the end who ever your love interest is will greet you before your final encounter with that classic romantic over the shoulder turn, run to, embrace and kiss; which would give more feels if she had more to say to me in our journey.
Magic in Greedfall can be overpowered and focus on your balance stat.
I decided for my first playthrough that if I were to be a diplomat first, I would forgo the sword and gun focuses and be entirely devoted to magic training, charisma and enlightenment talents and will power and mental power attributes.
As usual in games charisma and enlightenment opened up a lot of convincing dialogue choices, however in Greedfall Charisma improves the abilities of your companions as well.
Will power and mental power simply allowed me to equip the best rings (magic weapon) and necklaces (magic defense) in the game, which magic skills made me able to AOE freeze groups of enemies and pick them off easily from a distance while my companions kept them away from me.
Clothing, or armor in the game wasn’t too essential for me as I was rarely in melee range, though the most important stat I found to be balance. The higher your balance stat the less likely you are to be knocked over when hit by an enemy. This was important for companions like Kurt who could wear heavy armor but kept falling over and letting enemies through until I upgraded his armor to focus more on balance instead of defense.
Choices don’t really matter until the end of Greefall.
Along the way I’d make choices, many would impact my faction standing but these decisions didn’t really seem to matter to much during the time, until I got to the end and realized that a few key decisions along the way made the outcome a lot better and easier for me.
For those interested I was able to complete the game with all factions and allies friendly, except Siora as the romance character at loving.
I finished Greedfall and want more.
While the end of the game has your typical RPG major choice to make, think Divinity 2 Original Sin, I found myself wishing that a DLC or expansion would be planned. One where I could continue my activities as Legate or Demigod where in either role I’d get to continue my journey with my native woman love interest who rarely speaks.
