While Greedfall has a decent amount of good qualities and interesting ideas, it tends to fall short in all the areas that truly matter in a game like this. Everything about it, from it's world events to it's general gameplay ideas, have been plucked right from other games who share its genre, but it only seems to fall short in every way to its companions.
Greedfall is an open world action RPG in the same vain of The Witcher series, the Mass Effect series and the Dragon Age series. It operates on large and plentiful maps, character development and relationships, story elements, and RPG stat systems. Despite it having a large amount of content, the game tends to muddle its world with cliches, obvious story progression, rushed story ideas, and lazy ascetics.
Like the games its clearly inspired by, Greedfall seems to borrow more than just the good, but the bad as well, sometimes even overlooking the good all together. Though I named games like The Witcher and Dragon Age as games it relates to, there is one game that really stands out as inspiration for Greedfall, and that's Fallout 3, and 4. It seems like the developers took more than a few notes out of Bethesda's book, from a ridiculous amount of reused assets, to a faction system that seems more important than it really is, to a completely broken combat system.
The most glaring problem with Greedfall is its combat system. Clunky, delayed and easy to take advantage of, but hardly ever fun. There's even a button you can use to freeze time and select your next move with ease which seems to have been implemented only to draw away from the lackluster fluidity of the battles without it. Basically, you just wanna press the block button. If used properly, this button could make the final boss of the game beatable at level 1, and by used properly I mean just press it constantly. No matter whats going on in the battle, no matter what your character is doing, you can always press block and instantly block with no repercussions except for maybe your character falling over (which makes you invulnerable until he gets back up). I played the game on the hardest difficulty, and after getting through a learning curve at the beginning, I found myself barely changing equipment throughout the entire game because it was so easy to take advantage of this system. This also leads to another huge problem with the battle system... its NOT fun. Most battles in the game involve groups of enemies that can both long range and short range attack you, and there's no coding to create a fair or fun system. Enemies will attack you relentlessly without really interacting with each other. This creates a constant state of pressing dodge and block until you finally see a small window to attack, and then repeat. It's extremely boring, and once you find a good routine and skillset to take advantage of the enemies (like the stasis skill which lets you freeze enemies) you'll be dealing with every battle with disdain and boredom. This isn't even mentioning the delayed clunky feeling of the controls and the uselessness of your teammates who are seemingly only there to distract a few enemies at the beginning of a battle until they quickly die. Again, I did play this on the hardest difficulty, so I'm sure it's more forgiving in the others, but the general feeling and look of the battles is just awful.
Just like Fallout which likes to create this giant world filled with side quests and then underdevelop the crap out of it, Greedfall follows suit and does this to perfection. With only 3 main cities in the game, you'll have trouble distinguishing which one you're in. Every city seems to have been built by the same people, and despite some minor differences in layout and the exterior of the main buildings, everything is nearly identical. Even the interior of the 3 main buildings (each in a different city) are literally identical inside. The Exact same layout, with some different colors and decorations which hardly cover up the laziness. There's also a tavern/guild in each city which are all also identical to each other. I don't understand how a game could be this lazy honestly. You have 3 cities... that's not even a lot. Wouldn't it be a good idea to spend a little time making them unique? Unfortunately that's a constant problem in this game, and despite each city belonging to a different faction, and each village in the game consisting of a different tribe, all of the assets are identical. Though most of the game actually takes place outside of the cities and villages, the general areas of the game follow the same rules. Everything looks the same, and there's no real way to visually determine where in the world of Greedfall you are.
As with the buildings and scenery the same goes for the characters. Reuse is the name of the game. Hey, isn't that character familiar? Oh right, he's these other 15 characters I already met. This is ok when it comes to non-important NPCs, but a lot of these characters are decently important to the main story or side quests at some point. Greedfall doesn't even manage to swap out complexions, voices or facial features. In fact, some NPCs even have one of your companions voices. This reuse of characters is so obvious and redundant that it causes actual confusion during some quests, and at its best it pulls you from the experience to constantly remind you of how lazy of a game this is.
Now I know I've been talking mostly bad about the game, and to be fair it does have some good qualities. The overall story is decent. the companions and factions are interesting, and the general feeling of the game is decently fun. Not to mention this game is rather large and somehow seems to pull off zero to very short load times. However, you're constantly being reminded of the games faults in the areas it should be the strongest. Even though the main story feels completely rushed at times and all the main events don't really get enough time or development to breath and seem as important as they should be (Also pretty much every twist is completely foreseeable decently in advance), the game manages to have some interesting concepts. In fact as I came to the closing of the game I was starting to find myself forgiving a lot of its problems that irked me so match throughout, but then I actually did beat it... and wow.
The ending is complete laziness at its finest. A handful of still pictures with a narration. Wow... You don't even get a little bit of an ending in cinematic form, the entire ending is just stills. I cannot express how truly unfulfilling this feels. The entire point of a game like this is the character development and the relationships you acquire throughout it. To just throw in some still shots with some boring and obvious "choice determined" narration completely undermines the very essence of the storytelling. This ending style completely made me feel that this entire game, and the hours I spent playing it was a complete waste.