GreedFall 2: The Dying World is an RPG by the developer Spiders and published by Nacon. It is a prequel to the events that occurred 3 years before the original game of GreedFall. As a big fan of GreedFall, I was dying to jump at the chance to get early access to the new game. It is with a heavy heart that I must say at this time, I’m worried about GreedFall 2. I was able to jump into the early access that’s just released on Steam and I have to say that it is a mere travesty at this time. Now please bear in mind that Spiders claims that there’s only around 30% of the game being brought to us at this time, so that is a good thing. But at this exact stage, I find this prequel to be a lot less enjoyable than its predecessor.
The bugs for me were very overwhelming, from me running into walls which caused me to die. However, due to his death, I was still able to get a loot drop. About six minutes later I wandered past some enemy corpses, so no damn clue how they died as I was the only one playing in the area. However, for me to die to a wall but kill a mob yards away from me and get their loot, I am Overpowered!
The prequel takes place three years before the events of GreedFall, so it’s still in the 18th century, but it tells its story from a completely different point of view. You now play out the life of a tribesman from the animated movie of Pocahontas, kind of.
You are a native Teer Fradee islander, which brings to light the experience of those people. You get to live the life of having a foreign legion invade your territory to claim it. Toss in the fact that you also have a supernatural ability, and you are now the hero your people desperately need.
Now when it comes to combat, they decided to venture away from what I loved about GreedFall. In the original, you enter combat and directly control your character, running up to your enemies and hitting them, or casting spells. In GreedFall 2, it is now a pseudo-turn-based combat system. They moved away from the console kind of approach for a more tactical ‘pause and issue commands’ approach.
You use a tactical overlay to freeze the game and issue commands to your companions, telling them what to do. Now for me who loves Tactical RPGs I am fine with it, however, I don’t like it when a game changes its play style with the same IP. For me, it ruins the experience that I grew accustomed to when I played the first to the second game.
When it comes to the voice acting, it is decent and a fair range of accents are available, although a few characters seemed to veer between different accents almost at random. Most interestingly, a lot of the early dialogue takes place entirely in the Yecht Fradí language with subtitles for translation. To me, I found this intriguing because it gave me the feeling of watching a foreign film.
Whether fans are willing to give it that much time is unknown, especially when there are many other compelling RPGs to experience. Maybe it’ll surprise me down the line when they release 60 to 90% of the completed game to review. Hopefully, this will allow it to be more of a polished and enjoyable game. For now, GreedFall 2: The Dying World is a pretty big shift from the original in a negative direction from its predecessor.
This review was written based on a PC review code for GreedFall 2: The Dying World provided by Spiders and Nacon.