GreedFall 2: The Dying World is one of the biggest swings that studio Spiders have taken in a while. A sequel to their middlingly received 2019 fantasy action role-playing game (RPG) about diseased aristocrats pillaging an island nation of broadly drawn indigenous stereotypes, it sets out to fix a lot of what didn’t work the first time around.
This time you experience the world from the perspective of one of the island natives and explore the impact the sudden and violent colonization has had on your home first-hand. Strangely, the character creator is far less extensive than the first game in terms of physical appearance, but makes up for it by being more robust when it comes to unique RPG classes and abilities.
If the previous game was trying to be The Witcher 3, with its floaty real-time melee brawls and emphasis on consumables and buffs, this is aiming more towards Dragon Age: Origins or Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s rare to see an RPG franchise do the opposite of the traditional shift from turn-based to action-focused, but it instantly feels much more appropriate for the overall vibe of a game from the developer.
An island crawling with bugs
The studio has struggled to create engaging or satisfying combat in their more recent attempts to emulate Dark Souls, but it’s easier to forgive wonky animations and controls when they’re not directly hampering your ability to survive. Things now play out in a much more considered fashion - with a tactical camera that lets you pause time, get a wider view of the battlefield and queue up actions for your party to carry out.
It’s not exactly reinventing the wheel, but it’s surprising it took this long for Spiders to realise how much better an isometric camera and micro-managed party combat fit their niche of mid-budget RPGs. It wonderfully evokes the classic Black Isle Studios titles that are clearly such huge influences on every other aspect of their games.
It’s difficult to know whether this is down to being in Early Access or just its nature as a Spiders game, but the visual bugs are currently plentiful. You’ll probably see your character’s eyeballs through their head a dozen times in your first few hours. Objects appear and disappear from people’s hands at random, including during combat.
Beyond the bugs, there’s an overall unfinished roughness in many aspects of the design. There are separate stats dictating how effective Light or Heavy armour is for any given character, but seemingly no way to tell whether any piece of armour in your inventory is considered to be Light or Heavy beyond context clues in the flavour text.
If you’re a member of the Spiders faithful, of course, this is all expected and won’t scare you off from playing whatever they do next. If you’re someone turned away by messy UIs, clumsy world-building or unpolished presentation - then the game as it currently exists probably isn’t going to win you over.
Still, if you like all the Proper RPG Stuff; collecting hundreds of bits and bobs from little piles of junk on the ground; micro-managing the equipment and stats of a party of characters; asking NPCs to rattle off reams of dialogue about the commerce and industry of made-up empires - then there’s certainly enough here already to warrant keeping an eye on how GreedFall 2 develops throughout early access.
GreedFall 2: The Dying World is out now in PC early access. Its full release is slated to come to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S next year.
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