As a longtime fan of Spiders Studio, I can’t help but feel a little frustrated with the French outfit’s latest adventure. After the PS5 version of Greedfall smashed my expectations a few years back, Greedfall 2: The Dying World had a lot to live up to. The fact that this was launched into early access, to middling reviews, only adds to the general sense of expectation. And while there’s a lot here to like, the overall package just doesn’t feel like much of a leap forward.
Story-wise, it flips the script somewhat on the last game by casting you as one of the native tribespeople of Teer Fradee, the island nation you were sent to colonise in the first game. It begins with you undergoing a rite of passage trial with a couple of your friends before being taken prisoner by the colonists and sent to the mainland of Gacane. What should be a rip-roaring maritime adventure follows similar by-the-numbers plotting to the first game, as you assemble a ragtag group of companions who are for some reason happy to name you as their new leader, despite one of them being an aristocrat, one being a former military commander, and one being the actual captain of your ship, and your character being just a plucky gobshite.
The narrative itself is okay if a little forgettable, featuring the standard story beats underscored by a steady stream of casual racism. You’re constantly dealing with issues that only arise because some other arsehole hates islanders, and it starts to feel like Spiders are just hitting us over the head with the whole anti-colonial thing a bit too excitedly. I mean, we get it, you can stop now, Spiders.
One thing that bothered me more than it should have throughout was the range of accents. Characters are either sneering in the King’s English, drawling on in Cornish like what pirates do, yarr, or talking in the frankly awful made-up Teer Fradee accent, that’s like an Irishman trying to sound Spanish after six pints of Guinness. It’s incredibly distracting all the time.
The world itself is quite fun to explore, despite there being some issues with difficulty. It’s quite possible to utterly demolish a group of enemies, only to walk ten yards and be demolished right back by the next lot. Enemy levels aren’t displayed and you won’t know you’re in for a rubbing until you see their health bars and notice you’re suddenly losing half your HP with every hit. It’s really annoying, especially as there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. At one point I walked out of a room and was ambushed for a scripted fight and just seemed to stand no chance against the enemy. After five attempts and using whatever limited tactical options were available, I caved and dropped the difficulty to “story” which bypasses the issue by literally making you invulnerable.
There are options to tweak the difficulty in multiple ways, but it was annoying that I had to do it so early because the alternative was to plug away at the fight for hours until I either fluked it or won by a glitch. Loading an earlier save (much earlier) and trying to level up a little may have helped, but as that was my only possible option to grind at all, it felt like Spiders was taking the piss. It soured me to the rest of the game, knowing I could just be once invincible at any time.
Combat in Greedfall 2: The Dying World eschews direct control for a hybrid of real time and tactical systems, and seems to be aping Dragon Age: Origins despite that game being nearly 20 years old and its combat system being iterated on and improved by several games since. You can tactically pause at any time to issue orders to your party members, then unpause and have them act accordingly. But the camera is so temperamental and the combat animations so janky, it can be hard to fully appreciate the results. It’s a shame, really, because when the combat is flowing it can be quite enjoyable; it just trips over its own feet far too often.
You’re able to engage a stealth mode and hide in long grass, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to attack from stealth, and there’s no crime system to make thievery seem worth it. You can just take what you want from whoever you want. The most complex morality comes from whether you want to do menial tasks for arseholes or just kill them to get what you want, and I never saw a negative to just merking everyone in the name of progress. Spend an hour finding a key to this door, or slaughter the guys in front of it with zero consequences? Hmm, let me think.
I did have some fun with Greedfall 2, because as I said at the top of the review, I’m a fan of what they do. Their particular brand of Eurojank is comfort food for me, but they came so close to the big time with Greedfall that The Dying World feels like a few steps backwards. Even the companions don’t join you out of any sense of world-saving urgency; they just kind of tag along because they saw someone push you over and in that moment suddenly decided that all this murdering and pillaging of a complex tribal society had gone a bit too far. I didn’t even feel like romancing any of them, despite that being an option. Only Sybille felt particularly intriguing, as she’s the cousin of the first game’s protagonist and the link makes her interesting.
Fans of Spiders and the first game will be well served with a similar-sized adventure that plumbs the exact same narrative bucket with the exact same visuals, though the shift in combat mechanics might either irk or thrill depending on personal preference. But for any newcomers, I’d advise you just play Greedfall on PS5 or PC. It’s got a more compelling story and the characters are slightly more interesting, while I just preferred the combat there. Greedfall 2: The Dying World makes an attempt to be a swashbuckling, seafaring pirate thriller, but gets muddled in its own politics and bogged down by too many clashing systems. Not Spiders’ worst offering, but sadly some way short of their best.
