Man, never thought I’d see the day.
For those unaware Spiders and it’s publisher Nacon are unfortunately no more. Long time readers might be wondering why I’d be shedding a tear at that news, given that most of the games I’ve reviewed of theirs have well, never been particularly glowing. The reason is simple: even though I’d ironically play everything they put out, reveling in their objective awfulness, under that was a hope that one day they’d succeed. I saw a glimmer of hope there in the original Greedfall, the first of their games to inch above bad and firmly into OK. Steelrising was an unfortunate and ill-advised attempt to capitalise on the soulslike frenzy that was gripping everyone back then made only worse to be released in the same year as the great Elden Ring itself so even those who’d usually hunt those kinds of experiences down were much better served elsewhere.
So it was with an extremely heavy heart that I began my journey with Greedfall 2, knowing that it was to be their swan song. My hopes before all of that happening were somewhat high as the game had been in Early Access for some time and if there was anything that Spiders’ games needed it was polish. Unfortunately though it seems that history was doomed to repeat itself once again as Spiders’ last ever game makes the same mistakes as many of their previous titles have.
Flipping the script on the previous game Greedfall 2 has you playing one of the native inhabitants of Teer Fradee who’s beginning their quest to become a seer for their tribe. Your elders have set you to task to help the people of your tribe whilst also getting more in tune with the land that sustains you. These quests inevitably have you run into the foreigners who have come to your land and have started pillaging it for all it’s worth and you’re forced to make choices about how to deal with them. It is right at the end of your journey, just after you’ve ascended to the rank of seer, that you’re kidnapped and brought to the old world. It would seem that all you have left in front of you is life as a slave but the kindness of strangers has other plans for those like yourself.
Greedfall 2’s graphics are decidedly dated. To be sure they’re very much a step up from both the previous Greedfall and Steelrising, but it would seem that Spiders’ dedication to using their own in-house game engine Silk has come back to haunt them yet again. To be sure, I get it, there’s a lot of costs sunk into developing the tooling around an engine as much as the engine itself but given how quickly other proprietary engines have outstripped the capabilities of Silk it still boggles my mind that they didn’t make the switch 2 games ago. Couple that with the decidedly wooden animations, varying levels of jank (both mechanical and visual) and the distinct lack of optimisation in many places and it’s hard to have nice things to say about the visual aspects of the game.
Optimisation deserves it’s own section as this was one of the first games I played on my new rig which, to gloat a bit about, is a near top-of-the-line machine with a RTX5090, 64GB of RAM and a PCIE 5 SSD capable of speeds I’m not sure I can readily make use of. I say all that because even with a beast of a system driving it Greedfall 2 will still suffer from level of detail and texture pop-ins all the time, the below screenshot being just one example. I had countless times where NPCs simply didn’t render for upwards of 10 minutes, leaving brooms and other items floating wildly in mid air until the person hold them finally popped in. It doesn’t help that it seems like it renders up through the detail levels before getting to the last one which would do horrifying things like not render a characters teeth during dialogues and cutscenes. Given it spent just shy of 18 months in Early Access I expected better.
Once again Spiders fell into the same trap of simply doing too much, wanting Greedfall 2 to be something a lot bigger than what they had the capability to achieve. To be sure it’s nice to see all the trappings of a fully fledged RPG here: classes, talent trees, attributes, skills, party, real-time with pause combat, management, crafting, an (unfortunately very late in game) open world, the whole shebang. The trouble is though that many of these elements just don’t really work together cohesively, making the all feel like isolated mechanics that have little bearing on each other. This then flows directly into the core game loop which feels very much the same, disjointed and thoroughly unsatisfying at almost every turn. I absolutely, truly wanted to like Greedfall 2 enough so I’d play it through to the end but I simply couldn’t manage it, even after I went back after a couple week’s hiatus from it to play other things.
A big part of this, I feel, is how the progression system is just too damn slow and convoluted to make it feel like you’re really getting anywhere. To be sure, you and your party will level up a lot, but the system from the original Greedfall remains: one level gets you a skill point, the other attributes, another a talent point, etc. Spending these is then buried in multiple layers of menus, each of which you’ll have to navigate in and out of several times to spend all the points across your entire party. Even reaching some of the more meatier upgrades merits not much of anything in the grand scheme of things as I never felt that any of those keystone upgrades really made that much of a difference to anything.
It’s only after reading my previous reviews that I’ve figured out I may have done myself a disservice by choosing a non-melee class for the first time ever in one of Spiders’ games. They have routinely built out those classes as first class citizens with the rest of them seeming to get much less attention when the deadline starts to approach. To be sure that was my experience playing the supposedly damage focused caster class which was basically more utility than anything else. Even putting that to one side combat was slow, plodding and thoroughly unenjoyable just as a general rule anyway. In most encounters I wasn’t really doing much of anything save for wandering around, fighting the targeting system and just generally not having a great time with it. The lack of interactivity is just one issue among many for the combat system though which is not limited to lack of challenge (save for brick wall encounters that seem really out of place), abilities just seemingly not working as intended and the confused “choose your own adventure” of interactivity vs strategic combat modes all of which make little difference to how combat feels.
It also doesn’t help that the game takes a long, long time to get into gear before it’s even showing its full self to you. It takes almost 10 hours to get to the point when the world map is made available to you. Sure, I get that it’s tied to story beats, but there’s so, so many ways to integrate that mechanic earlier and make that extremely disjointed early parts of the game feel like they’re actually part of something greater. You get a sense of that through the first 3 areas you go through but it’s not until you finish the last one that they’re finally all pulled together. At that point though you will have already convinced yourself that they’re places you’ll never visit again.
Which finally brings us to the one thing that can make me forgive many sins: the story. Unfortunately I really have no idea what was trying to be said here that the original didn’t already touch on as much of it felt like “and then” style writing without a kind of driving purpose or narrative backing everything. Like, in a game that takes as long as it does to even get moving properly, there was plenty of time to setup a bigger narrative that could’ve pulled everything forward. But no all the moments that are supposed to be monumental feel completely unearned, happening just because they have to or the story simply couldn’t keep moving on. It was bad enough that I was thinking about deliberately failing everything I could to see if there really was any material consequences to doing so. I’m guessing there aren’t.
This all means that Greedfall 2 feels like it simultaneously has too much and not enough going on. As I said, time and time again in my reviews, if Spiders would only narrow their focus down to what would make their game great I’m sure they’d be able to do something amazing. But even in this, their final presentation to the world, they make the same mistakes they always have. Usually this would have me signing off with my usual schadenfreudian glee, remarking at how these guys seem to keep getting funded, but now it’s just all sadness. Truly I had hope that one day I’d be writing a review where I could say “I’d been with them since long before they were cool”, those hours and dollars I sent their way finally amounting to something. But alas, it is not to be, and instead I sit here, minting yet another middling review score at them, knowing it will be my last for them. Vale Spiders, I wish it could’ve ended better.
Rating: 6.0/10
Greedfall 2: The Dying World is available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S right now for $83.50. Total play time was 9.7 hours with 18% of the achievements unlocked.
