Greedfall (PS4 Game): Great in some ways, terrible in others (CONS)

One of my favorite games on the PS4 is Dragon Age: Inquisition so when it was brought to my attention that there was another RPG out there that functioned in a similar fashion I was stoked. It also just happened to be on the Summer Sale list for around $10 so I figured what the hell, go ahead and do it.

If you look online to see some reviews you will find almost all of the reviews are pretty great but after playing this title for about 30 hours of game time, I think that perhaps there is a chance that some of the reviewers are giving it "extra points" because it is not a massive studio and is what a lot of people refer to as a "AA" game (triple A being massive companies like Square-Enix.)

If I tried to write about my entire opinion in one go this would be several thousand words long so instead I am going to break it up into Pros and Cons, ending with the Cons so I can show that generally I tend to look for the bad in most things in life especially video games. You can see the pros pointed out in my other post here

Negatives about GreedFall

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Just so everyone can know, Greedfall is a semi-open-world RPG on a rather immense scale. You team up with AI controlled teammates of your choosing (well, among a group of 5 options that you can pitck at most times) and ravel around the world and carry on with quests. As I pointed out in the "Pros" portion of this review, the story, the voice acting, the availablity of companions, and the amount of freedom to roam are the pros in this game but there are a lot of negatives and most of this is a problem that I see in a lot of other games.

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Lots of running around senselessly

I say senselessly because I would much prefer if my quest simply took me down a dungeon and or to an area that had multiple stages that got increasingly more difficult but instead, Greedfall has these situations where they will make you run to entirely different zones just to talk to ONE PERSON and then have you run all the way back and then at that point many times it simply results in having your run all the way back to where you started from in the first place.

First off, I apologize for not making the map better but please note the numbers. This is one city so THANK GOD there is almost no zone-loading taking place but this is one small part of one quest. It involves catching a particular captain that is selling secrets of the government to outsiders and you carry on following him from place to place over and over again all inside of the same city. There are 8 portions of this quest, all of which involve running to various spots inside the same city and waiting for something to happen. In parts 3 and 7 they are particularly annoying because now you have to enter a palace and run up to the 3rd floor to get a few sentences of dialogue in order to carry on.

During all of this you only have one time that you fight anything and it is a pushover fight that someone who has never played the game could win if I simply showed them the attack button.

The rest of it is senseless running around for dialogue that you quickly tire of and by the end of the "mission" you hate the mission, the story, and everyone that has been involved in it. This is not an isolated incident either, this happens in many places and sometimes it even involves "zoning" to other parts where the system spends an extraordinary amount of time loading only to have you turn around and head back after doing like one thing. It' stupid

Greedfall was famed in a sense for having no "fetch quests" but basically they did the same thing but eliminated the need for you to carry an object. You are instead "fetching" information and honestly that is the same thing.

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Ranged Cheese

There are a lot of ways that you can do combat in this game and this is actually one of the things that I praised in my write-up about the positives of this game. You can specialize in melee combat, magic (which tends to be ranged), or you can focus on firearms such as pistols and rifles.

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You see that boss there? Well that thing will eff you the hell up if you get close to it and don't know how to parry. Honestly it will probably still mess you up then as well because some of its attacks are unblockable. Good thing that every single boss fight (or any other fight) is easily won by having enough ammo which is really easy to create / find and simply stay at a safe distance and blast away.

There is really no reason to ever attempt to do melee because you can quite easily "cheese" every single opponent in the game simply by rifling away. Maybe it sounds like I am being a jerk here but seriously, I went through the entire game and tried to do up close and personal skills but then with one strike some enemies take away like 3/4 of your health. Since they can't really seem to close the distance very well and very few mobs have any sort of ranged offensive, it's just better to stand back and take pot shots with your trusty rifle until everything is dead. It works every time and it shouldn't.

Once you figure this out is is like discovering "god mode" on original DOOM, you are not going to go back to the original game once you know you have the system one-upped in really anything they have to throw at you.

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Lack of variety in enemies

I've played the entire game, which was maybe 30 hours for the story and doing a few of the side-quests. In that time you are going to encounter maybe 5 enemy types and that's it in the entire game.

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Go ahead and get used to seeing these bear/dog hybrid things because that is 50% of the enemies you are going to face in the entirety of the game. They are, just like everything else in the game, incredibly susceptible to rifle fire, so go ahead and take them out using that to avoid all damage. There are a few bosses, some of which are actually pretty good at doshing out some damage, but once again. Stay away and dodge every now and then while continually firing your rifle, and they are easy prey.

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_{the first boss battle (this one) is actually completely unexpected and really cool, but this is where you first find out that rifle power, is the best power}

Bosses are few and far between and they repeat what they look like, which is super lame. I understand they are a small studio but I would rather not have another boss than have the same boss again.

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The awful and unnecessary camp scene

If you have't played this game you have no idea what this is. I would imagine that it is meant to assist you in planning who you want to have in your crew during the next part of your journey and YES there are instances in which this could come in handy but no, it doesn't need to be an option every single time you move from one zone to another.

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The "Camp in the Woods" is something you are going to see 7 or 8 hundred times in your quest to complete this game and while there are a handful of incidents that you may appreciate this, it a total waste of time 98.6 percent of the time. You don't need it yet it MUST load every....single....damn.....time... that you move from one zone to another.

There have been instances where I accidentally pointed to the wrong zone, realized it, and then had to sit through the "Camp" loading twice even though I didn't need it at all even once.

This is where you would get more ammo, change party members, change equipment or just load up on craftables but honestly, did they beta test this at all? Certainly someone would have told them something along the lines of "make it an option but don't force players to go there hundreds of times because that might start to get annoying."

At least that is what I would have said if I was involved in the beta.

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All in all, I was impressed with Greedfall because they are such a small company taking on a very big project and there were many aspects of this game that I seriously applaud them on. However, there are certain annoyances in the game such as excessive running around (and therefore TONS of loading times) that nearly made me put the game down early. I actually only finished the game because I found out by accident that after an alarmingly filled with running to and fro portion of the quest that I was only about an hour from finishing the game, and I did so.... Almost entirely by using my rifle on literally everything and cheesing the hell out of the game on Normal setting.

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The game looks good but to me it appears as though the "finished" product wasn't actually finished and the people who made it were aware of this but released it anyway. This game is worth $15 (which is what it costs now) and I suppose I could say that I am glad I played it. However, unlike the game that inspired me to purchase it in the first place (Dragon Age: Inquisition), you would have to pay me money to get me to play this one through again to see the other endings.