GreedFall

Having previously liked Mars War Logs and Technomancer, I had high expectations towards Greedfall. However, it's the worst Spiders' game up to date. After finishing the main story and almost dropping the game altogether a couple of times, I'm struggling to name any positives. It's definitely the best looking from the three, from a technical perspective, I guess. The foliage is nice. The game is painful to play regarding all its aspects, because its core design is misfit to the scale. Greedfall is almost 1:1 a carbon copy of Mars: Wars Logs. However, it's padded to a couple of dozen hours of artificial busy work and holding a "Run" key back and forth, and it's not enough to uhold the whole thing. The entirety of content (enemy archetypes, loot, crafting, quest variations) is exhausted in the first 2, 3 hours of the main story. It's just the prologue and a short bit of the main island. If you had played War Logs or Technomancer, you will immediately recognize reskinned enemies in Greedfall: they even share the exact (or almost exact) reactions. Bosses (except the last one) share the same move set. Open world isn't integrated with the quests at all. It's just a background for the player to run from point A and B (sometimes a couple of times in the same quest). There's no real gameplay to talk about besides running back and forth through copy pasted locations and encounters. You will quickly be steamrolling through them. Exploration is not rewarded and itemization is unbalanced. The story and the setting are one of the worst examples of the noble savage cliché I've ever seen. If you had experiences with it before at least once, you know what will happen in the main story and during every side quest. It's all one dimensional. The writing is subpar and you quickly end up skipping it. There's a lot of it, but most is unsubstantial and repetitive to the point of pure annoyance (especially in investigation quests). VO is bad.

Visual aesthetics are good, that Victorian style looks pretty amazing, but all other parts of this game not even close to being good. The best thing I can tell about it, it's mediocre. The developer still has a problem with storytelling, every quest dragged so long that I felt physical exhaustion from finishing two side quest. And let's not forget about a 2-hour prologue/tutorial that works as a prologue, but barely does its work as the tutorial. I was really pumped up when they showed a big monster at the end of a prologue, but and it's 5 hours later and not even one big monster were shown since then. Maybe it's because I spent too much time on the side quests and exploration, but if quest weren't so tiresome I'd at least tried to force myself to see those big monsters. Fighting is not the strongest mechanic of this game. I didn't feel punishment for bad parry (and I can't parry in Dark Souls even if my life depends on it), being dropped on the ground at least 5 times a fight by the enemy that blindfolded you doesn't seem fun and when your attacks either blocked by your companion that just stopped in front of you mostly frustrating. Personally I feel like this game is overrated, maybe it's because I never played Mars or Thecnomancer and I can't appreciate the developer's growth, but it seems to me that the developer didn't grow that much. Presentation is great, all other stuff mediocre at best.

Fought some creatures that just seemed to ignore any attacks. Constantly killed a plit second after landing an attack. Dodges dson't seem to dodge. I'm by no means a novice for similar games (completed the Dark Souls series and a big fan of the Witcher) but it was complete unituitive. Creatures I encountered (some sort of bull deer type thing) barely telegraphed attacks before they hit. Despite several attempts at fighting them I couldn't figure out the hit box since they were swqiping nothing but air. This makes dodge nearly useless. Dialogue interfaces were also terrible. I kept having to leave conversations with merchants and come back if I wanted to switch between selling and buying. Some of the characters also talk at a snails pace. A lot of the time I ended up skipping dialogue so I could just get on with it. Lots of running back and forth between the same NPC's during quests which made me feel like a messaenger service. Story seemed like it might be good but couldn't get far enough to get involved without pulling my hair out.

I have no idea, what expectations would have people rating the game 1/2, If you love mass effect / dragon age (2/3) this is definitely for you, plus it has some unique flavour to it. If you dont or even more - if D.A. 3 is a heresy for you, game is not your type. Still far in the game after 15 hours, still love it

Couldn't post the whole review here due to character limit restriction https://www.reddit.com/r/greedfall/comments/i1ycno/my_review_of_greedfall_or_why_gog_review/