GreedFall

The best thing for me was the diplomatic core - that you speak and act to influence those around you to forge coalition. Another awesome aspect is the way companions complement the story telling by offering their commentaries and stances to curent events, your behavious. The gameplay is mediocre at best, it is not terribly fun to fight and skill system is not particulary revarding. I could omit that had the dialogs and quest been written well - the very core of diplomatic game. Alas the companions were flat and comment only seldomly, without wit or any particular insight. The depiction of science, religion, commerce, indigenous and seafaring were boring cliché. Inspite of all that I finished the game and at times it was real fun to play.

This is a fantastic game. It has all the charm of Dragon Age, but it's set in a 15th/16th century setting with amazing detail and story. It also resembles Quest for Glory in its almost-perfect skill tree assignment. Most quests can have up to 5-6 different solutions, based on your abilities, your inclination, your team, etc. It's glorious!! I have been absolutely hooked for about 6 hours now.. and that is a rare treat these days, when most games, here or elsewhere, barely manage to keep me occupied for 2-3 hours before boredom sets in. The game is not combat-centric, it requires you to actually think and come up with solutions, a lot of the quests are detective stories or puzzles and not mindless "kill giant rats" tasks. I am a long time Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age and Mass Effect fan and this game manages to combine all that was glorious about these franchises and put a shiny new coat on it. The atmosphere, the dialogue, the story, the characters, everything is perfect. I rarely give 5-star reviews. This one just deserves 6.

Ever since Mars: War Logs, Spiders have been improving and iterating on the same formula and it shows. This is most likely their best offering yet. Wait for a 50+% discount (happens pretty often) and it's very much worth it. The story is pretty interesting and the amount of spoken dialogue is insane. You will spend hours upon hours listening to people talk in this game, unveiling mysteries, history, deception and intrigue . Most characters are consistent and very well fleshed out. If story and immersion are what you are after, then this game won't disappoint. Combat is OK. Not as bad as many reviews claim IMO. It also greatly depends on the difficulty you pick. I played on the hardest with a melee build and had only a few issues. The camera can sometimes get obstructed by foliage and some enemy moves are dubious at best. Humanoid enemies have a propensity to teleport to you with their every swing (mainly 2-handers) and some animals' attacks have very unclear hitboxes/animations (it swings nowhere near you, you get close to it and you magically get hit anyway). But these issues are pretty minor, happen mostly only when fighting melee and can be worked around (with proper timings and play). My main issue with the game was the pacing. Pretty much from the get-go, the game allows you to visit like 80% of the areas that are in it. This means that you can visit quest areas prepared for a quest 40 hours from where you are. Fight certain enemies very early before they are shockingly revealed later in some main story mission. Leads to scenarios where everyone is gasping and in amazement at something you already met and killed before etc. I would actually have preferred if this was more limited. Open up an area only when a quest leads you there. What I did was explore everything I could before doing any story missions and most areas had pretty much nothing of relevance in them until a quest led me there. I greatly enjoyed my time with the game and give it an 8.5/10.

When I played The Technomancer, I was sad because it disappointed me. That was the first game from Spiders that I disliked. But with Greedfall, they've managed to make their best game. Interesting characters, very good side quests, beautiful graphics... It's the top tier of AA games. The "secondary quests" are only secondary because they're not directly linked to the main quest. Most of them are really good and engaging, worthy of being the main quest of another game.

I had high hopes for GreedFall. When I played it for the first time, I was a little disappointed, admittedly, but I'd say it was because I expected a little too much. So, GreedFall didn't become my new favorite game, like I had hoped, but it's still a very good game and I enjoyed my time with it a lot. It really feels like you're going on an adventure - one with beautiful landscapes and interesting characters and stories. Exploring this world was really worth it for me and I took my time taking in the sights and sounds and listening to everything the NPCs had to tell me about the world. And even if GreedFall doesn't reinvent the wheel, the game was still fresh and interesting enough to reel me in. Pros + great setting and atmosphere overall + beautiful landscapes in particular + beautiful soundtrack and sound design + interesting lore and characters + non-restrictive skill tree Neutral | game would have benefitted from more fast travel points or ability to initiate fast travel from any point of a map | not really open-world (which might bother some people, I actually prefer it that way) Cons - duplicate interiors - „dead ends“ unless a quest triggers some event, new path or loot - backtracking I would recommend GreedFall to people who played and enjoyed other Spiders games (obviously), like Technomancer or Bound By Flame. Other than that it's a bit like Dragon Age: Origins (map-wise - plays more like DA:I or Witcher, I'd say). Vampyr is another game that comes to mind which feels similar in regards to gameplay (and map) and also strikes the same chords with me, in general.