GreedFall: The Dying World review: RPG prequel fails to offer anything that hasn’t been done better a hundred times before
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The original GreedFall was something of a balm for people hungry for a particular flavor of sub-BioWare action role-playing games (RPGs) – games about reading lore codexes and talking to party members about their unresolved family drama.
Exam Information
Revised platform: PS5
Available on: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC
Release date: March 12, 2026
The other big change is in your perspective: the original game casts you as a member of a noble house in a European-inspired industrialized nation, as they colonize a new world of feather-wearing, magic-infused natives with a culture built from mindlessly mixed native stereotypes.
Presumably in response to criticism of their mishandled parable of the colonization of North America, Spiders made the baffling and ill-advised decision to make it an allegory for the transatlantic slave trade.
Troubled waters
In The dying worldyou play as a member of an indigenous tribe on the fantasy island of Teer Fradee who is quickly snatched from her home by soldiers and shipped to the mainland in a prison ship. It’s a bold overture for a developer who doesn’t have a great track record of handling this sort of thing with any degree of sensitivity or consideration.
Luckily, creative cowardice prevails, and you’re immediately released from prison by a woman who is very, very sorry that her job is to help ships bring back captured natives for cultish human experimentation. The rest of the game feels a lot like an apology tour, as we discover that it’s actually just a few bad apples – not the entire colonial apparatus – who have a penchant for human slavery and torture.
It’s a shame how familiar things are, how quickly the player character becomes second fiddle to more traditional RPG stories featuring your roster of deeply uninteresting party members. There is no way to get angry at what all these people have done to your country. You can’t take revenge. We cannot assassinate business leaders.
You just stumble around, being helpful and small while hoping that someone in a position of power feels enough remorse to help you save other captured natives or find your way home. The best you can hope for is that someone in charge will, perhaps one day, consider looking into the entire slavery trade.
The lack of player agency can sometimes reach comical levels; you would think that one member of the group becoming captain of their own enormous ship would be a solid return ticket for the island’s natives. By bringing up this possibility, the rest of the party acts as if you are completely unreasonable in demanding such a costly and time-consuming diversion. It makes much more sense to help everyone with the lifelong mission they accomplished first.
It’s a bizarre decision on the studio’s part to double down on the original game’s biggest weakness and miss the blank slate they gave themselves. There’s a game where a cool female pirate goes on adventures she could have had, far from the baggage of bad ideas she had. They ended up with the worst of both worlds, lacking the conviction to focus on the native storyline, but also tarnishing the attempt to create a fun RPG about finding lost treasure and killing inexplicable packs of rabid monkeys in the countryside.
The trying world
The fight is also a flashback. With GreedFall And The rise of steelit felt like Spiders had finally settled into a comfortable place with his vaguely soul-like attempts at real-time combat. Here he reflected on the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 and the rest of the computer role-playing game (CRPG) revival, and tried something more tactical – resulting in a system very close to Dragon Age: Origins.
Exploration is done via a traditional third-person camera, but with the press of a button, the camera displays an almost isometric view and time freezes – allowing you to control the details of each enemy, queue up each party member’s individual actions, and position them for defensive or offensive purposes.
Resumption keeps you in the tactical view, allowing you to monitor how things are going and decide when you need to pause again and adapt to the battle as it unfolds. Not that you’re really surprised by anything.
Most encounters go the same way; the same way they do in most CRPGs – sending a tank to distract the enemy’s attention from your favorite assortment of spellcasters, archers and thieves who all destroy enemy defenses or hit them with afflictions or cast favorable buffs on the tank. Sometimes there will be an explosive barrel.
It works well. The studio has done a really commendable job of mapping this stuff onto a console controller – you never feel like you’re struggling with the lack of a scroll wheel or keyboard. You might struggle to stay engaged in your third, never-ending battle against a dozen rabid monkeys in a row – as you find yourself pausing and pausing to apply the same tried-and-true tactics you’ve been relying on for 20 hours.
Outside of a few notable bosses, the game rarely throws you a curve ball or forces you to think outside the box.
Fortunately, The dying world features robust difficulty and control options – letting you do everything from making it so that a single poorly timed or misplaced spell can result in the annihilation of your own party or turning the game into a third-person autobattler with infinite health.
If combat starts to feel like a chore, you can basically make it play on its own while you enjoy exploring the world or advancing the narrative. Or if you’d rather make it something like a ’90s computer classic, you can play the whole thing as if it were a real-time strategy with a fixed isometric camera as you click to move around the environment.
As a Spiders fan in general, this is ultimately a deeply frustrating experience. There’s a lot to enjoy here. The cities and towns of the continent are a dense pleasure to explore, once you finally have the freedom to do so.
There is a calming quality to being able to sit back and consider your options while looking out at the battlefield. But you can only spend so much time clicking the same combination of skill icons in battles that all overstay their welcome. You can only wince so many times as the writing constantly trips over itself.
It’s heartbreaking to say, considering the effort involved – and knowing that there’s a good chance this could be the Spiders’ swan song – but it’s a world they should have let die in peace.
Should I play GreedFall: The Dying World?
Play it if…
Don’t play it if…
Accessibility Features
The game allows you to change a variety of aspects of combat to suit your tastes, from friend or foe damage levels to when the game automatically pauses or how the camera reacts in certain contexts.
You can determine how much autonomy your party members have during combat. Three presets are available, which offer different ways to experience and engage in combat, from minimal to precise.
Subtitle options are limited to one background and three sizes, but there are no colorblind settings. Luckily, they included something every video game should come out with: an Infinite Health toggle switch in the options menu.
How I Reviewed GreedFall: The Dying World
I played through the main story and main quests of Greedfall: The Dying World for over 40 hours on an original PlayStation 5 connected to a 50″ OLED TV. HDR really highlights the wide range of deep, rich browns and reds that make up the towns and forests you’ll spend your time in.
I played using Quality mode, which limits FPS to 30 frames per second (fps) – which I found had little impact on tactical combat. Performance mode is limited to 60, but the significant reduction in resolution makes detailed environments appear blurry and cluttered.
First revision in March 2026
