REVIEW – GreedFall was a pleasant surprise on PS5 back in the day, so I expected GreedFall 2: The Dying World to bring that “small studio, big ambition” vibe that Spiders can sometimes nail. Instead, this feels like an early-access patience test: there are good ideas and atmospheric spaces, but the whole thing doesn’t register as a real step forward. It’s like they’re scraping the same sauce off the first game’s plate – only now it’s gone cold, and sometimes it’s lumpy, too.

This time the story flips the viewpoint: you’re not arriving on the island from the “civilized” side – you start out as a member of one of Teer Fradee’s native tribes. The opening has you pushing through a coming-of-age trial with a couple of friends, then the colonists quickly kill the romance: you’re captured and hauled to the continent, Gacane. From here you’d expect the big maritime adventure, but the plot mostly trudges through familiar checkpoints out of obligation: you cobble together a crew, everyone hands you leadership, and you watch the narrative run the same circles as before – just on a different set.

Reversed Casting, Familiar Script

Putting the party together sounds exciting in theory, but in practice it “works” in a weird way. You’ve got an aristocrat, a former military commander, and the literal captain of the ship – and for some reason they all shrug and appoint you boss, even though your character reads more like an eager, loud-mouthed survivor than a natural leader. The narrative gets by, but it rarely sticks: a lot of conflicts start because someone hates islanders, and after a while it feels like the game is hammering the same theme into your skull instead of letting situations speak for themselves.

What surprisingly hurts the experience is the chaos of voices and accents. One character goes full measured “King’s English”, another scratches at a Cornish pirate drawl like it’s mandatory, and the invented Teer Fradee accent is so jarring at times that you’re not watching the scene – you’re thinking, “they really shipped it like this?”

Unpredictable Power Levels, Pointless Frustration

Exploring the world can work, though: the pacing is decent, and it can genuinely be fun to wander, scoop loot, slide into a side thread, then drift back to the main plot. The problem is that difficulty is completely erratic. It’s entirely possible to steamroll one group, take ten steps, and have the next bunch flatten you like you wandered into the wrong game. The game also doesn’t communicate enemy levels clearly, so you often only realize you’re in trouble when your HP bar suddenly loses half its life to a single hit.

There was one mandatory, scripted fight where I simply didn’t feel like I had a chance. I tried it a fifth time, got fed up, and dropped the difficulty to “story” – which “solves” the problem by making you invulnerable. You can tweak difficulty in multiple ways, sure, but it’s a bad feeling that I had to touch it this early, because the alternative was hours of headbutting the same wall and hoping the game takes pity – or a bug saves me.

And once that door exists, it’s hard to unsee: when you know you can flip yourself into “god mode” at any moment, it seeps into every decision. Not because you want to cheat – because the game itself keeps telling you, “if you’re bored, turn it on and move on.” That kills risk.

Tactical Pause, Shaky Camera

Combat is a hybrid thing: real-time movement with an anytime tactical pause and order system, with strong Dragon Age: Origins vibes. In theory it’s good. And when it finds its rhythm, it really can be fun: pause, assign abilities, reposition, then watch your team do the work. The issue is that it trips over itself far too often. The camera is temperamental, animations are jerky, and a lot of the time you’re not beating the enemy – you’re trying to decipher the system: “why isn’t it doing what I told it to do?”

Stealth is here too, with grass-hiding, but there’s no real reward for it. I didn’t find a meaningful “stealth kill” approach, and a crime system seems basically nonexistent: you can just take anything from anyone. Morality boils down to whether you do errands for jerks or cut them down and move on – and for a long stretch I didn’t see a real downside to simply removing everyone in the way for the sake of progress. Spend an hour hunting a key, or erase the guys at the gate with no consequences? That’s not a hard choice, and that’s a problem.

Romance Is There, The Spark Isn’t

I’m generally receptive to Spiders’ style, so there were moments where this worked for me: the big world, the scavenging, the crew, the conversations. But even the companions feel less gripping here. It doesn’t feel like they “have to” go with you – more like they’re tagging along because halfway through they decided the colonizer story got too ugly even for them. Romance is in, but honestly, none of it pulled me in. Only Sybille felt more interesting, because she’s related to the first game’s protagonist, and that connection gives her an extra layer.

That’s what you’re left with: fans get a similarly sized adventure drawing themes and visuals from the same bucket – and the combat shift will either click or irritate, depending on taste. For newcomers, it’s easier to say: play the first GreedFall on PS5 or PC, where the story and characters land better and combat reads cleaner. The Dying World wants to be a piratey, seafaring thriller, but it gets stuck in its own politics and weighed down by too many clashing systems. Not the studio’s worst – just nowhere near its best this time.

-Gergely Herpai “BadSector”-

The game was provided by the GeekStore.hu webshop!

Developer: Spiders
Publisher: Nacon
Genre: Action RPG with tactical elements
Release: March 10, 2026