Greed Fall: The Dying World review: RPG prequel fails to offer anything that hasn’t been done better a hundred times before | Tech Radar

Overview

Greed Fall: The Dying World sets sail with confidence before sinking beneath an ocean of bad ideas and even poorer execution

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Details

Greed Fall: The Dying World could have been a triumphant fresh start for a setting with a rocky foundation - providing Spiders with a true breakthrough mainstream hit. While offering a trek through some beautifully realized forests and cities, it unfortunately fails to deliver either an engaging strategic challenge or a narrative that competently handles the difficult themes it wants to explore.

+Beautiful and varied world to explore every nook and cranny of

Beautiful and varied world to explore every nook and cranny of

+Lots of very silly hats to make party members wear against their will

Lots of very silly hats to make party members wear against their will

+Controller support that feels every bit as natural as keyboard and mouse

Controller support that feels every bit as natural as keyboard and mouse

-Tedious, uninspired combat which will test your patience

Tedious, uninspired combat which will test your patience

-Takes a long time to open up from very contained environments

Takes a long time to open up from very contained environments

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The original Greed Fall was something of a balm for people starving for a particular flavor of sub-Bio Ware action role-playing games (RPGs) - games about reading lore codices and speaking to party members about their unresolved family drama.

Platform reviewed: PS5 Available on: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC Release date: March 12, 2026

True to form for veteran “Temu versions of bigger RPGs” developer Spiders, it played like an earnest if haphazard version of The Witcher 2. Greed Fall: The Dying World - no longer named Greed Fall 2 to clarify its position as a prequel to the original - instead attempts to channel the spirit of classic late 90s or early 00s PC games as it becomes a real-time-with-pause tactical RPG.

The other big shift is in your perspective: the original game cast you as a member of a noble house from a Europe-inspired industrialised nation, as it’s in the middle of colonising a new world of feather-wearing, magic-infused natives with a culture built out of thoughtlessly mashed together indigenous stereotypes.

Presumably in response to criticism of their poorly handled parable of the colonisation of North America, Spiders has taken the bafflingly ill-advised decision to make it all an allegory for the transatlantic slave trade instead.

In The Dying World, you play as a member of a tribe indigenous to the fantasy island of Teer Fradee who is quickly ripped from their home by soldiers and shipped to the mainland in a prison ship. It’s a bold opening for a developer that doesn’t have a great track record for handling this sort of thing with any degree of sensitivity or consideration.

Luckily, creative cowardice wins out, and you are immediately sprung from prison by a woman who is really very sorry about her job being to help ships bring back captured natives for cultish human experimentation. The rest of the game feels very much like a tour of apologism, as we find out that it’s actually only a few bad apples - and not the entire colonial apparatus - that has 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 starring your roster of deeply uninteresting party members. There is no opportunity for righteous fury at what all of these people have been doing to your homeland. You can’t go on a revenge rampage. You can’t assassinate business leaders.

You just stumble along, being helpful and small while hoping someone in a position of power feels enough remorse to assist you in rescuing other captured natives or find a way home. The best you can hope for is for some official to possibly consider, maybe one day, looking into the whole slavery business.

The lack of player agency can sometimes reach comical levels; you would think a party member becoming a captain of her own massive ship would be a solid ticket back home for the island natives. Raising it as a possibility makes the rest of the party act as if you’re being completely unreasonable to demand such an expensive and time-consuming diversion. It makes far more sense to help everyone else with whatever lingering lifelong mission they’ve been on first.

It’s a bizarre decision for the studio to double down on the biggest weakness of the original game and flub the blank slate they had given themselves. There’s a game about a cool pirate lady going on adventures that they could have made, away from the baggage of the bad ideas they’d had. They’ve ended up with the worst of both worlds, lacking the conviction to focus on the indigenous storyline but also tarnishing the attempt to make a fun RPG about finding lost treasure and killing inexplicable packs of rabid monkeys in the countryside.

The combat is also a step back. With Greed Fall and Steelrising, it felt like Spiders had finally settled into a comfortable place with its attempts at real-time, vaguely soulslike combat. Here, it has looked at the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 and the rest of the computer role-playing game (CRPG) revival, and tried something more tactical - ending up with a system very close to Dragon Age: Origins.

Exploration is done via a traditional third-person camera, but at the press of a button, the camera pulls out to an almost isometric view, and time freezes - allowing you to get a handle on the details of each foe, queue up individual actions for each party member, and position them for defensive or offensive purposes.

Unpausing keeps you in the tactical view, letting you monitor how things play out and decide when you need to pause again and adapt to the battle as it unfolds. Not that you’ll ever be really surprised by anything.

Most encounters play out the same way; the same way they do in most CRPGs - sending out a tank to draw enemy attention away from your preferred assortment of spell casters, archers and thieves who all chip away at enemy defences or hit them with afflictions or cast favourable buffs on the tank. Sometimes there’ll be an explosive barrel.

It works fine. The studio has done a genuinely commendable job at mapping this sort of thing onto a console controller - you never feel like you’re struggling against the absence of a scroll wheel or a keyboard. You might find yourself struggling to stay engaged in your third, drawn-out battle against a dozen rabid monkeys in a row - as you find yourself pausing and pausing to carry out the same tried and tested tactics you’ve been relying on for 20 hours.

Outside of a few standout bosses, the game rarely throws you a curveball or forces you to think outside of the box.

Fortunately, The Dying World features some robust difficulty and control options - letting you do everything from making it so that a single badly timed or placed spell can result in wiping out your own party or turning the game into a third-person autobattler with infinite health.

If the combat ever starts to feel like a slog, you can essentially make it play itself while you enjoy exploring the world or furthering the narrative. Or if you prefer to turn it into something like a 90s computer classic, you could play the entire thing like it’s a real-time strategy with a fixed isometric camera as you click your way around the environment.

As a Spiders fan in general, this is ultimately a deeply frustrating experience. There’s a lot to be appreciated here. The towns and cities of the continent are a densely packed delight to explore, once you’re finally given the freedom to do so.

There’s a calming quality to being able to sit back and consider your options as you look down on the battlefield. But there’s only so long you can spend clicking on the same combination of skill icons in battles that all overstay their welcome. Only so many times you can grimace as the writing constantly trips over itself.

It’s heart breaking to say, given the effort involved - and knowing there’s a strong likelihood this could be Spiders’ swansong - but this is a world they should have let this world die in peace.

You enjoy comparing trousers While Greed Fall: The Dying World's encounters leave much to be desired, preparing for them is deeply satisfying if you're the type of person who likes pouring over the statistical details of every item of clothing equipped on your party members. There's a steady trickle of loot to sort through, and all of it is reflected visually, so you'll be agonizing between form and function.

You like looking at cobblestones and trees The world might be dying, but it's very nice to look at. It takes too long to reach the point where you can freely explore the towns of the continent, but once you do, you'll find they're oozing with detail and atmosphere. Each nation feels genuinely distinct in terms of architecture and personality, while feeling grounded in the same world.

You like well thought-out fantasy settings Focusing on the already poorly conceived and broadly drawn native culture of the original is a perplexing, unforced error. What could have been a course correction only leads to more missteps, as every hour sees some plot beat or piece of dialogue that will make any player who is culturally or historically sensitive suck air through their teeth and tug at their collar.

You are hoping to show off your tactical genius Greed Fall: The Dying World's more complex combat ends up feeling like a tedious slog rather than a true test of your intelligence. Most builds don't feel particularly unique or interesting, offering nothing you haven't seen a thousand times already. All you can really do is shovel in some artificial difficulty in the form of damage modifiers or friendly fire, which grates very quickly.

The game lets you change a variety of aspects of combat to taste, from friendly or enemy damage levels to when the game pauses automatically or how the camera reacts in certain contexts.

You can determine how much autonomy your party members have during a fight. There are three presets available, which offer different ways to experience and engage with combat, from minimal to exact.

Subtitle options are limited to one background and three sizes, but there are no colourblind settings. Commendably, they have included something that every video game should release with - an Infinite Health toggle switch in the options menu.

I played through the main storyline and the major companion quests of Greedfall: The Dying World for over 40 hours on a stock Play Station 5 hooked up to a 50” OLED TV. The HDR really shows off the wide range of deep, rich browns and reds that make up the towns and forests you’ll be spending your time in.

I played using the Quality Mode, which caps the FPS at 30 frames per second (fps) - which I found had little impact on the tactical combat. The Performance Mode caps at 60, but the significant reduction in resolution makes the detailed environments appear fuzzy and cluttered.

A freelance journalist for the last two years, Siobhán Casey has quickly established herself as a respected enthusiast for ugly 6/10 CRPGs that nobody else likes and incomprehensible JRPGs that nobody has ever heard of. When she isn’t being an outspoken Gitaroo Man advocate, she spends her days accumulating PS2 Slims in a sleepy Scottish town with a constantly farting French Bulldog.

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Key Takeaways

• Greed Fall: The Dying World sets sail with confidence before sinking beneath an ocean of bad ideas and even poorer execution

• When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission

• Greed Fall: The Dying World could have been a triumphant fresh start for a setting with a rocky foundation - providing Spiders with a true breakthrough mainstream hit

• +Beautiful and varied world to explore every nook and cranny of

• Beautiful and varied world to explore every nook and cranny of