Greedland Review

Greedland is a labour of love, a one-man project that has taken several years to complete. It appears to take inspiration from Vampire Survivors and an old classic from the indie PC scene: Crimsonland. This equates to tight controls, and about a million enemies onscreen at any given time.  

The story for all the massacre is straightforward; an invasion of an alien planet is in full force. The player controls a cyborg that is tasked with establishing a foothold on the planet and taking its resources. This means going to a Jungle, Sand and Ice biome and obliterating everything.

Each of the three biomes has a series of stages to complete in them, this is done by surviving a requisite amount of time and completing the level objectives (collect resources, shoot enemies etc), each of these biomes ends with an endless mode.

The gameplay itself has to control options there is the auto fire mode that has the weapon shoot at the nearest threat with there only being the extra controls of a dash and character specific special ability; there is also a full twin-stick enabled shooting that gives full control but also comes with a overheat system.

Both are excellent in terms of handling, the twinstick motion has that special ‘je ne sais quoi’ that aligns itself with the best of its genre.

The combat is thick and fast, with XP dropping and levelling every minute. This expands out the cyborg’s arsenal quickly with there being heat-seeking rocket launchers, defensive shields, multi-shot upgrades, extra speed and so on. If played in co-op, by the end of the average 14-minute playthrough the screen will be lit up with explosions, laser fire and obliterated limbs.

Beating a level means losing all the accrued gear but cashing out two different meta currencies that are contingent on how well the player performed, and how many resources were picked up.

The currency can be used to upgrade or unlock a variety of different cyborg chassis, weapons, equipment and mods. Mods are the most interesting, they bestow different perks and in the beginning there is a limited number that can be attached – a respawn mod is super useful but costs 12 slots to place, so it might be better to have some lower cost weapon and equipment buff instead.

Real levelling up, however, is sequestered off in a corner of a sub-menu, it wasn’t clear to me that this was actually the most important progression point. In an already busy HUD there are additional side quests, and these vary from meeting an in-level requirement, killing a number of enemies with a specific weapon and other tasks. Completing these will increase the player’s overall rank and this is the key to getting new levels and making new gear available to purchase.

If a particular side quest is hard to obtain it is possible to just pay currency to skip that task. This is handy because there is a bug that manes that one of the ranks requires the player buy a ‘Time travel’ item. The problem is that this item is not available to purchase until a later rank.

This still tied into my desire to level up – I even went back to older levels to get better scores – there was a certain clinical detachment to it, but I definitely felt the urge (most of the time). Even if I couldn’t escape the sensation of being in a system designed to get a player addicted like a free-to-play mobile game.

The user interface too feels cluttered and awkward to navigate like it was made with the mind to extract money out of a player with its different currencies and requirements. Some of these expectations and explanations are not made clear by the translation – there are some upgrades that I am still not sure what they do.

I said that I was very much compelled by the treadmill nature of the game, but by the time I hit the Ice biome the grind had started to kick in. My serotonin levels weren’t rising with each explosion and upgrade prompt.

Co-Op is a big saving grace here, seeing my partner choose their upgrades, and seeing their approach to objectives was always welcome. The extra player does cause an upswing in difficulty – XP is not shared between players, so it can often feel like a struggle to hit higher levels.

For as many aliens I fought – the real threat were the bugs. I had Greedland hang on loading screens, get stuck on upgrade options, another time I got an inexplicable ‘game over’ screen even though both player characters were still alive.

In short: the parts of Greedland that are polished (controls and in-game progression) are buffed to a shine, but the parts that are not (the meta-progression, the localisation) drag it down.

Conclusion

Greedland has lofty goals, and it mostly succeeds. Unfortunately, some poor translation and some other bugs get in the way of this game being the best it can be.