GREED: Black Border Demo

Ever since Diablo practically perfected the hack-and-slash genre and introduced almost all the mechanics used in every similar title that came out after it, you cannot really talk about a H&S game without mentioning it. However, while titles like Torchlight welcome the comparison and even emphasize on it, others choose to flash the originality card with every chance they get, hoping that no one notices the obvious.

GREED: Black Border is not necessarily one of them, but it certainly tries a lot to be different, yet it makes no effort to integrate any kind of interesting gameplay mechanics, nor come up with an original idea when it comes to character abilities. But, at least it has a somewhat intriguing setting, since there aren't too many hack-and-slash role-playing games out there that take place in space.

As far as the story is goes, creativity was out of the question during development and everything that came out was the same “a new powerful element was found” plot line, which quickly fades into nothing after a few minutes of gameplay anyway. Thus, after our civilization discovers how to travel between stars much faster and they meet other races, things get a little heated and everyone is out to kill everyone else, in order to get their hands on the mysterious “Ikarium”.

The term repetitive gameplay usually does not have its place when talking about a H&S game, but that is only because the aforementioned repetition is rewarded with interesting loot and it makes the mindless grinding way more bearable. Unfortunately, the game at hand does not quite integrate that second part, especially since you can only equip three items at a time and they cannot be customized or upgraded in any way.

Moreover, the enemies themselves are not varied enough to sustain the same level of excitement, especially since some passages are quite long and the level design did not receive enough attention to distract you from the endless stream of clones. The three available classes have different skill trees at least, although there are no good reasons to replay the game with a different one when and if you manage to get through it.

In the end, while even basic dungeon crawlers might have their charm, every title must at least make the grinding worthwhile, whether through story, appealing items or character customization options. GREED: Black Border does not even concern itself with either of those, choosing to basically spam the screen with the same dozen types of enemies for a couple of hours instead.