Review by: Dave VanDyk

Greed, a new action RPG available for download on Steam, takes place in a politics-riddled future focusing on the history of several planets and a variety of factions. The game actually goes to good lengths to try and immerse you in a universe where crimes against humanity seem commonplace, and where your chosen character has a damn good reason for striking it out on their own.

The game is played in a top-down, 3D rendered worldview reminiscent of Space Siege and walks you through a few basic interaction tutorials, but it's not long before you find yourself besieged by the ship's derelict security systems and undead crew members, with the ultimate goal of reaching the command deck alive to free your own ship from the docking arms and figure out what the heck is going on.

Action-wise, the game plays out about like your standard action-RPG with a focus on accumulating experience, leveling up, and assembling a stockpile of loot and money for eventual spending. It splits the available skills you can obtain from leveling across three categories: active, passive-offense, and passive-defense. The gimmick is that even though you can have points invested in multiple sets of skills at once, you can only have one skill from each category "selected" and active at a time.

This provides a bit of a contrast to the usual RPG regimen of stackable passive bonuses - if you plan to invest in multiple skills, you'll need to be prepared to micro-manage which ones are active to adapt to changing situations. The game thankfully provides a few hotkeys to help make using different skills easier to this end, but it would have been nice to assign "groups" of skills to certain hotkeys for quick recall, like in some other RPGs.