Greed: Black Border

Greed: Black Border is a top-down, hack-and-slash action RPG set in a futuristic universe where five colonial powers are locked in open war over a rare element called Ikarium. If you are picturing Diablo reskinned with corridors, cargo bays, and laser weapons instead of dungeons and swords, you are not far off. Clockstone built something functional here, but functional is about the ceiling. The setup has genuine potential. Interstellar colonization, resource wars, and a mysterious new element are exactly the kind of worldbuilding bones that a stronger RPG would flesh out into something memorable. Greed does not do that. The story is thin connective tissue between combat rooms, and the lore that does exist rarely surfaces in ways that make you care about the factions or their motivations. As someone who will re-read a throwaway journal entry three times looking for subtext, I found the narrative here almost aggressively incurious about its own premise. Combat is serviceable. You pick from available character classes, grind through enemy waves, collect loot, and spend points to push your build in a direction. The sci-fi weapon variety gives it a slightly different texture compared to its fantasy genre cousins, and there is some satisfaction in tuning a build and watching numbers climb. The problem is that enemy variety and encounter design do not keep pace. By the midgame you are essentially doing the same thing you were doing in the first hour, just against enemies with larger health pools. That is the padded XP grind I tend to call out, and Greed earns the callout. Build variety exists on paper but the combat sandbox is not deep enough to make experimentation feel rewarding past the early hours. The mixed Steam reception (sitting at 43% positive) reflects a game that landed in a crowded genre without differentiating itself enough to matter. Released in 2010, it was competing with better-funded, better-designed contemporaries, and age has not been kind to whatever edge it once had. There is no listed Metacritic score, which tells its own story. Multiplayer is not a listed feature, so if you were hoping to co-op through the campaign with a friend, check the current feature set before buying. Who is this actually for? Completionists of the action RPG genre who want to tick a box, or players with a specific nostalgia for early-era sci-fi loot games. If you are coming in expecting meaningful choices, branching character arcs, or writing that rewards attention, you will be disappointed quickly. This is a grind game with a sci-fi coat, not a world you will think about afterward.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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