Another incredible CRPG from Obsdian, this time with a focus on player agency through choices and dialog. The reactivity in this game is insane, and the sheer variety of potential paths to the ending is worth the price of admission alone. And that's a good thing, because while this game's combat system is more punchy and accessible than something like Pillars of Eternity, it also lacks some of the variety and customization. The narrative really shines; it's stuffed with love-to-hate-them villains from top to bottom, and you'll have the opportunity to explore more shades of grey than most RPGs allow. As an ruthless Fatebinder -- essentially a wandering judge, jury and executioner -- you'll have the opportunity to lean in and go full Judge Dredd, search for a path to redemption, or occupy one of the many layers in-between. A clever and masterful RPG.

Somewhat underrated CRPG and really one of the best modern representatives of this genre. The writing was finally something different than "Chosen One fights the Big Bad" :D, there were super interesting factions and understandable motivations for pretty much every character you meet. The mystery surrounding the ruler of this world (Kyros) is also super interesting and well written. My favorite part was the ending. I don't want to spoil anything, but for me the world only got more interesting here. It's a shame that there wasn't a sequel following this.

This game feels criminally short for how much I loved the world, the characters, and the combat. It isn't often that I enjoy RTWP but the magic is so explosive and satisfying to play with that I grew to really enjoy it.

I know this game can feel a bit half baked, especially without the added story DLC to breathe more life into the game (similar to PoE admittedly) but honestly Obsidian crafts such intriguing worlds that it still gets a near perfect score from me. I only wish there was more, y'know?

Tyranny is a game I enjoyed a bunch. It has a strong setting, being set in a fantasy early Iron Age based period, and has an interesting premise. The story is also intriguing, and there is much opportunity for role play and immersion. The graphics are good, being stylized, and your adventures will let you explore very interesting and diverse regions and locations.

You’ll get to recruit 6 followers, each with its own quirks and characteristics, but you can only have three of these with you while exploring. Followers have a lot to say and talk about, and, sometimes, they will comment on current missions or decisions you make, which can even shift their Loyalty or Fear meters, both affecting some dialogues, abilities and endings. They don’t talk a ton, though, and there was a time during the game where I rarely heard them talking about what was happening.

I played on normal difficulty, and the combat is more slow paced, which I like; it is also more small scale, where you’ll rarely fight more than 4 or 5 enemies at a time, even when your enemies could easily overwhelm you by sending everyone at once. In some parts of the story, I found it distracting how your enemies would only send enemies in waves. There aren’t many different types of enemies to fight, with most being just humans with different abilities, weapons and armor, but it didn’t really bother me.

The music and sound design were pretty great, generally fitting the more grim atmosphere this game posses, but also sounding pretty mystic or glorious when needed.

The story DLC (Bastard’s Wound) is pretty mediocre. I found it much less interesting than the base game’s regions. And this DLC has harder combat encounters (even harder than the last combat situations before the ending), which is no fun.

The story, although having a strong premise, and, in my opinion, being good, is clearly unfinished. This game could really have a sequel, to expand the world and resolve main conflicts left unfinished. Unfortunately, this game did poorly on sales, the developer is owned by Microsoft and the IP is owned by Paradox, which means a sequel will never come.

Overall, Tyranny is a CRPG that has lots of strong points, and, even with its flaws, is still worth checking out. It is not as long as many other CRPGs, taking around 30 hours to finish, and I would totally recommend it to friends.

Yeah it's just kinda OK. Still hate real-time with pause combat so that's doing it no favors here, they attempted to improve the system relative to BG by having timers show for rounds but that still doesn't get around the general clunkiness of it, but they also doubled down on the worst parts of it by having yet more hard to target and track abilities and the fights take FOREVER.
I can't make any huge comments on the story since I only got through act 1 and a bit of act 2, but it's alright. They managed to make the whole evil empire and factions system work well and not make good choices abundantly obvious, but the dialogue is still a little to game-y at times due to that system.
Overall, I'm gonna drop this one for now, but it'll probably be worth it to you if you like real-time with pause combat.

This was the next effort by Obsidian's team that brought us Pillars of Eternity, which was a flawed game which I really enjoyed, and I was very excited to see an evolution on that fantastically clever formula. That however, is not so much what you'll find here. Tyranny is so incredibly derivative on Pillars of Eternity, I could go find my old 2015 review of it, copy and paste it here, and it'd serve just as good of a purpose aside from the fact that Tyranny (in just about every way) feels like PoE but less.

As a feat of storytelling, Tyranny is absolutely fantastic, at least in its first (and mostly second) act. The way it manages to make factions that are objectively fascists and anarchists trying to work to subjugate a land in their own selfish ways come across as sympathetic and human (except when deliberately not) is masterfully done. The companions you meet during those times are well portrayed advocates of each side of the conflict and all bring very engaging voices to the table.

However, that is where my praise of the narrative stops. Beat for beat, point for point, this game has virtually exactly the same pros and cons as Pillars of Eternity did with only a few very small exceptions:
Cons:
- This game had fantastic earlier companions with the latter half feeling mostly like underdeveloped and shoe-horned in afterthoughts, whose only real characterization is revealed through dedicated efforts of talking to them (the only actual dedicated companion quests are in the Bastard's Wound DLC, and that's only for the first half of the companions (who were the best written already, quite frankly)).
- The game starts out with a great narrative but really peters out its pacing in the second act to just come to a screeching halt in the 3rd.
Pros:
- The writing for the plot and characters, as previously stated, is great! I just wish it were better fleshed out.
- The combat engine and the way stats work are still the same fantastic evolution on the old DND CRPG's, where every stat is valuable for every character.

I really, REALLY hate saying it, as this was a game I wanted to adore, but this game feels half-baked in almost a Double Fine fashion. If the game didn't have achievements, I woudln't've even known that there was a 3rd act with how short it was compared to act 2. It feels they pulled the name "act 3" out of their ass, slapped it onto the last quarter of act 2, and called it a day. It feels like there's a real act 3 that just never made it into the game, and that shouldn't be how a story leaves your audience feeling. On top of the other fault of pulling your character in a direction that (at least I) seemed totally contradictory up to that point in the narrative and forcing them down that path, assuming every player would want to do it. The game's even been out for damn near a year and there were 2 or 3 main-plot pieces of dialogue that just have dummy text or obviously missing parts (it's a NPC_texthere.txt type of message or literally says that it's dummy text). The game runs just fine, but for a game so focused on its story, I was very surprised on the number of unmissable errors still in it.

This is a game I wanted to like so badly that just really threw itself away in the 3rd act. I really did not foresee my main narrative improvement on PoE for Tyranny being that it incorporates your Keep/Home Base thing better into the story.

Verdict: Hesitantly recommended. This is probably the most halfhearted recommendation I've given for a review on this site (at least that I can remember). With all the new narrative hiccups this makes, there is really no reason to play Tyranny when Pillars of Eternity is a much more complete experience. At the very least, PoE gives you more time to settle into (and then out of) the narrative purely by virtue of being longer and having more party members. Unless you're really dying for another good CRPG and haven't played Pillars of Eternity, I'd say Tyranny is far from a must-play in the genre.

At first I was not expecting much with this game, but I really grew invested in it. The setting is quite interesting, using something similar to a late Bronze Age/early Iron Age setting, and the main plot revolves around you being a representative of a high ranking official in the army of an evil Overlord, tasked with finishing the conquest in one of the last places untouched by the Empire.

The gameplay is typical of cRPGs, and there's a variety of playstyles available, however theres some stats and skills that are inherently better than the others, which came as kinda disappointing. Dodging, parrying and lore are essential to the gameplay, as the first two allow you to avoid damage altogether, and lore helps you create powerful spells and read scrolls containing spell parts. When you level up, you get to put points into your stats and into your skill tree, opening new passive and offensive abilities for use. Different enemies and armor types have types of thamage that they are incredibly effective against, and damage that they cannot protect against, so planning your attacks in battles is your biggest priority, specially in the harder difficulties. Your party members can also gain cooperative skills with your main character, depending on the actions you choose in conversations with them or the different facions in the game, so conversations also become an important part of the gameplay.

The story, without spoiling, revolves around the last of the unconquered lands, the Tiers, and how the army generals are too busy fighting each other instead of getting the job done. Your job is to solve the dispute by whatever means necessary, or not, the game is very open with its factions and how you deal with each of them through the game. The biggest downside is that once you choose one of the two factions to lead an assault in the beginning, you're locked out of helping the other one, and every time you skip the option to betray the faction you chose, you're locked into the quest that you got there for. However, there is not one singular absolute ending, each faction and companion character has a possible ending, aside from the standard ending you get. The story does end up rather abruptly, so much so that I was left expecting something more after it, like a final confrontation or something.

Overall, I believe Tyranny is a pretty good game, I enjoyed my time with it, carefully going through the plot, making sure I wasn't making too many enemies along the way, and planning how each character would fit in the party.