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.
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.