Tyranny - Standard Edition

As most people checking the game I am a big RPG fan. I played most of the major RPG games in the last 20 years. I would say that Tyranny is a very special game and has a place among the great. The strongest and most unique point is the choices you make. This is emphasised from the character creation screen, where you get to make war decisions even before the game starts. This choices are fairly easy to understand, i never felt confused about them, but they will impact the game from beggining to end in a quite meaningfull way. NPC characters will often evoke your past actions and judge you by them. The story is about factions. It's a military and political story, about the conquest of a territory. While in many games, you get to choose faction A, B or C and stick to it to the end, here it's very different. First, their are many many different factions and people you can influence. Then you are never forced to choose a specific way, and can very much make your own way, with your own moral compass. You can be loyal to faction or a character, then choose to betray pretty any time you want. Their are many major endings, then probably a few hundrends small variations in the ending of the game that acount for your choices during the game. Something as insignifiant as choosing "remain silent" dialogue option many times during the whole game, will be noticed in the endgame. Many persons critique the ending, saying it's too short, rushed. I did not feel that. I think the ending makes sense. The choices you make will also affect your fighting ability. You will gain new abilities based on your standings and affiliations. In no other game have I seen such a nice and deep connection between combat and story. You can even find legendary items that come with their own abilities. My only critique it is that combat becomes a bit easy and repetitive by the end of the game. Because of lack of friendly fire you can easily spam big AOE spells, and it's the main tactic you use.

A was fairly disappointed with Tyranny, great premise, intriguing world, lots of potential, but its VERY short, compared to previous releases (esp pillars of eternity) and while the character creation/what roles you played in the early conquest are fun and add to the replay value, there is limited scope for character and npc development and the levelling up felt very constricted. Nothing much has been added from Pillars of Eternity and a few fun bits have been taken away, It feels like they planned to do a lot more, but ultimately ran out of time. Too short, but could have been amazing.

…for this game. To be clear: it's not a good RPG. What's being sold by the marketing, playing some kind of legate of a victorious evil supreme lord, making real tough choices with real consequences is just not true. You will spend most of your time mob killing people, crawling through maps, looting corpse, selling batch of iron swords… does that sound like a legate job or life? There very very little diplomacy, intrigue, moral and legal questions or dilemma. And on top of that combat is messy. You won't know who's who on your screen, who's doing what when to whom. A full mess. Even worse, if the game was a tabletop rpg it would be labeled Narrativist, as the game impose incoherent and ludicrous scenes. Like the leader of your enemy taunting you for 5 minutes literally just 2 feet away, then just running away. And you can't move during all that, at all, the game deem you able to play it only once the pseudo cinematic as concluded. And not once or twice, but a lot. A lot. And the writing isn't tip top too. And even worse, the game railroad you all along. Yes you can choose, right at the very selective moments, one of the 4 paths scripted for you. Once you do, even if the game and a whole lot of NPC tell you to be subtle, you won't be because you can't. The game will make choices for you, even a whole lot of unreasonable or incoherent one. You're not making choices, you're not making A local temporary arbitration, you're choosing every damn quest and decisions for your character until the end of the game. Decisions being go there kill them, even though the quest givers usually have whole armies at their disposal, somehow again and again and again a young “diplomat” like you is needed for this FantasyNavySeals RPG of killing people and selling their petty stuff back to the local quartermaster, sorry merchant. Could have been a good game. It's not.

Ironically, these games that emphasize how "choices matter" often make me feel even more railroaded. Let me translate what "choices matter" really means for this game: Sometimes in the game a dialogue choice you make will lock your character into a certain path, and block off others. Don't worry, you can play through a second time to make a different key choice! Cool, I guess. What would be really cool is if how you actually conducted yourself in the game really gave you different options throughout the game. Like, OK you made one alliance based on a past choice but you could maybe convince some other faction to work with you through dialogue or proving yourself to them? Nope, not in this game, that area is greyed out and you can't go there or you just have to kill them all (even though you didn't even know anything about them when you made that fateful choice, btw). It's hard to explain without spoilers but at the end of the day, there are basically 4 paths. So it's really a very linear game you have to play 4 times. But that's fine because the story is... OK. It's OK. It's not a masterpiece but it's interesting and I was having fun learning more about the world but it was frustrating how little autonomy I actually had in that story and being forced to be the bad guy got kind of old. I played for like 25 hours but I think I'm basically done because the gameplay loop is just not interesting. The combat is kind of samey after a while and the tactics are limited. At first, making spells is fun but that gets old too. The loot system is... a mess. You collect an endless amount of straight garbage (and it all seems to be heavy armor that you will never use because the companions are, also a mess...). So I had a decent 25 hours, which isn't bad for the 8 bucks or whatever I paid (GOG sent me a steep discount) but in the end, I am pretty disappointed. New Vegas this is not.

I preferred this game over the other new isometric RPG's (Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity and Torment: Tides of Numenera(I haven't played Original Sin games)). It stinks that they never finished the game properly but still, it engaging and imaginative world and story. Reminds me of the ancient Greece stand against the Persian empire (just as dark and mean).