* The review is spoiler-free * The premises of Tyranny are interesting: a game where you play the role of a morally compromised character serving an invisible, almost God-like tyrant. The settings seems to be very well-thought, the engine is the one of Pillars of Eternity, which means that it is robust and beautiful, and Obsidian is a safe bet when speaking about the quality of the writing. What could go wrong? In fact, in the first act nothing goes wrong. The dialogue are interesting and abundant and the narration is balanced. Without going into details, the first act is about choosing your side in the war, and the way this happens made me really care about the future of my character and what could ever happen to it. And there are so many little details in the world! The worse part is, probably, the lack of enemy variety. Still, that wasn't too much of a problem for me, as I can forgive that if the story is interesting enough. Then the second act beings. The more you go on, the more the content becomes scarce. The boring combat takes a prominent role while narration falls behind and fails to keep the pace. There are some disappointing traditional item-fetching quests, some boring battles, but still the anticipation for the things to come kept me going. When the third and final act begins, all that sense of anticipation just fails to deliver. Things stop making sense and just "happen". There is no decent explanation, no beautiful dialogues. Every choice you have made becomes irrelevant as all of them lead you to roughly the same output. All the beautiful sense of moral responsibility that was in the first act is nowhere to be found here. Now, for me the problem is not the abrupt ending that many have pointed out, but the fact that it does not respect my previous choices and the narration, in the end, is almost non-existent. So, in the end, I would not recommend this game. The first act is beautiful and incredibly well-written, the other two are terribly dull.
