Tyranny is the latest game in Obsidian Entertainment’s recent revitalization into the world of cRPGs. It promises a deep RPG in a world where evil has already won but unfortunately delivers a disappointing, albeit functional package full of wasted potential.
Tyranny
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment
Price: $45
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
To begin, my underlying issue with the game is how completely uninteresting the story and characters are. The game begins by telling you about a war between good and evil, with the evil Overlord Kyros eventually winning out and conquering the kingdom. You play as a Fatebinder who travels the land enacting Kyros’ will and deciding how justice is dealt out to the citizens. This concept of a game taking place after the battle between good and evil took place, with evil winning out and you being on that side, is an incredibly novel idea and something I was eager to experience. Tyranny properly sets this scenario for you in its tutorial where you select between various choices in the final years of the war in a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ style menu. Some examples of choices you’ll make in the tutorial include the way you assault a city or what goals you chose to prioritize as well as which you ignore. These decisions will not only affect the relationships you have with characters in the game, but how the environment is in certain areas as well.
Unfortunately, once you complete the tutorial it all comes crumbling down almost immediately. You’re not so much playing an evil character, but more of a stoic dealer of justice and you never actually end up doing anything particularly “evil”; most of the choices I encountered leaned heavily towards a good alignment than evil. For a game that sells itself on playing the villains in a world where the baddies won, it completely fails to deliver on this pitch. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the game requires you to almost immediately pick a faction and stick with them throughout the rest of the game. The very first chapter has you deciding between two major factions resulting in the other faction falling out of your favor and betraying you.
To add a cherry on top of the whole situation, most of the factions have almost no likable qualities, and try to convince you over to their side by showing off some random good aspect, but then turn around revealing an insane extremist attitude like being big fans of crucifying people. The Scarlet Chorus, for example, are a marauding band of bonafide idiots who rape and kill anyone they see, oh but they’re super progressive and accept people of all race and sexual identity. There’s no good reason to back any faction when most of them are objectively wrong in every dialog choice you have to make and it almost feels like the game is forcing you to side with the rebel faction or go solo. But in a game where the premise is that you’re the judge, jury, and executioner for the main villain, there’s a sort of disconnect over what the game tells you it is, and what it actually is.
The characters in the game are also the most cookie cutter fantasy characters ever, which is hugely disappointing considering Obsidian made this game. Every character you meet acts exactly how you assume they will after your first look at them and they stubbornly stay that way. Your companions are also disappointingly bland with most of them being tropes I’ve seen done better in other games. They also don’t really react to the world in any sort of way either; your first companion is part of the Scarlet Chorus and when I chose to side with the Disfavor she had no reaction. It wasn’t until maybe an hour later that she made a comment about it and it was a super indifferent feeling about the whole situation.
The crazy thing about Tyranny is that the writing itself is very good and the world is fully realized. Certain words in dialog will be highlighted, allowing you to click it for additional details which is a brilliant idea. I was immediately drawn into this world wanting to know more about Kyros, how he came to be, the backstory of all his Archons, and what all the factions are. Unfortunately, something can be well written but lack the substance to make you care and you’ll hit this wall of bland storytelling a few hours into the first chapter.
Combat itself is functional but a pain in the ass at times. The game is real time with a pause option so it plays pretty much like every other cRPG you’ve played and the skill system is definitely a neat change of pace for the genre. It’s more skill based than class based and those skills level up the more you use them. Your character has six skill trees that you can play around with that each offer various styles of play and your companions have three trees themselves. An early companion you get can either be specialized into a more elemental mage playstyle, ranger, or maybe a mix of the two. It’s a neat system that I enjoyed tinkering with even if it had some minor quibbles I had with it. The skills you unlock for co-op maneuvers with your companions are also a delight to see performed and the reputation system gives you benefits for both having factions loyal, and hateful towards you which is a huge departure towards how most RPGs handle faction loyalty bonuses. For example, if you reach good favor with the Forge-Bound you’ll gain a permanent +1 armor against elemental damage, but if you reach a certain level of wrath with them you’ll instead get a -10% duration for any hostile effects applied to you. There’s no downside, besides through the plot, for having factions be for or against you and it’s entirely possible to gain both loyalty and wrath since one doesn’t detract from the other.
Now the game’s combat isn’t free of any issues. The AI for both your companions and enemies isn’t the greatest thing around, and even when you tinker with the companion AI settings they still refuse to do things you set for them. I told my healer to focus on healing and after each battle I found myself having to manually do it myself. Characters have a habit of just running into crowds and getting clustered together as well; with all of them bunched up it becomes a complete mess trying to see. During these moments I found myself having to pause combat, zoom in (can’t zoom in very far either), and try to find the enemy I wanted to target with my spell which was still difficult since many times other characters would be in the way of my cursor. You can help alleviate this for your characters by turning off companion AI but that turns the game into a big micro-manage scenario which some players might not be too keen on. Hell, even with the AI off, I still found some of my characters deciding to lose themselves in the crowd of enemies. The fights themselves aren’t very engaging either and I found myself getting bored at the almost repetitive combat encounters and wishing I was playing something with a more engrossing combat system like Divinity. When your game is making me wish I was playing a different game, things aren’t going too well for you.
One thing I will applaud the game for is its difficulty modifiers. There are a host of options you can turn on and off to help tailor the difficulty just the way you want it. You can change the difficulty level whenever you want and adjust options such as how much info you see and whether or not the game will auto-level your companions. There’s even an option that allows the game to auto-pause whenever a specific action has taken place. There are over a dozen actions you can activate that will trigger the auto-pause such as a character taking damage, a spell being cast, an enemy being spotted, or if a character dies. The tutorial menu is also a massive tomb of information that contains everything from lore about the world to explanations on the game’s mechanics. The detail put into this game, and its world, are staggering; I just wish it were in a more engaging game.
The Final Word
There’s a frustratingly good idea in Tyranny, but you’ll have to push your way through an unstimulating plot and mediocre combat to find it.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 3 out of 5 – Average
