This title is no graphical powerhouse, but the environmental design is very good. There's a clear emphasis on the late bronze age here a la The Iliad, and it's really wonderful. Though I actually like the late middle ages as a setting I recognize that it's beginning to become tiresome to constantly set fantasy in that time period. As a classical history major myself I found the influence of Hellenistic culture in Tyranny to be more refreshing than even I'd have thought before getting into it. Merchants sell olives, the Disfavored fight in a phalanx, etc. It's surprisingly refreshing not to have knights riding around on horses, swearing fealty to dukes, while everyone attends the coronation of the boy king. Instead we're dealing with emperors, heavily armored infantry spearmen and peltasts. It's a welcome change in setting and it makes me wonder why more fantasy isn't set in this type of era.
A great feature of Tyranny is how it smoothly introduces its lore. It begins with "Conquest", a choose-your-own-adventure prologue where you flesh out your player character's backstory in much detail. It affects a whole lot of atmosphere in the game, including how NPCs refer to you, dialogue options, plot options, and even active combat abilities your character has available to them. Conquest is good not so much because of what it affects in the game because of how it smoothly introduces the player to the world's lore. Fantasy games featuring deep worldbuilding are often prone to getting bogged down with too much exposition in the first few hours. The first Mass Effect is guilty of this when it strands you on the Citadel for hours after Eden Prime without much to do but speak to NPCs and read codex entries to learn its lore. Tyranny is able to get around that because you've already been introduced to major past events and characters in the Conquest prologue without having realized it as you made choice after choice. It's really a brilliant way to do things, and it made jumping into the game smooth. There is still some exposition to be had when speaking with squadmates but it's very relaxed compared to many other titles with similarly well-designed lore.
The biggest drawback I noticed with the Conquest prologue is that it can sometimes create jarring, disjointed dialogue in-game. I've had people meet me and immediately praise me for having made a decision beneficial to them early in Conquest, only to have them passionately insult me in the very next window of dialogue for making a later decision in Conquest that was damaging to them. I understand the difficulty in blending so many prologue decisions into the campaign, but this happened too frequently and it was incredibly immersion breaking.
Another drawback is the voice acting, which is pretty bad in general save for certain performances such as Verse and Eb. The Voices of Nerat is particularly awful -- He sounds more like a Twitch streamer reading Nerat's dialogue than a professional voice actor. Barik is nearly as bad; his delivery is universally wooden and awkward. He sounds almost like a teenager trying to deepen his voice to sound more mature. I'd have been fine with no voice acting whatsoever.
Tyranny's combat is pretty standard cRPG fare. I tolerated it for the first portion of the game only to try and dive into the narrative, but it quickly grew boring and served only as something I had to reluctantly push through to try and see more of the story. Not too far into the game I found myself sloppily pushing through most engagements just to get them over with. On the plus side are the spells used in combat. They're the prettiest thing about this game: They're viscerally impactful and feature gorgeous particle effects. Combat is not very good, but it's also not why people are going to play Tyranny, so I don't weight it as much as the writing in this review.
In classic Obsidian fashion, this game lives and dies upon its writing. And this, to me, is where the game fails.
I found too many of the characters to be too gimmicky and, at worst, downright cheesy and contrived specifically to be as unique as possible. It's always good to have interesting, unique characters, but you've got to draw the line somewhere before things start getting ridiculous. There also needs to be a touchstone of relatable characters so that the contrast between them and the more outrageous characters exists. In addition to this, some characters just struck me as "off". For example, The Voices of Nerat is a mage who absorbs the minds of other mages he's conquered. He basically lives with a thousand other minds in his head and a world's worth of knowledge and intelligence. I'd assume a character like this would be wise, quiet, always plotting, with just a subtle touch of insanity peering through every once in a while. Instead he's written as more of a Joker-esque madman, cackling and blathering on about nonsense when he's not hurling juvenile insults at Graven Ashe for no real reason. It's just too much. It seems as if the writers were trying too hard to make his persona notable when subtlety would have served far better. A lot of the writing warrants exactly that criticism: It just seems to be trying too hard, as if Obsidian is aware of its reputation for sterling writing and is struggling to live up to it.
I also found the dialogue to be sub par. It has a tendency to sound unnaturally casual or out of place. The Disfavored are supposed to be unmatched in their discipline, so why do they all refer to their commander by his first name rather than his rank? And Graven Ashe is centuries old but talks in colloquialisms. Good dialogue writing is about getting the little things right. Too many of them are wrong in Tyranny.
It's not all bad, though. The writing is at its best in its allowance for roleplaying. This is a game that will have you staring at dialogue screens for 10 minutes, tempted to alt+tab into your browser to google results of a decision because you're honestly stumped as to which choice is the least of a half-dozen evils. I found myself struggling to roleplay not because it was bad, but because I was constantly tested by the complexity of the pickles it presents, constantly weighing the effects of each choice and the repercussions against each party involved. Balancing the favor of the larger forces at play (ie. your party members, the Disfavored legions, the Scarlet Chorus horde, and the Archons who control all of the above, and more) is the core of this game. And it's what it does best.
I'm not an old school cRPG fan but I have been playing RPGs for nearly 30 years. Even despite that background I only made it about 15 hours in to Tyranny before I simply lost the desire to keep playing. Considering that, I can't recommend this game to the typical RPG fan looking to try out a new title.
A great feature of Tyranny is how it smoothly introduces its lore. It begins with "Conquest", a choose-your-own-adventure prologue where you flesh out your player character's backstory in much detail. It affects a whole lot of atmosphere in the game, including how NPCs refer to you, dialogue options, plot options, and even active combat abilities your character has available to them. Conquest is good not so much because of what it affects in the game because of how it smoothly introduces the player to the world's lore. Fantasy games featuring deep worldbuilding are often prone to getting bogged down with too much exposition in the first few hours. The first Mass Effect is guilty of this when it strands you on the Citadel for hours after Eden Prime without much to do but speak to NPCs and read codex entries to learn its lore. Tyranny is able to get around that because you've already been introduced to major past events and characters in the Conquest prologue without having realized it as you made choice after choice. It's really a brilliant way to do things, and it made jumping into the game smooth. There is still some exposition to be had when speaking with squadmates but it's very relaxed compared to many other titles with similarly well-designed lore.
The biggest drawback I noticed with the Conquest prologue is that it can sometimes create jarring, disjointed dialogue in-game. I've had people meet me and immediately praise me for having made a decision beneficial to them early in Conquest, only to have them passionately insult me in the very next window of dialogue for making a later decision in Conquest that was damaging to them. I understand the difficulty in blending so many prologue decisions into the campaign, but this happened too frequently and it was incredibly immersion breaking.
Another drawback is the voice acting, which is pretty bad in general save for certain performances such as Verse and Eb. The Voices of Nerat is particularly awful -- He sounds more like a Twitch streamer reading Nerat's dialogue than a professional voice actor. Barik is nearly as bad; his delivery is universally wooden and awkward. He sounds almost like a teenager trying to deepen his voice to sound more mature. I'd have been fine with no voice acting whatsoever.
Tyranny's combat is pretty standard cRPG fare. I tolerated it for the first portion of the game only to try and dive into the narrative, but it quickly grew boring and served only as something I had to reluctantly push through to try and see more of the story. Not too far into the game I found myself sloppily pushing through most engagements just to get them over with. On the plus side are the spells used in combat. They're the prettiest thing about this game: They're viscerally impactful and feature gorgeous particle effects. Combat is not very good, but it's also not why people are going to play Tyranny, so I don't weight it as much as the writing in this review.
In classic Obsidian fashion, this game lives and dies upon its writing. And this, to me, is where the game fails.
I found too many of the characters to be too gimmicky and, at worst, downright cheesy and contrived specifically to be as unique as possible. It's always good to have interesting, unique characters, but you've got to draw the line somewhere before things start getting ridiculous. There also needs to be a touchstone of relatable characters so that the contrast between them and the more outrageous characters exists. In addition to this, some characters just struck me as "off". For example, The Voices of Nerat is a mage who absorbs the minds of other mages he's conquered. He basically lives with a thousand other minds in his head and a world's worth of knowledge and intelligence. I'd assume a character like this would be wise, quiet, always plotting, with just a subtle touch of insanity peering through every once in a while. Instead he's written as more of a Joker-esque madman, cackling and blathering on about nonsense when he's not hurling juvenile insults at Graven Ashe for no real reason. It's just too much. It seems as if the writers were trying too hard to make his persona notable when subtlety would have served far better. A lot of the writing warrants exactly that criticism: It just seems to be trying too hard, as if Obsidian is aware of its reputation for sterling writing and is struggling to live up to it.
I also found the dialogue to be sub par. It has a tendency to sound unnaturally casual or out of place. The Disfavored are supposed to be unmatched in their discipline, so why do they all refer to their commander by his first name rather than his rank? And Graven Ashe is centuries old but talks in colloquialisms. Good dialogue writing is about getting the little things right. Too many of them are wrong in Tyranny.
It's not all bad, though. The writing is at its best in its allowance for roleplaying. This is a game that will have you staring at dialogue screens for 10 minutes, tempted to alt+tab into your browser to google results of a decision because you're honestly stumped as to which choice is the least of a half-dozen evils. I found myself struggling to roleplay not because it was bad, but because I was constantly tested by the complexity of the pickles it presents, constantly weighing the effects of each choice and the repercussions against each party involved. Balancing the favor of the larger forces at play (ie. your party members, the Disfavored legions, the Scarlet Chorus horde, and the Archons who control all of the above, and more) is the core of this game. And it's what it does best.
I'm not an old school cRPG fan but I have been playing RPGs for nearly 30 years. Even despite that background I only made it about 15 hours in to Tyranny before I simply lost the desire to keep playing. Considering that, I can't recommend this game to the typical RPG fan looking to try out a new title.
Tyranny is a decent game... Depending on what you're looking for. It aims squarely and unapologetically at the cRPG fanbase and provides some solid roleplaying but features quite a few damning flaws. If you're a hardcore cRPG fan and willing to overlook some rough edges, then you'll probably like Tyranny. However if you're just an RPG fan looking for a new game to play, I'd probably pass on this one. It's too uneven an experience with too many flaws that add up to damage the overall experience.
⭐⭐
Playtime: 14 hours
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