Tyranny made a big promise. It would show us that playing the bad guy in an RPG is a viable focus. Let other games waste their times with the usual knights in shining armour trying to stop the evil overlord. Here, the evil overlord has already won and you are but a glorified lackey, a cog in the machine of the evil empire. Obsidian, fresh from the success of Pillars of Eternity, which was pivotal in the reinvigoration of the classic isometric cRPG genre, decides to take a risk here and try something different. Needless to say I was intrigued and quickly bought and played this game, with mixed results. A few years later and having bought what limited DLC the game got, I decided to give it another shot. A good excuse to finally write down a few thoughts.

Tyranny is set in a bronze-age inspired fantasy setting. The overlord, Kyros, has conquered the known world thanks to the use of incredibly potent magic. The player is a Fatebinder, a conduit of that magic, tasked with proclaiming the spells Kyros has prepared and as such bringing them into effect. Sent to the most recently conquered province in the realm, which the player had a customisable role in subduing, the player lands in a web of various factions vying either to curry favour with or oppose Kyros. The writing, beginning with the factions and their backstories, is quite good for the most part. Except when it gets sabotaged by real world politics of course. Such as the girl boss disease. It is immersion damaging how desperate they are to portray women as warriors for example. And I do have personal experience with Obsidian's forum to know it was most definitely intentional. Nevertheless, this unfortunate fixation aside, I have little to complain about writing wise. There is a lot of interesting stuff to read and the dialogue system is satisfying. Finally, the companions are another highlight. A quite unusual bunch of questionable characters, with their fears and wants, whose approval is not guaranteed and must be earned.

The main issue is the lack of content. The game is fairly short. Divided into three Acts only the second of which is actually meaty. The game does offer a fair number of available paths and options, but due to the overall limited content present those are simply not fleshed out enough. The finale in particular is noticeably abrupt. Disappointingly short games would become an Obsidian staple, but Tyranny is particularly stung by that. I would argue the game needed to be at least twice as long if it was going to satisfy. Still, the experience of playing the bad guy is why we are here. So how does that go? Well, it is there, true, but not to the extent I was hoping. The storytelling can often veer into standard good guy tropes. At times I wondered if the creators themselves didn't occasionally forget what their concept was. I do understand though that it is hard to get rid of so much good guy baggage. So what is there is much appreciated. The lack of enough substance extends to gameplay also. They did build a few nice system yes. A spell creation system, skills that improve by use etc. But most elements are underdeveloped or underutilised. Even combat can become an automated and repetitive affair at times.

Decent writing and a very interesting concept is not enough. The game also needs to deliver on its promise and here the results are decisively mixed. There are many good ideas and some interesting mechanics, but there is not enough content and what is there is often half-baked. Half-baked being the key word. Rather than a must play RPG Tyranny is a curiosity. An interesting experiment that offers a glimpse to a different approach. One that it wasn't quite able to properly realise. On a sale, I would suggest people that are interested in the genre to give it a shot. But it is inessential and unless the expectations are tempered, it may end up disappointing. A weak recommend from me.

Conceptually very compelling: basically it’s like “what if Baldur’s Gate 2 / Pillars of Eternity, except you are working for the bad guys from The Black Company (or Bungie’s Myth if you prefer).” I got kind of over it mechanically fairly quickly, but the dialogue trees are pretty well executed and the game has a surprising amount of plot reactivity to user choices. Be aware that the amount of actual game here is basically the first ~60% of what you’d expect and the game kind of ends abruptly. But it’s still worth it for the somewhat novel worldbuilding and unusual commitment to “you are a medium-level bureaucrat in an evil army.”

Like the Pillars of Eternity series, this game is exquisite in its making. With well-crafted character mechanism, story-rich content, dialog options, and interesting side contents such as upgrading your bases of operations (Spires in this game) and random events, you feel that the developers really put their efforts into making a quality CRPG.

And I also noticed that players have the option to play the game in a completely different story, increasing the replayability of this game. That is a good game design, in my opinion. For example, you can choose to betray alliance in the early game. I guess that would turn you from a Kyros follower into a Kyros challenger. Not that I encourage betrayal, but I'm not quite used to invading other countries despite I played as a Kyros follower throughout the game. In the future, I will likely be replaying the game as a Kyros challenger to try to put a stop to his invasive deeds.

My two disappointments are the majority of combats being challengeless and the compulsory ideology of Female Protagonist:

• There are only three combats which made me feel challenging (the boss fight in Vendrien's Well, the fight in Timbervale Village, and the fight with the Archon of Shadow). The rest of the combats were simply challengeless and were like hack and slash. I played as a War Mage and my companions were Barik, Verse, and Lantry, by the way. I also chose the peaceful solutions whenever possible. And I set the Difficulty to Normal. Maybe I should have set it to Hard instead. But I set it to Normal in the Pillars of Eternity series as well and didn't feel challengelessness. So this probably has something to do with the number of your party member being limited to 4. With such a small party, the game cannot give you larger scaled, more challenging battles.
  
• While I understand some developers and players might be interested in Female Protagonist, that's not my cup of tea. And I'm disappointed that experiencing the ideology in the game is not optional and is compulsory. But fortunately, the ideology hadn't gone too far in the game, because the Archons you meet in the game are all male. In the future, I hope the developers would consider making the ideology an option which you can switch on and off before starting the game.

Overall, I still find this game worth recommending to CRPG lovers. If you enjoy classic 2D CRPG such as the Pillars of Eternity series, the Icewind Dale series, and the good-old-days Baldur's Gate series, this game is definitely worth a try.