Tyranny PC Game Review (basically Fantasy Judge Dredd)

Good mornin-afternoo-vening dear readers and welcome to what I consider to be a modern classic, or at the very least, a game that has a high probability of becoming a modern classic of the cRPG genre. Today I’ll be talking about...Tyranny.

This game lit up my radar something big from the moment I saw the announcement trailer, the idea of playing an RPG in a world where evil had won made me curious to see exactly how the people at Obsidian used this theme from a gameplay perspective. Keep in mind, I am a wannabe game-designer myself, so I get very excited about new ways of doing things with the medium of RPGs in general.

Just to make sure everyone knows the fundamentals before I start, Tyranny is set in a world where an incredibly powerful sorcerer - Kyros - has conquered almost the entirety of the known world. The events in the game, the ones which you will have a direct hand in, deal with the last remaining free territories and how they’re conquered, to a large extent, by you.

You are a Fatebinder, a representative of Tunon the Adjudicator - who is one of four Archons that work for Kyros. You’ll get to meet and talk to all four of them throughout the game, but they’re not incredibly relevant for the purposes of this review. What is relevant is to understand that you’re not just any average Joe in this world, nor are you any kind of Chosen One either, you are endowed with a certain amount of responsibilities and protection due to your status. 

The Fatebinders are a type of judge-jury-and-executioner capable of deciding on every type of legal issue that is brought to their attention, from minor squabbles between various people to dealing with the Archons.
You are basically Judge Dredd, and the whole idea behind Tyranny can be very succinctly described as pretty much fantasy Judge Dredd. Which is even more of a point in the game’s favor as far as I’m concerned, since I’m a big fan of 2000AD and especially Judge Dredd.

But while Dredd is bound and adamant on following the letter of the Law, you as a Fatebinder can oftentimes interpret the laws given by Kyros, and this will depend to a certain extent on your Lore skill, so in order to get as much as you can from this aspect of the game - and it’s very important for immersion purposes - I suggest you invest in Lore, regardless of the type of character you’ll be running.
So this is your starting point, you already work for the conqueror of the entire world, not only that but as the game unfolds, you’ll become responsible for dealing with the remaining free territories.
There is no good or evil path in this game, because evil, a tyrant, has already won, and you work for him. There’s only the law and how you decide to interpret and apply it. 

You can choose between the disciplined approach of the Unfavored or the chaotic approach of the Scarlet Chorus, these being the two military factions of Kyros’ rule, each of them being lead by a distinct Archon. There’s also a Neutral Path, but I don’t suggest you go for that from the start, try for the Neutral Path after you first playthrough. I suggest you go with your gut and see where the story takes you the first time you start up Tyranny, this way you’ll be more personally involved into what happens further down the line.
The game has an interesting way of setting the stage, because your character has been part of events that took place before your actual entry point into the game. But instead of creating a few different versions of what might’ve happened till this starting point, the developers found a way of letting you decide what happened in your character’s past.

And you can actually play through the prequel events that lead to the current situation of the gameworld. You can also skip it and choose one of the three options I highlighted earlier, but at least for your first playthrough, I suggest you play the Conquest stage as well. Everything that happens during this stage has direct consequences in the game that you’ll be experiencing, in terms of the various factions’ reactions to you.
I love the fact that Obsidian basically introduced a tiny interactive narrative mini-game into their massive cRPG.

But that’s enough about how the game feels, suffice to say, it’s a great experience, let’s move onto how the game plays.

The biggest characteristic regarding Tyranny’s gameplay, once you get deeper into it, has to be the extremely high level of customization that you as the player have access to.
One would expect to be able to customize one’s player character - of course - choosing stats and relevant skills that you start with, but what I didn’t expect was not only the fact that the player then will have several talent trees at his or her disposal to further specialize and customize their character to their play style. But that the same thing applies to your companions as well.
Regardless of the type of background you choose for your character you will have access to all of the talent trees, the background is only the foundation of your character, you will be in very serious control as to how you’re going to play the game. Although if you’re making a spellcasting character, you might want to focus your talents into the Magic tree, just as a general tip.

Similarly, all of your companions get talent trees as well, although they will be generally limited to only two trees, but not necessarily. This means that you can actually mold and build up your companions to fill any gaps in your party. Although, focusing Lantry on anything but his Healing tree might be a bit of a bad idea.  
In terms of the backgrounds, they are all detailed and different one from the other, spanning a wide range of personality types, but they’re almost all of them downers, on the other hand what would you expect from a world controlled by a tyrant? Also, a slightly less important point in the overall scheme of things, but something I tend to pay close attention to, lots of portraits available when creating your character, both male and female.
And you’d think this is where I’d normally stop talking about customization right? I mean, your PC gets a crap-tonne of talent trees, your companions get talent trees as well, but you’d be wrong. And so was I before starting to play, because Tyrrany allows you to also customize your spells.

That’s right, you don’t learn spells with set characteristics, instead your learn sigils and accents and then you mix and match them and make your own spells. This means that you can make spells that affect only yourself, or others, aura spells, direct damage spells, area of effect spells, so on and so forth. You can create any sort of spell you’d like, as long as you have a high enough Lore to cast it, and know the relevant sigils and accents.
This also means that every once in awhile you need to check your spells and update them, because as your Lore increases, and you gain new accents, you can make your spells last longer, reach farther, do more damage, reduce their cooldown etc.
And on this bombshell...I’m still not done talking about how customizable this game is, let me get back to companions.

One very cool combat feature in Tyranny is the companion combos. You get access to a unique combo move with each of your companions, and these range in usefulness from somewhat useful - like Lantry’s ability, to OP-as-fuck combos like Verse’s Fury’s Rage and Eb’s Terratus’ Embrace.
And the companion combos are just a part of the whole package, since the companions will also develop particular abilities based on the type of reputation you build with them. This is built as a result of your actions and dialogue exchanges with them.

Not mention that there are certain companions that can develop combo abilities between each other, after you develop a high enough reputation with each of them.
I can’t fathom how in the hell they approached balancing all these various customizable systems, but I’m glad they found a way and would be more than interesting in reading about it in detail, so if any of you have any clue or links preferably, drop me a line in the comments.

So now it’s time to talk about the twin-elephants in the room, the type of combat and the storytelling aspect.
The first one, is unfortunately, real time combat with pause, and I have made my feelings on this type of combat quite clear in both my Ember and Masquerada reviews, but what I also mentioned in those reviews is that I will easily overlook this choice of game design if the other parts of the game lure me in, and suffice to say, Tyranny does this more than adequately.

I actually have some positive things to say about the combat in Tyranny, especially when you compare it with the one in Pillars of Eternity. For starters, In Tyranny it helps that the party number is limited to four characters, this helps a lot with the clusterfuckness of the encounters. It’s simply much easier to tell what’s going on, with a reduced number of characters. It is also easier to keep track of which skills have been used when you only have to cycle through four characters. Although, trust me, there will always be skills and abilities that won’t be used because you can only hot-key a limited number of them, the rest being available through a secondary menu, which you’ll only have the time and inclination to access, when dealing with a particularly tough encounter. Now don’t get me wrong, I would’ve still prefered turn-based but as far as I’m concerned, the combat in Tyranny is more than acceptable, even for old-schoolers such as myself.

Besides the reduced party, the companion AI has been improved over the one in Pillars of Eternity, even if ever so slightly, and this tends to make managing the real time component of combat a bit easier. The default setting of companion AI is to protect the party, and they do this quite well.

Now onto the other elephant in the room, the storytelling aspect. I feel like I have to reference back to my Ember and Masquerada reviews yet again, because those two titles disappointed me tremendously when it came to this part. And it wasn’t due to a lack of worldbuilding within the titles - Masquerada especially had a lot of work put into its worldbuilding - it all had to do with how the info was presented.

The difference between those two titles and Tyranny - in terms of storytelling -  is the difference between me asking myself ”What the fuck is going on?” and not bothering with it and “Why the fuck is this going on?” and me being interested in it. The latter one being applied to Tyranny.

I think I spent somewhere around 30% of my playtime simply reading through the discussions I had with my companions and other characters in the game-world. Not only is the story itself compelling, not only is the game written very well, but the devs managed to make it, an actual gameplay mechanic. I was actually feeling curiosity and trepidation as to what was going to happen next. It isn’t there simply to dump background information on the player’s screen, because what you say and how you act will have a direct influence on how your companions and the various other factions in the game react to you.

There is an option in the game settings that will display after each dialogue choice, how said choice will affect your reputation with any given faction. Thankfully this option isn’t ON by default, and I suggest you keep it that way for your first playthrough. Again, I suggest you go with your gut and answer as close to what you or your character would answer in said circumstances, and see where that gets you. You can turn that option ON for your following playthroughs in order to be sure you’ll be getting different outcomes.

The music is epic, engaging and moody. Coincidentally, those adjectives apply to the game overall as well. And besides some occasional audio clipping here and there - when a lot of stuff was happening on screen, which could’ve been caused by my slow laptop - the game’s music is a pleasure to listen to while playing.
So up until now I’ve been kissing this game’s ass constantly, and for good reason but… there’s some room for improvement, Tyranny isn’t all that it could be.

The game - and storyline - feels rushed, from about the 60-to-65% completion stage, you can clearly see that they probably planned to add in a lot more content, not to mention a considerably less anti-climactic ending. This was the only thing that let me down about Tyranny, that it wasn’t bigger.

I do suspect, and hope, that Tyranny, much like Pillars of Eternity, will see some expansions in the future, where the devs can add in the content they planned on initially and also continue the story, because, the way it ends in the game, let’s just say there’s no way they’re not going to follow this up, there are quite a few story threads that need to be tied up. And considering how interesting the whole approach of the game was to begin with, I’m hoping the story will end differently than what one might expect. I did find it quite weird that the beginning narration is done from the perspective of those yet to be completely conquered, so that seemed an odd way of setting up the story to begin with...hmmm.

So now let me end this review by saying this. It has been a long, very long time, since I was this excited by an RPG. Honestly, while I have enjoyed my time in various RPG worlds, and will continue to do so in the future, I haven’t been this into an RPG world and gameplay since Fallout 1 and 2. Yeah, I said it, and I also think that Tyranny will soon take its place alongside titles such as Fallout 1 and 2, as a modern classic of computer role playing games.

And that’s it for this super-long, Tyranny review, thanks for reading and I hope you found it informative.

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Tyranny on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/362960/Tyranny/

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