Tyranny

this game is in the same tier as new vegas to me. genuinely amazing. will absolutely teach you that you're not a good person, and will show you what brand of fascism you're weak to. PLAY THIS GAME

VGH... What is there to say?
I know that Obsidian were locked into having to do POE, but man, THIS is what they should have lead with.
Tyranny is better than Pillars 1 and 2 in everything important, by a wide margin. The world, the story, the characters, the artstyle, the tone, the themes, the combat, the RPG mechanics, the exploration, the itemization, the choice and consequences...
What could have been... What we lost...

Arguably, Tyranny is one of Obsidian's best games and one of the most original RPGs I've ever played. It features an incredibly cool setting, great characters, excellent replayability, and an absolutely brilliant concept: experiencing a party-based RPG through the eyes of Evil in a doomed world.
Furthermore, a playthrough takes about 20-25 hours — which is quite short for an RPG — yet it still manages to tell an engaging story, flesh out the characters, and lay the groundwork for a massive sequel.
As for the downsides: the combat system is frankly weak (please, pick "Easy" difficulty, the game is not about combat at all), and it is a huge disappointment that after 10 years we still haven't received a sequel that would explore more of the fascinating lore and expand on the gameplay mechanics and possibilities of the original.
It’s an ambitious game from Obsidian with fantastic writing and a wonderful execution of an unusual idea. Paradox, please, make a sequel happen. Somehow. We need it.
8,5/10

Building a game where the protagonist serves the side of evil is a difficult undertaking. It’s all too easy to slide into caricature or create a product aimed solely at edgelords. Tyranny avoids these traps. It stays grounded and tackles questions of responsibility, complicity, efficiency, and the very possibility of resisting an overwhelming force.
Unfortunately, the game leaves you with sharply mixed feelings. The flaws are many: a counter-intuitive combat system, pacing issues, a rushed finale, and some truly clumsy presentation of key decisions. There’s an enormous amount of potential here, and only a fraction of it made it onto the screen.
Even so, I can’t help but admire the sheer ambition of the project and the central idea around which the whole game is built.

Power, law & moral ambiguity. It challenges you to confront what it truly means to wield authority when evil has already won & to decide how far you are willing to bend to survive.
- for patient gamers who appreciate old-school CRPGs
- RTWP with amazing spellcrafting system
- strong writing, deep worldbuilding & reactive companions
- heavy immersive reading & decision-making
- gritty, dark & complex game that subverts fantasy tropes
Very underrated gem. Easily one of my top favourites!
Also, happy 10th birthday.. can we have the sequel please~

“Aren’t you tired of being nice? Don’t you just want to go ape-s***?”

Obsidian has a long history of creating some of the most interesting evil factions that you can align with, so it’s only natural that they would one day tackle a world where evil is the de facto mode of play. In Tyranny you are a peon to The Overlord Kyros. A Fatebinder, part judge, part soldier, sent to deliver Kyros’ specific form of justice in the Tiers - the last free lands of Terratus.

Obsidian had been developing Tyranny for almost a decade and not a day was wasted when it came to fleshing out Terratus and it’s inhabitants. Not content with simply creating an “evil has won” setting, Tyranny includes multiple shades of evil and contests them against each other both directly and philosophically. Another quirk is that this campaign is set during the end of a bronze age. It’s not often I play a game of swords and sandals, where iron is valued more than gold, and in that decision Tyranny offers a unique aesthetic, appropriately bringing some Ancient Greek God influence. This is extended in the form of The Archons, powerful god-like beings who carry mortal flaws.

The story matches the world building in quality and sees the player traveling across the Tiers delivering judgement, assisting in a civil war, uncovering mysteries behind The Oldwalls and its Spires, and growing in influence. The player will need to use any knowledge they uncover to decide who best to ally with, and just how freely they can act while under the authoritarian rule of The Overlord. The companions you collect offer their own perspectives and insights to the mysteries surrounding Terratus, the Oldwalls, and Kyros themselves. The companions are a grab-bag of mostly well realized and memorable characters.

Skill checks are aplenty and smartly utilized. Just because you can pass a skill check does not mean you automatically win an encounter. You’ll need to keep in mind what information characters have available to them, and even then, passing a skill check may invoke wrath when you are seeking favor or vis versa. Playing politics and keeping your wits about you helps smartly layer dialogue encounters, as well as inform about the personality or motives of said character.

A small feature that ended up being a massive highlight for me was the Missive system. It’s such a minor thing: letters that you occasionally receive and respond to from your superior and other notable characters that take a day or two to travel back and forth via messenger birds. It offers a lot in the way of information, character building, and also helps solidify the timescale that this is a large campaign occurring over months - where it takes days to travel from one notable point to the next.

Combat is where we fall out of my typical wheelhouse. Real Time w/ Pause is not my forte and I’d for a turn-based option. However, for the RTwP freaks out there, there is additional mechanical depth that I imagine would elevate this game over it’s decade old predecessors. Companion abilities have two players syncing up their actions to massive effect. Magic is not learned so much as created through crafting and skill checks. To reward this extra effort, magic is appropriately powerful and feared in Terratus.

The secret sauce of Tyranny is how well the narrative, themes, and systems intersect. The aforementioned companion abilities are unlocked by mustering either Loyalty or Fear with your companions. Instead of a positive / negative binary that other developers may lean into, both earning your companions respect or cowing them into subjugation rewards the player with new skills and benefits. This approach also extends to the many in-game factions in the form of Favor and Wrath, with each offering its own buffs. All of this to ask the central theme: What is power but influence manifest?

While music has an appropriate “evil is triumphant” sound, the voice acting does not always match this tone. Truthfully I find the voice acting serviceable to not good. I noticed this primarily with characters related to the Scarlet Chorus faction which may have been intentional as the Chorus are largely made up of citizen-conscripts - folks who lived normal lives before meeting Kyros’ Peace. But their casual, everyman VA direction was a bit jarring in a world full of Evil and Might.

A harsher critique is the dungeon crawling of the Oldwalls. You’ll spend a good amount of your middle hours crawling through same-y looking dungeons, fight after fight, with little reprieve. It’s when combat is at it’s heaviest and the story at its lightest, and as I mentioned, RTwP is just not my bag - making me weak to this particular grind. Those who enjoy this style of combat will be more immune to the onslaught of battles, and those don’t can always throw the game into an easier difficulty.

There’s a couple factors that also offset my critique on fatigue. One, is that Acts 1 and 3 offer a lot in story, decision making, and are on a greased rail in comparison to the middle chunk of the game. The other is that Tyranny is quite short - for a CRPG. I clocked in 30hrs to complete my campaign. This is beneficial not just for my short attention span but also because Tyranny has a lot to offer in the way of alternative paths. I can easily see myself returning to this game for a second play-through to try for a different political approach, a more magic focused build, and to utilize the companions that I neglected during my first go round.

Tyranny is an easy recommend for fans of CRPGs, easier so if you can stomach RTwP. I hope one day we can see another game set in Terratus. Perhaps even a sequel based around what the conclusion of Tyranny teases. I only hope that it includes an option for turn-based combat, which is my specific flavor of freak.

An easy 8 out of 10 recommend, +1 if you are a Real Time w/ Pause freak.

First and foremost: This is like reading a 3,000 pages novel. This is factual information. I mean, real reading a lot between story and dialogues and there is much more reading than actually playing in this game. So if you don't like reading something the size of all Harry Potter's books combined or going twice through all 3 Lord Of The Rings books, then I don't recommend this game. On the other hand, the story and the world are really compelling and professionally written. It's a truly captivating environment, characters, and circumstances going on between the regions and factions. The game puts the player in between everything and emphasizes the importance of decision making and you feel the world and relations really change because of your decisions. Then you have a pretty straightforward campaign that you shape what is going to happen next based on your options.
Combat though, happens a bit differently from typical RPGs. The people who complain about the combat in this game, or that characters don't do anything, or that they don't understand what is happening because it is all so quick, or anything similar to that, it's probably because they didn't grasp the combat system in this game. It is not supposed to be something you just leave it going on real time and you click click your characters and their abilities like a WOW or something. It's mandatory to use the pause (space bar) since the first milliseconds of engaging in combat. From there you check all your characters one by one, their positions, the action they are taking at the moment (according to what you defined in their AI settings), then you change what you find appropriate to your strategy, choose who does what, then you release pause, see what happens in the next second, pause again, check what unfolded so far, rinse and repeat. That's how combat is built to work here.
Recommend it 8.5 out of 10 if you like reading very long fantasy novels and playing RPGs, especially on sale.