I hate this game. I hope the developers stub their toes every day for the rest of their
lives because of it.
Things get off to a bad start by the absence of classes from character generation. That's right, the single most significant choice in roleplaying games since 1974, choosing a "role", is simply taken out of the equation entirely. Instead, you are meant to level up skills via use. Sort of. Like all the other systems in the game you are going to find the skills and leveling system as enjoyable as a squishy wet fart in white shorts.
The RTwP combat is as dull as dishwater. Party size maxes out at 4 characters, so combat is boring and slow, instead of boring but over more quickly. A few hours into the game I gave up on it altogether and played ukulele while waiting for battles to resolve themselves. There isn't any strategy to it. It's tactical combat is about on par with Pac-Man.
You gain combat abilities to fight with, spells, and quick slot items to buff or heal, but everything is on lousy MMO-style cooldown counters. No spell memorization, mana, fatigue and few limits to worry about. Some abilities are 'per encounter' or 'per rest', but those are few and, tbh, not worthy of concern.
RPGs are generally known for having large bestiaries of foes to dispatch. Tyranny gives you 3 - Humans, Beastmen, and Bane. Beastmen are just annoyingly talkative werewolves. Bane are amorphous clouds of "who-the-hell-thought-this-was-a-good-idea?". Enemies heal over time, so if you try to be clever and spread out your fighters combat will move like molasses. You should always focus your entire party on one foe at a time.
Spell-casting is a "meh" system where you use sigils in short combination to discover spells. About half-way through the game I gave up on it. I had a handful of useful spells I learned early on that carried me through the game - heal, haste, and a stone aura spell.
Resting is almost pointless. After every battle you quickly auto-heal, cuz 'HALO', amirite? The only time you need to rest is if you are wounded, because wounds (which stack) lower your max health, and resting clears them. But if you happen to level up while wounded - you are fully restored.
Items are a mess. Sorting through them to suss what is an upgrade for characters and what is junk to sell is a whole boring meta-game in itself. Three of your possible six companions can't even wear helms. One doesn't wear armor at all, and another can't change his armor 'til the game is almost over IF you have the DLC that contains the quest that allows you to do that! Quick items like potions and food give buffs, but there is a glut of them and I never found a reason to use half of them.
Why is it I can just walk up to a merchant, open one of his chests and just take whatever I want without so much as an "Excuse me, what are you doing?" - in a game that prides itself on consequences?
Reputation in dialog is inconsistent. If I side with Red-Fang over Barik on a particular point in conversation I will gain Favor with Stonestalker Tribe, but lose Loyalty with Barik. However, if I side with Barik over Red-Fang on this same point I only gain Wrath with Stonestalker Tribe and no Loyalty gain with Barik. The issue is either consequential, or it's not. It smacks of design RNG. And it happens frequently that outcomes are wishy-washy in this respect.
Sometimes the consequence from a choice makes no sense at all. I once lost Favor with
Bleden Mark for offering a wounded soldier healing - even though Bleden Mark was not on the map, had zero to do with the situation or what lead to it, and no other similar instance resulted in him giving a flying flip.
Gaining Loyalty / Fear with characters appears to only open a few extra dialog options, unlock some abilities, and determines what the end game story roll will say about the further adventures of a particular character.
There were many instances in the game that I thought would logically lead to a character in my party getting fed up with me and just leaving, but it never happened. This is especially true of Barik. By the end of the game I had basically destroyed his way of life and everything he valued, but all he did was frown momentarily.
The writing tries overly hard to be edgy and really just whiffs of the sense of entitled self-satisfaction of it's writers. It leaves me "tumescent" with opinions about this game's narrative. Words sometimes fall short in their ability to articulate the sublime. Tyranny's writers' answer to this conundrum is always more words. And I suspect there is a Thesaurus sitting on a shelf at Obsidian with burn marks on it from furious flipping of pages. They got more use out of the word "roil" than any combination of authors in the last hundred years.
Characters with scrappy down-to-earth personas will sometimes use fancy words like
"coquettish" or archaic words like "puissance". My favorite was "palaver" - a word no one (in America) knows, and if they did would never actually use in conversation, and it wasn't even used properly!
Kills-in-Shadow, a Beastwoman, is a perfect example of how bad the writing is. She speaks in very broken english, as do all of her kind:
"Fatebinder who smells of Alpha."
"Left-Claw is good whelp."
"Pad-pad soft, human."
"Paw-paw-pawed."
"Kill-kill-killed."
"Run-run-flee"
"Good, yep. And many more than five."
...and other juvenile dung. She talks like she's in an improv skit about a mentally challenged killer, but the veneer of sustained character is occasionally broken by a grown up word from her like "obsequiousness". People in our literate, modern society don't even use words like these in conversation. This character made me want to quit the game, btw. I feel like she was created just to troll the player. The developers were like:
Dev#1: "How can we prank the player?"
Dev#2: "What if Ted Nugent was a female talking dog and we make her a party member?"
Dev#1: "Genius!"
Verse is the worst written character I've ever witnessed in my entire life. She is a fearless psychopath who gleefully tells you how much she loves to fight and kill, that she hated her mother and enjoyed murdering the people of her village, and describes the pleasure she derived from torturously cutting a farmer's legs off while his wife cried. This is not a sympathetic character, but that didn't stop the writers! You will have to repeatedly listen to her nostalgically reminisce in grotesquely maudlin fashion about her "sisters". She'll tell you in agonizingly boring detail how they loved to fight and kill, and how amazing they were at it, then morosely say something like "She was one of the good ones." No! No she wasn't! They were all a bunch of psychos! Why am I being emotionally manipulated to feel sympathy for horrible people?!
The average npc talks like a snarky post-grad who majored in Creative Writing, with a minor in Wasting People's Time. Plot unimportant NPCs will info dump on you.
ME: "Who are you?"
NPC# 623: "Me, I'm nobody important, but let me give you a biography of myself anyway and tell you the same information you already got from five other NPCs."
Female characters, throughout the game, regularly mock the size of a male's manhood, their virility, their ability in bed, their physical appearance, and make threats of violence to their genitalia. None of which is true conversely, btw. Males in Tyranny are repeatedly depicted as liars, dopes, cowards, crybabies, creeps, etc.. 4 of the 6 companions are female - and they are all above reproach, as are all female characters in Tyranny. Meanwhile the 2 male companions consist of a proud and honorable warrior who is forced to soil himself daily and an older man who gets accused of being a pedo (and nobody defends him). No fair play gender-wise in the storytelling. Score one for the Sarkeesians of the world, I guess.
I could go on, there's so much more to say about this terrible game.
