Bitksel - Tyranny, the game of choices and consequences

Yesterday, after 13 hours of play, I finished Tyranny. I bought the game only couple a days ago and I just couldn't stop playing it, so I finished it rather quickly. Here's some of my thoughts about it.

Tyranny is remarkably similar to Pillars of Eternity, since they use the same engine. The only big change is the story and setting itself, so they aren't tied to each other. I absolutely loved Pillars of Eternity, so I will be doing some comparing between the two. I will write a post about Pillars when I have finished the White March expansions.

In Tyranny, you start your game creating your character. The character creation is pretty basic, there's no other playable races than human and you can only choose your past and weapons, then skill points and all that good stuff. After that, though, you will get into "conquest" mode.

After you've done conquesting, you see a tiny cutscene, well, more like a slideshow with narration, but the artstyle and writing is really worth your attention! You will then play in a tiny tutorial area, that is also part of the story... And things begin to unravel.

Anyway, the combat is fun. It's very similar to Pillars: It's realtime combat but you can pause it any time, you can have multiple weapons and switch between them during battle and you have tons of skills to choose from. There's also spellmaking sort of thing, where you can make spells for your characters, but I didn't really dabble with that so I can't talk much about it.

The one thing that stood to me the most was the combo-skills between your character and their companions. If you made friends (or made your companion fear you), you would gain these combo-skills. They made the gameplay much easier and much more fun. It added a bit more flow to the combat and gave more weight for the choices: "Do I wanna piss this guy off, just so I can keep him helping me in the combat, even I hate this opinions on things?"

The combat also feels nice, even to a wuss like me who plays on easy: The sound effects add nice impact to it and it's visually nice looking. One thing that annoyed me though was the characters constantly, I mean **constantly **complaining when their weapons didn't do damage for reason to another. My favorite was when one of the characters said: "This weapon is like nipples on a man: Useless!"

At this point the story starts and you'll be running around the area called as The Tiers doing oddjobs here and there. There's lots of things to do, lots to see. On my first playthrough I missed a lot of stuff, so I'll be definitely replaying this game at some point. One nice thing about the story is that there is a possibility to betray either one or both of the two armies and give a big middle finger to everything. I will definitely try that on my next playthrough.

The enviroments are really nice looking. I spent some time just looking at the tiny details in walls and floors, looking at the pretty lights and so on. I have no idea how they're done, I assume there's been a lot of 3D modeling and then rendering them to images. The most realtime 3D things you see on your screen are any characters that are moving.

Besides of normal conversation stuff, there's also a thing called missives. It's basically a mailbox and you get mail from some characters while your story goes on. You can reply to these missives in different ways and they either provide you more backstory or give you good advice. Or bad, if you make someone unhappy with your sloppy response. It works like the conversation system, except there's more text.

One thing I hope to see in Pillars 2 is the reputation system Tyranny has. You have all the factions, characters, things, etc. in one big reputation list, and you can check how anyone or anything feels like about you. On top of that, reputation can give you skills and passives, so basically making some dude very angry can give you powers against his faction. It's really cool system and I liked it a lot.

I can't really explain it any better than that. It simply felt like something was lacking. Maybe it was because I wasn't that interested in the world of Tyranny compared to Pillars of Eternity, or maybe the game didn't really give me a chance to get interested. You are pretty much dropped into the world and you have to spend some time researching things yourself. Otherwise you will be very lost in the lore of Tyranny.

The ending was a bit underwhelming too. It just.. ended. Very unexpectedly. I was waiting for more than 13 hours of gameplay. Maybe I just rushed things, I'm not sure. I still enjoyed the ending, even it was very cliffhanger-y.

Since the game has New Game+, I will definitely try Tyranny again someday and see what other kind of choices I can make, and what the outcomes are.

I would recommend this game to anyone who likes RPG's, especially if you enjoyed Pillars of Eternity. Just don't expect similar world or story. Tyranny is very, very different, and that's a good thing.