My final playtime was 41 hours, but I suspect it was truly close to 30-35. I haven't played Bastard's Wound. Tyranny is a great bit of choice & consequence wrapped up in an exceedingly mediocre game.

So let's talk combat. This is based on the Pillars of Eternity system, which I found to be pretty interesting to play with. It has some of the same problems, primarily that the underlying numbers system is unnecessarily fiddly (seriously, stats or skills, just choose one!), but it was a pretty solid system overall. Tyranny is in love with abilities, you've got your talents, your spells (customisable at that), your party combos and artifact abilities. You can't fit it all on a skill bar. The problem is it's almost all pointless.

Combat in this game suffers in a couple of key ways. Firstly, in PoE, area control was key. When someone was engaged in combat, it was a significant factor. Leaving engagement hurt, and enemies were reluctant to do so, and a lot of areas provided you with means to limit the size of the engageable area. Tyranny drops pretty much all of this, with open areas, little to no penalty for leaving engage, and enemies who will do so at the drop of a hat to engage the backline. Every battle becomes a scrum, which results in every battle being about dropping enemies as quickly as possible because tanking isn't really a concept the game has.

They also added back pre-buffing. Hands up everyone who missed pre-buffing before a battle? No one? Thought so.

The other element of PoE was the variety of damage types and how they interacted with enemies. It was often worth carrying two sets of weapons so you could switch to whatever worked best for the situation. Again, pointless in Tyranny where I don't recall seeing a single enemy that cared if you did slashing, piercing or crushing damage. All that mattered was damage, DPS and armour pen.

It leads to incredibly shallow combat, which is nothing more than ability rotation. And while you have a ton of abilities you won't care about huge numbers of them because you don't need them. See, combat is also very easy, probably because there's so little depth to the combat itself so all you need is enough damage output. I was carrying healing potions from the beginning of the game at the end of the game. I think my party got wiped only once during an early Bane encounter because I was too lazy to use potions. The customisable spell system, combined with everyone being able to use spells, also means Lore as a skill becomes hugely powerful. More Lore means increasingly powerful spells, and by the end I was buffing it to the near exclusion of everything else. Party combos are a cool idea, but in practice you rarely needed to bother.

Quest design is also an issue, with far too many quests requiring you to go to an area, run to the far end through a maze, speak to someone, then run all the way back to access the world map and repeat it at another location. I had the most fun with Bane dungeons, simply because they presented the most interesting combat scenarios (still not great though), and threw a few light puzzles in there to keep it varied. Certainly better than yet another forgettable maze town. What should be great quests, like the investigation into the Archons, prove to be nigh on irrelevant, unless there's some road I didn't take that makes the mass of facts you gather useful.

And here's the problem with the world, the world as it's told is awesome, but the world you interact with is small and boring. Did you really feel a difference between the Bane village and the village of stone? Did you care about any of the happenings there? Because I didn't. The strong characters, like Tunon, are simply absent for huge portions of the game. The entire investigation piece needed to be given more importance, because it's the only thing tying together a bunch of otherwise disconnected hub quests.

The companion dialogue has the usual dreadful Obsidian pacing, with just too much available early on, and then not enough reactivity later on. In Act 3 Verse had to make a choice of where her loyalties lay, and because I had her at level 3 she stuck with me. Yet I got her to loyalty 3 on the first screen of the game! Where's the pacing?! And that hurts because I think the game has one of the stronger RPG companion casts I've experienced in a while. They do feel undercooked though, with hints around certain characters like Lantry that never seem to amount to anything.

I never met a skill check I couldn't pass that wasn't loyalty or background related. I don't know if that's a fluke of my skill choices, or just another part of the game being way too easy.

Act 3 is weird, and I can see why people say it feels cut short. It looked like the dungeon and spire that come with it could be skipped, meaning you could wrap it up in under an hour. And Act 3 is also when you can access to the big power, the power that is a total non-factor by that point.

What the game does have is great choice & consequence stuff, and there look to be a lot of cool ways things could play out. But it's not enough, because trying again would mean slogging through really dull combat, and having to wade through huge dialogue trees again just to hit some loyalty/wrath triggers. More companion stuff needs to happen in relation to events in the world, rather than as massive history and personal background dumps up front. And events in these little towns need to have some impact. Outside of unlocking abilities, I didn't feel the impact of loyalty, wrath and fear anywhere near enough.

One other area the game deserves credit is for managing to be such a land of grey. Almost everyone you meet has a point, and yet are also terrible people surviving in a terrible land. There are few out-and-out evil people, and pretty much no out-and-out good people. Everyone does what they must to make it.

I was actually a little disappointed that the game went with such a world shaking plot because it ends up making the world feel smaller.

On Kyros, I was certainly left confused, and wasn't sure what was intentional confusion. Kyros is often described as a woman, except by Sirin who states he's a man. You're told almost no one has any dealings with Kyros, which is why she's so mysterious. But Sirin talks about him throwing a number of soirées and inviting a whole load of people. So which is it? Everyone thinks Kyros knew you'd get your power and it's all part of her plan. But then Kyros at the end looks like a bumbling fool. Is making you an Archon her big move to end you? I just wasn't sure how the game wanted me to see Kyros, are they some master schemer, or just a idiot with a power? I preferred Kyros as a mysterious figure used to setup the world, without taking part in it, because they instance they get involved they become less and frankly seem like a bit of a pillock.

All-in-all I'd recommend Pillars over this, because while I loved the idea of this game and its world, I think Pillars is a better game.

My final playtime was 41 hours, but I suspect it was truly close to 30-35. I haven't played Bastard's Wound. Tyranny is a great bit of choice & consequence wrapped up in an exceedingly mediocre game. So let's talk combat. This is based on the Pillars of Eternity system, which I found to be pretty interesting to play with. It has some of the same problems, primarily that the underlying numbers system is unnecessarily fiddly (seriously, stats or skills, just choose one!), but it was a pretty solid system overall. Tyranny is in love with abilities, you've got your talents, your spells (customisable at that), your party combos and artifact abilities. You can't fit it all on a skill bar. The problem is it's almost all pointless. Combat in this game suffers in a couple of key ways. Firstly, in PoE, area control was key. When someone was engaged in combat, it was a significant factor. Leaving engagement hurt, and enemies were reluctant to do so, and a lot of areas provided you with means to limit the size of the engageable area. Tyranny drops pretty much all of this, with open areas, little to no penalty for leaving engage, and enemies who will do so at the drop of a hat to engage the backline. Every battle becomes a scrum, which results in every battle being about dropping enemies as quickly as possible because tanking isn't really a concept the game has. They also added back pre-buffing. Hands up everyone who missed pre-buffing before a battle? No one? Thought so. The other element of PoE was the variety of damage types and how they interacted with enemies. It was often worth carrying two sets of weapons so you could switch to whatever worked best for the situation. Again, pointless in Tyranny where I don't recall seeing a single enemy that cared if you did slashing, piercing or crushing damage. All that mattered was damage, DPS and armour pen. It leads to incredibly shallow combat, which is nothing more than ability rotation. And while you have a ton of abilities you won't care about huge numbers of them because you don't need them. See, combat is also very easy, probably because there's so little depth to the combat itself so all you need is enough damage output. I was carrying healing potions from the beginning of the game at the end of the game. I think my party got wiped only once during an early Bane encounter because I was too lazy to use potions. The customisable spell system, combined with everyone being able to use spells, also means Lore as a skill becomes hugely powerful. More Lore means increasingly powerful spells, and by the end I was buffing it to the near exclusion of everything else. Party combos are a cool idea, but in practice you rarely needed to bother. Quest design is also an issue, with far too many quests requiring you to go to an area, run to the far end through a maze, speak to someone, then run all the way back to access the world map and repeat it at another location. I had the most fun with Bane dungeons, simply because they presented the most interesting combat scenarios (still not great though), and threw a few light puzzles in there to keep it varied. Certainly better than yet another forgettable maze town. What should be great quests, like the investigation into the Archons, prove to be nigh on irrelevant, unless there's some road I didn't take that makes the mass of facts you gather useful. And here's the problem with the world, the world as it's told is awesome, but the world you interact with is small and boring. Did you really feel a difference between the Bane village and the village of stone? Did you care about any of the happenings there? Because I didn't. The strong characters, like Tunon, are simply absent for huge portions of the game. The entire investigation piece needed to be given more importance, because it's the only thing tying together a bunch of otherwise disconnected hub quests. The companion dialogue has the usual dreadful Obsidian pacing, with just too much available early on, and then not enough reactivity later on. In Act 3 Verse had to make a choice of where her loyalties lay, and because I had her at level 3 she stuck with me. Yet I got her to loyalty 3 on the first screen of the game! Where's the pacing?! And that hurts because I think the game has one of the stronger RPG companion casts I've experienced in a while. They do feel undercooked though, with hints around certain characters like Lantry that never seem to amount to anything. I never met a skill check I couldn't pass that wasn't loyalty or background related. I don't know if that's a fluke of my skill choices, or just another part of the game being way too easy. Act 3 is weird, and I can see why people say it feels cut short. It looked like the dungeon and spire that come with it could be skipped, meaning you could wrap it up in under an hour. And Act 3 is also when you can access to the big power, the power that is a total non-factor by that point. What the game does have is great choice & consequence stuff, and there look to be a lot of cool ways things could play out. But it's not enough, because trying again would mean slogging through really dull combat, and having to wade through huge dialogue trees again just to hit some loyalty/wrath triggers. More companion stuff needs to happen in relation to events in the world, rather than as massive history and personal background dumps up front. And events in these little towns need to have some impact. Outside of unlocking abilities, I didn't feel the impact of loyalty, wrath and fear anywhere near enough. One other area the game deserves credit is for managing to be such a land of grey. Almost everyone you meet has a point, and yet are also terrible people surviving in a terrible land. There are few out-and-out evil people, and pretty much no out-and-out good people. Everyone does what they must to make it. I was actually a little disappointed that the game went with such a world shaking plot because it ends up making the world feel smaller. On Kyros, I was certainly left confused, and wasn't sure what was intentional confusion. Kyros is often described as a woman, except by Sirin who states he's a man. You're told almost no one has any dealings with Kyros, which is why she's so mysterious. But Sirin talks about him throwing a number of soirées and inviting a whole load of people. So which is it? Everyone thinks Kyros knew you'd get your power and it's all part of her plan. But then Kyros at the end looks like a bumbling fool. Is making you an Archon her big move to end you? I just wasn't sure how the game wanted me to see Kyros, are they some master schemer, or just a idiot with a power? I preferred Kyros as a mysterious figure used to setup the world, without taking part in it, because they instance they get involved they become less and frankly seem like a bit of a pillock. All-in-all I'd recommend Pillars over this, because while I loved the idea of this game and its world, I think Pillars is a better game.