izigame.me

I like the feeling of power in games. I'm not talking about turning unspeakable ancient evils into my sex slaves, nor I'm talking about three-sixtying a noob. I like the feeling of power that derives from ruling over the land, passing judgement and for good or worse making an impact on the lives of those worthless NPCs. Looking back at the marketing campaign of Tyranny, it should have been the perfect game for me. You, the fatebinder, have been assigned as the mediator of an evil tyrant. Two great generals of your overlord are squabbling over trivialities and you need to solve the issues between them on a newly conquered land, is a premise that excites me more than I'd like to admit.
In the end, I cannot believe that I was disappointed in Tyranny despite how much I wanted to enjoy it. There are three explicit paths that you can approach to solving this conflict and one relatively obscure. You can either side with one of the two generals or the simple choice of betraying and killing them both. The lack of options to reconcile these two warring generals is where the premise immediately shows its lacking execution. I am the fatebinder, executor of the will of most powerful being in the known world, play nicely or you will die horribly should be a warning much more respected and threatening than these generals seem to think. There is also the fact that we come to know of Kyros's (overlord) might through these two generals, and frankly if Kyros's two best generals are these two petulant idiots, it really doesn't paint a good picture of Kyros either.
The relatively obscure option is the so-called rebel path, where you need to make a several choices that leads to siding with the locals of the conquered land. I stumbled onto this path unknowingly, as I played the game in my typical "fuck the system" manner. This path immediately reduces what makes the story unique to null and I'll maintain that the fault here stems from the game's lack of proper introduction to the order Kyros brought, rather than my own dickishness towards authority. How authoritarian governments manufacture consent is so formulaic that you can almost call it a playbook, but seems like just because there is a playbook on it, doesn't mean that game developers will necessarily read it.
As a kinda sane and kinda normal person, "we are doing evil serve us" doesn't sound much like a good propaganda line to me, personally. I need to have a personal attachment to fascism so that I can side with it against my common sense. If brigands that killed my friends were pursued and hanged by the forces of Kyros that's a start. Then, if my backwards village rapidly developed and became relatively wealthier, that's a bonus. If Kyros also is a force that satisfies my inherent desire for nostalgia and a simpler society and eradicates the "decadent" (progressive) tendencies in society, then I am ready to go down the fascism path, or at the minimum, I can accept and act within that form of fascism. If there is no backstory to make me act as the character in game, I will just crudely apply my own real life beliefs even where it doesn't fit. Tyranny goes straight for penetration without getting me wet by foreplay of fascism and we all know it only hurts when you just stick it in.
Of course, Tyranny is not the first game that suffers from inability to make the player care as they are supposed to. There are games where a supposedly very close character to you will get killed within 10 minutes into the game and you, as the player are supposed to care. This doesn't mean that they all turn out to be bad games overall. It's just that once the suspension of disbelief is cracked even slightly at the beginning of a game, it requires a massive effort to bring it back. What doesn't help, is the land we are supposedly use to create a power base to challenge the most powerful character of the game's universe consists of three or four small villages that consists of no more than five or six named characters.
Issue of scale has been a common complaint since time immemorial in RPGs, but developers have always used clever tricks to make the world bigger than it actually is or adjusted their writing to alleviate the issue. Tyranny doesn't go down this path. Instead it unabashedly tells you that Kyros can be challenged by the united force of Tiers, which is as ridiculous as thinking that a united Lebanon can defeat United States in open conflict. Tiers, probably one of the most generic name for this generic RPG land also brings up another issue with suspending my disbelief, the fact that most of the names are outright horrible in this game.
You have companions named Eb, who does magic and Verse, a part of a group that is supposedly fight like a song. When they reach above basic allegory, the lack of imagination and clashing identities becomes very apparent when you have two people named Welby and Caelus in the same faction, in the same small region. It is time-honoured RPG tradition that if there is a character whose name stands out from others within a group, they must have a reason to have it because even in fantasy worlds, we apply real life logic. That's why you don't see two elves named something like Eldannon and George in Lord of the Rings. Nevermind that, the all-powerful being Kyros's name doesn't exude power, but only succeeds in making me want some gyros. In a brothel, the pimp will outright tell you "Ah, Sheila, with that name, she was just destined to be a whore." I don't know whose ex-girlfriend Sheila was in Obsidian, but it's baffling that something outright idiotic like that passed through so many quality checks.
Frankly, I couldn't believe that this game was made by Obsidian, makers of some of my favourite RPGs like Alpha Protocol, KotoR 2, Fallout New Vegas and The Stick of Truth. You can list mechanics like character creation, diversifying paths, multi-choice dialogues, leveling and inventory systems as the traditional hallmark of RPGs but what truly separates RPGs from other genres like shooters and strategy games is the quiet moments before and after the storm, where you reflect upon what bombastic thing just happened or is about to happen by talking to other characters or exploration. Exploration almost doesn't exist in Tyranny as the world is small and uninteresting and the dialogues don't go any further than lore-dumps for most of the time. Instead, you go from region to region, first clearing mobs, then facing the inevitable final boss of the level.
I'll talk more about gameplay, graphics and some redeeming qualities of Tyranny in the comments as I've exhausted the space allowed in reviews. Check it out if you want to read more.