izigame.me

Pros:

Worldbuilding. The world is pretty neat and not something I've seen before. It's the end of the bronze age and iron is the new nuke. The bad guy already won, you're just living in their world fighting over some podunk holdout on the frontier of a vast evil empire. The magic system is drawn from powerful individuals and based on the power of belief, which is relevant in the story and not just set dressing. Logistics is a huge amount of the war effort which few fantasy RPGs focus on. Tons of faction infighting which makes the world more believable. Lots of cool ideas overall.
Dialogue. It's no disco elysium, but I enjoyed the dialogue. The game is very upfront with its influence system. If saying something would make someone like/hate you, the game not only tells you that but tells you by how much it influences them. There's only a handful of non combat stats so you can usually hit them all with a balanced team (Lore stat is OP though). It also doesn't penalize you for upsetting factions/companions, in fact you can gain bonuses for doing so, which I thought was really cool and wish other games would do. Being the bad guy is made fun and plausible. NPCs will still call you out for being Chaotic Stupid (as they should), but you have many options of pragmatic villianry to choose from.
Hints. The game makes extensive use of a hint system in dialogue, which deserves its own point. This is a life saver and lets the game continue organically without making you google everything every 5 seconds when someone offhandedly mentions something you either forgot about or wasn't mentioned before but you as a character should realistically know about. This has a huge effect on the writing in a good way and should be a standard feature in any modern RPGs but sadly isn't.
Companions. The companions are relatively interesting. Not amazing, but enough to not be forgettable. They also all serve very clear roles in combat instead of just being a generic platform of stats which gives you a reason to switch between them.

Cons:

Frontloading. The character creation takes foreeeeeever. I hate games that front load 50 decisions on you when you barely understand the world you're entering, and Tyranny takes it up to 11. At one point I just started laughing at how it just kept going, and going and going. While I applaud the sheer number of background choices you could make, I was already decision fatigued before I even started the dang story.
Loot. Looting is streamlined and simple, which is a pro. Unfortunately the loot itself is terrible to the point I ask why even bother. Like 99% of everything you pick up is vendor trash but it's hard to actually discern it's vendor trash. I'd prefer the game not even bother with dropping it at all and just give me the good stuff.
Combat. The combat sucks imo and is needlessly over-complicated and finicky. I tried playing on hard, being used to RPGs and using strategy but I could not be bothered to learn the combat system. There's way too many stats and especially in the early game not many options to make use of those stats. Just because you have 600 poorly explained stats governing my character's ability to stab someone in the face does not mean the game is made more interesting for it, an all too common RPG design pitfall. After getting tired of banging my head against a wall in basically every fight, especially story ones where you're outnumbered 2:1 in a game that heavily penalizes being outnumbered, I gave up and switched to easy/normal. I recommend doing the same. After doing some reading, people suggest using the auto pause system but I found it actually made playing even more frustrating because it would pause *constantly*. Pro tip there's an easily miss-able early game companion (Lantry) who uses and teaches you healing magic and is vital to the early game hell.
Misc Mechanics. I didn't care much for the injury system. If one of your guys goes down it takes a chunk off their max health. So your punishment for dying...is it makes it easier to die again. You can camp to get rid of it, but it just seems like a pointless mechanic done to make the early game frustrating and then become irrelevant later on.
Speaking of pointless mechanics, there's also a time mechanic. At first I thought it'd be heavily used like in say Roadwarden where traveling inefficiently has consequences. But it ends up just being exclusively an act 1 thing (of which you would have to deliberately try to fail at) and then completely forgotten about. Begs the question of why bother it at all. I could see why other people wouldn't like time sensitive mechanics and how it could be frustrating, so w/e I guess, but missed oppourtunity.