Recent reviews by E. Skill

FPS RPG of unbelievable scope which brings the medieval era to live. Best thing in this vein I've played since Morrowind. Totally engrossing. Combat can be difficult early on. Vast majority of bugs seem to be patched at this point.

I have about 100 hours clocked in Pillars of Eternity (which uses the same engine as Tyranny) and am a fan of these kinds of RPGs. Right now I'm towards the start of the second act of Tyranny .

Tyranny is a really strong cRPG with a lot of branching choices and well written dialogue. I was initially concerned about how interesting it would be to play an evil character but as some people have said it's more like you play a judge/law enforcer concerned with making the evil empire run smoothly than someone who goes around kicking puppies for a living. The world is well built and the hypertext-style annotations to dialogue make it easy to get a reminders of what things are.

The combat is fairly sparse so far - at least compared to Pillars which was fairly packed with enemies along the lines of Baldur's Gate - but it's well implemented. The combination abilities between the main character and the followers add a decent tactical dimension. It's not quite class-based - each character is essentially a multi-class with two different skill trees (eg rogue and ranged debuffer) except the main character who has a lot more options (around 8 separate trees). Additionally characters seem to be developed as much from how you use them - casting spells makes casting spells better - as well as what choices you make on level up. Right now there is no way to respec a character which is hopefully something that can be added in a patch as it was for Pillars.

Anyway highly recommended if you're a fan of the genre or are looking for a good entry point into it.