4.4 hours played
Written 18 days ago
Tyrant's realm is a game.
it has buttons you can press, mechanics that do feasibly work, and for $10 you could buy worse.
You could also buy MUCH better.
There's roughly 2 hours of content in the game. Everything you see in the trailer? That's pretty much the ENTIRE GAME. It's JUST long enough to run you out of refund time and then completely drops all pretenses of having anything new to show you.
Let me break down the pros and cons:
[Pros]
• Solid Variety of weapons to use with different stats, but....†
• Enemies are animated well enough that you can tell what attack is coming.
• Basic gameplay mechanics function.
• The upgrade system is nice but...††
[Cons]
•† Many weapons are simply bad. Despite the variety, there are CLEARLY BETTER weapons, and many of the weapons you can unlock simply add clutter to the pool. This is an issue MANY roguelikes have where they add weapons that are only there because the developer thought it would be "cool" but didn't think to balance them properly.
•†† It's only good because it's stolen directly from Dead Cells. Ripped completely and utterly with effectively no changes.
• There's only like 9 enemies in the game. Soldiers, Archers, Executioners, Spearmen, Assassins, Dogs, Fishermen, Armored Executioners and Undead Soldiers. That's it. Once you've seen these, the only variance comes in what level they are (HP and damage values which you scale with so it doesn't make much difference) or if they're "elite" or not, which seemingly just does the same thing. Each enemy has anywhere between two to three animations at most. "Fast attack combo" "Slow wind up attack" and in the case of assassins: "Backflip dodge", and Fishermen only have two: "Stab" and "Eat fish to heal a little". That's.....That's it. Once you learn these animations, and given the lenience of the parry mechanic, you will learn to parry almost every attack any normal enemy can throw out with 90% consistentcy and the only time it gets dangerous is when you get jumped by 3+ enemies at once, and even then you can often just lure them by walking back, attacking once, dodge rolling away, and chipping them out that way. Play like this, and you will win EVERY SINGLE FIGHT IN THE GAME including the boss fights on your first try.
• The bosses are so simplistic that beating the game on your very first run is likely, with the only difficulty coming in the form of trying not to zone out or get bored.
• The Variety of weapons is actually a bit of a lie. There's about 6 animation styles. Sword, Axe, Fist, Greatsword, spear, Twinsword. They all fight the same, making the only difference between them their stat values, which as mentioned above, are in DIRE need of balance adjustments. For example, what sounds more powerful to you, "Slightly faster stamina regeneration" or "DODGE ROLLS DO NOT CONSUME STAMINA AT ALL"? I'll give you a hint, dodge rolling is VERY forgiving in this game to the point that you regen stamina while rolling and have invincibility even after you've finished the roll and are able to act again, meaning you can often roll WAY too early and still be just fine.
•The environments, while decent on a first playthrough, make you realize just how little the stage layout matters. It's a series of square rooms and the layout of the room does not matter at all in combat, aside from two specific zones which you can choose to avoid, making combat a striaghtforward "roll-em-up".
•The parry mechanic is fine, but the enemies are far too easy to parry consistently. Just like dodging, it's far too forgiving, making it a completely viable strategy to just use your shield entirely for parrying and it's passive and never have to worry about it's stats, and given that a shield that gives you INFINITE DODGE ROLLS exists, you might be surprised to know that a great way to exploit the game is to just play the game until you have the "Start with a random weapon/shield/armor" upgrades, and just restart the run over and over until you get that shield + an armor and weapon of the same color that you prefer. You now have zero reason to change gear for the entirety of the run, and your upgrades will always be beneficial as you are always given two of three colors to upgrade, sometimes all three. Never less. This means you inevitably will end up with something like "4 offhand levels, 8 main color levels, 2 subclass levels just for the HP bonus.".
• It creates an aura of repetitiveness VERY quickly. It's the kind of game where you can sit down and see all of it's true "content" in the first hour. What you see in your first hour is EXACTLY what you'll be doing for the rest of your playtime, just with higher HP and damage values for the enemimes, making it more of a "Play slow and win" aspect. There's little reason to do more than block/dodge, attack twice and repeat for pretty much any boss.
If the game put more time into the balance of the weapons so that buying equipment didn't actively make the game worse to play (As in adding booby items to the pool that you'll never want to use), it would be a lot better of an experience. Maybe making it so that passives came from amulets and shields had their own abilities that focused on the parry mechanic or blocking instead?
Just ANYTHING to make it so that the player isn't drawn to just mashing "restart" at the beginning of a run until they get the "free win" option. Cause as it stands, you're encouraged NOT to buy items and armor sets mid run. It's a BAD thing that you're slowly forced to spend gold on unlocks because it means over time you are forced to add bad items into the pool just to pad out the difficulty.
Why would I ever trade being able to get free gold from every enemy and having 400 armor for an armor of the same color that gives me 90 armor and the ability to throw a single projectile once every three rooms? Why would I want to buy a weapon that is just actively worse than another weapon that has the exact same animations and fighting style?
