This is probably a very tenuous comparison, but upon first seeing Tyrant’s Blessing, by developer Mercury Game Studio and publisher Freedom Games, my mind immediately thought of something out of left field: Lords of Thunder. Released in 1993 for the Turbografx-16, Lords of Thunder took the typical scrolling shooter setup and flipped it on its head, setting it in a fantasy world instead of the far future. I thought it was really interesting how they took all the universal tropes of the genre and recontextualized them to fit the new setting. Instead of a starship bristling with high-tech weaponry, you control Landis, a knight in flying armor with a magic sword that throws fireballs at his enemies. I make this comparison because that’s exactly what Tyrant’s Blessing is attempting to do, taking the DNA of Subset Games’ critically acclaimed Into The Breach and putting a fantasy-inspired spin on it.
In the land of Tyberia, the evil sorcerer Ningaminel has conquered the land, slaughtering the populace and transforming them into servants for his army of the living dead. Lyndal, the proper heir to the throne, must summon a group of rebel fighters to crush Ningaminel and save the world. While the story isn’t the most original in the world, it’s told rather well. The game has a massive cast of playable characters, and each character has a lot of interactions with the rest of the cast, and they’re generally pretty interesting to read. The characters don’t diverge much from stock archetypes though, fitting into the classic mold of “Anime character with a singular personality trait and a penchant for violence”. The conversations remind me a bit of Fire Emblem, and I think it could lead to very interesting mechanics if this dialogue system was more fleshed out.
Graphic-wise, the game is fine. It’s a solid-looking pixel aesthetic. Nothing amazing, but everything is animated well. All the different biome types look distinct, the user interface is very clear, and there are a lot of distinct-looking hero and monster sprites. The soundscape is similarly well done, but there’s nothing particularly memorable to it. A lot of woodwind instruments and sounds of metal clashing, it fits the theme of the game well, but it’s not something worth celebrating. The presentation is okay at best, inoffensive at worst, but it’s absolutely the game’s strongest aspect. While the dev team’s love for FTL is obvious, it’s also obvious that something went pear-shaped when the team tried to make their own interpretation of it.
If you’re familiar at all with Into The Breach, you’ll know the setup immediately. You control a team of four heroes in battle against a team of the undead. At the start of each turn, the enemies all forecast the action they will take in the next round, and then you must carefully counter their actions on your turn. You can just murder all your problems fine enough, but to truly master the combat system requires knowledge of the battlefield and careful positioning of your enemies. Most of your party members have the ability to shove enemies around, and you’re encouraged to use it at all times. You can make enemies attack thin air, terrain objects, or even other enemies. It’s a combat loop that still works very well, but it’s the changes to the formula where Tyrant’s Blessing really starts to falter.
One of Into the Breach’s smartest moves was casting your mechs in the role of protectors, not destroyers. The bugs usually ignore your robots to target the buildings instead, and it’s your job to protect them. Every building destroyed damages the power grid, and destruction of the power grid is an instant game over. It leads to a lot of interesting scenarios. Do you sacrifice one of your mechs to protect a vital building, or do you deliberately destroy one to gain an advantage in a critical fight? It’s a mechanic that forces you to think a lot, and Tyrant’s Blessing is far worse for its absence.
While there are still the occasional “protect the thing” missions in Tyrant’s Blessing, they’re a momentary deviation instead of a core gameplay mechanic. In your typical mission, battles are just you and the enemies, and the combat balancing doesn’t work without the depth that Into The Breach’s power grid provides. You’ll often get targeted by multiple units at once, and one slip-up will instantly kill one of your party members. To further complicate things are the addition of shades. Whenever an ally targeted by an enemy moves, they leave a shade behind, and any damage absorbed by the shade is transferred to the unit it belongs to, something consistently more annoying to deal with than anything in Into the Breach. One of your first units is an archer that fires explosive arrows, and he can’t fire through his own shade. To further complicate things, shades are vulnerable to friendly fire, and one of your other first units is a mage with her only attack being AOE fire breath, so it really shows off right away just how annoying the shade mechanic is.
Diving deeper into the game’s mechanics, it becomes obvious that Tyrant’s Blessing is just a shallower, less customizable, and less interesting game to play than its inspiration. Equipment is another disappointment, Into The Breach’s mechs are all modular and can be equipped with new weapons you find in your journey, while in Tyrant’s Blessing, your party member loadouts are all locked in from the start of the adventure and cannot be changed, outside of the addition of a one-use special item. Stores are boring and have little that’s interesting to buy, gold quickly becomes useless towards the endgame.
One particular thing that I think absolutely went to waste is the enemy roster. The game is set in a fantasy world, and yet, outside of a handful of evil mages that serve as minibosses, all you fight are zombies. I think the game would be far more interesting with them sprinkling in some more typical fantasy creatures, it just feels like such a no-brainer thing to include, and the fact that they’re absent makes each battle feel really repetitive. Hell, I’ll even give some free suggestions. Orcs are big and strong but move very slowly. Dragons breathe fire across an entire row of the battlefield, instantly roasting anything they hit. Golems are super tanky, but are vulnerable to being attacked from the back. Slimes resist physical attacks and devour units, preventing them from doing anything until the slime is killed. The undead as is are basically just beatsticks, performing an attack with the only real thing differentiating one unit from another being the attack’s damage and range, with most enemy units not having any secondary effect.
To double down on the unfortunate comparisons to Into The Breach, the game has been hit with a bit of unfortunate timing. Three weeks before this game’s launch, the world saw the release of Into The Breach Advanced Edition, a free expansion that brings a massive of new content to the game, expanding on it in every conceivable way. Great for Into The Breach fans, bad for Tyrant’s Blessing, which is a damn shame.
I think the idea of a fantasy inspired Into The Breach is very solid. I think the idea of radical setting swaps to established gameplay concepts in general is a very solid idea, the only other one I can think of off the top of my head is The Surge. It’s a concept I absolutely would not mind seeing more of in the future. As for Tyrant’s Blessing, perhaps a couple of years from now, it will get its own Advanced Edition upgrade that finally makes it a fleshed out and satisfactory product, but in its current state, I’m on the fence.
Tyrant’s Blessing is available for PC and Mac for $19.99 via Steam.
Related: Reviews by Devon Williams
"Videogames have been a massive part of my life since I was three. With a bottomless appreciation for games both modern and retro, I'm always happy to experience something new and wacky. I hope to become a writer someday, to craft wonderful worlds like the ones in my favorite videogames."
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