I’m a big fan of tactics games. I love constructing a band of memorable adventurers and employing different strategies, while also constructing unique builds for each of my party members. When I came across Tyrant’s Blessing, I was instantly drawn to the retro art style and sprite work which channeled the aesthetic of the early Fire Emblem games for the Gameboy.

Developed by Mercury Game Studio and published by Freedom Games, Tyrant’s Blessing certainly lives up to the renowned difficulty that saw the first Fire Emblem rocket to success. This game, however, blends the tactics genre with Rogue-like elements. When any of your party members are killed in combat, you have to start the game all over again.

The main story is pretty simple. You must defeat a Tyrant who has used his undead magic to turn the magical world of Tyberia into a land of horrors. It’s a pretty standard and bare-bones fantasy story. Every adventure begins with a team of three heroes and one support pet. Although each character has a distinct personality and playstyle, I never found myself very attached to any of them. They all embody a surface-level fantasy trope with little depth. Combine this with the fact that most of the interactions between characters are relatively trivial conversations that occur between levels and you have a pretty forgettable cast of characters.

In terms of music, there are some nice little tunes but nothing that will really stick in your head long term. It’s serviceable for the most part, my favorite track being Shoni Pal’s “Twilight Life.”

As you progress through each level, you will complete achievements that will then allow you to recruit more characters to your cause. These characters can then join the team on subsequent adventures. Additionally, you can upgrade each of your hero’s abilities and buy items to increase the success rate of future runs. Each hero comes equipped with two abilities of varying utility and are grouped under five classes: Support, Mage, Fighter, Assassin, and Marksman.

Combat is turn-based, but with an interesting twist on the formula. Enemy attacks are telegraphed beforehand and will attack immediately after your turn is over. This causes every level to play out more like a puzzle or Chess game as you try to protect your heroes from incoming attacks. Positioning is hugely important as when you try to move away from an enemy that has targeted a hero for an attack, a spirit will be left behind that can still take damage.

While I appreciate the unique concept, I found this mechanic to be pretty frustrating overall and it seemed more like a way to artificially enhance the difficulty of each level. Given that most abilities are extremely restrictive in terms of range it’s already difficult enough to move around the cramped environments. I often found myself in situations where I was boxed in with no way to get out safely.

The lack of any potential checkpoints and overall level diversity also made for some extremely homogenous gameplay. The early levels are pretty easy, especially once you get the hang of the mechanics. As a result, when you fail a run you have to waste time replaying easy levels over and over before finally facing a real challenge again. This killed any potential replay value for me as I knew every future adventure would be the same in terms of enemy encounters and terrain. The only true difference comes in the form of changing up heroes and pets or raising the difficulty level altogether.

Another big issue I have with the gameplay is the overall balance of the characters. There is huge a disparity in power levels with some characters being either supremely overpowered or utterly useless. The support pets, in particular, are especially weak and often became a liability as their abilities cannot be upgraded. I disliked how I was forced to take them on every run and would have preferred another hero, seeing as how enemies always outnumber your party and can generally attack more times than you can on a single turn.

Though I admire the decision to blend the two genres of gameplay, I came out of my time with Tyrant’s Blessing pretty underwhelmed. Unfortunately, this didn’t quite hit the mark for me in terms of execution and I wish there was a little more content here for the price tag. I could use I larger overworld map, with more levels in future updates. While I found the retro art style and sprite work quite charming it wasn’t enough to keep me coming back for more adventures in Tyberia.

A PC review copy of Tyrant’s Blessing was provided by Freedom Games for the purposes of a review.

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Tyrant's Blessing

$19.99

4

Score

4.0/10

Pros

• Charming retro art style
• Solid sprite work

Cons

• Basic story and characters
• Repetitive gameplay
• Unbalanced characters