No real spoilers here. So the premise of Tyranny is that a malevolent and immortal despot has already mostly conquered the world, but that was hundreds of years ago (if I recall correctly), and things have become more routine. You are a high level functionary of the government with a lot of authority and autonomy to handle situations as you see fit. Even though the government is cruel and heartless, you don’t need to be. Thee game has some issues, but I thought it was really neat from a role playing perspective to be thrust into this Charlie Foxtrot grimdark world and try my best to be decent.
Also, the major conflict is between factions within the evil government, basically Lawful Evil v. Chaotic Evil, and of course there is a resistance to join if you want nothing to do with either. There is always a resistance to join in these sorts of games. Even before the game was released and people were complaining about being “forced to be evil,” I was saying “just join the resistance.”
I thought there was a situation where you had to effectively side with one of the factions; though that didn't mean actually having to play an evil character, which is fortunate as that's not something I enjoy. The setting of Tyranny is pretty evil but the PC doesn't need to be; if anything it's a more noble endeavour to try to undermine that evil from within, which is what I did.
My only real criticism of the game (I mean apart from subjective elements such as me not being a fan of very rigid isometric) is that the last chapter is pretty weak and feels quite unfinished, but that's hardly unique to Tyranny; I've played (at least) as many games that are like that as not.
