This game is a perfect example of developers who want to have their cake and eat it too, which is sad because they could have had something great if they were just willing to commit to one side or the other.
The art style and tanks with abilities may lead you to think this is Overwatch with tanks. Unfortunately, while that would be amazing, you would be wrong.
The combat itself is very arcady. You have health bars and highlighted weak points that show you exactly where to shoot. Add in a mix of different vehicle types (not just tanks), some interesting weapons, and a few new game modes, and you would have a solid sandbox.
That is not what the developers want. Right now, the game has a single game mode (not counting ranked) where everyone gets one life, and you win by killing the entire enemy team or capturing their base. Though, in practice, this basically only happens when the enemy team is all but wiped out anyways because there is almost zero cover on the capture point, and your capture progress is reduced every time you take a hit.
There is effectively zero healing, meaning whatever damage you take is permanent (There is technically a healer tank and capture points that restore health, but in the vast majority of matches, you will never be healed by them, and even if you are, it is not a meaningful amount).
And because both your team and the enemy team have a finite health pool, avoiding taking damage is just as important as dealing it.
This is where the dumbest design decision I think I have ever seen in a game comes into play.
You like being shot at by enemies that are invisible while the entire enemy team can see exactly where you are, not just on the minimap, but through walls? No? Well, too bad. For some reason, the developers think this is peak game design.
Tyr has a spotting system. If you are not spotted, you are completely invisible. It doesn’t matter if you are in the middle of an open field with someone looking directly at you; they cannot see you. But likewise, you cannot see any of the enemy team unless you spot them first.
So how do you spot someone? Basically, you drive into someone’s spotting range. Light tanks have a larger spotting range and higher stealth values, while heavy tanks have shorter spotting ranges and lower stealth values. Firing your gun lowers your stealth, while hiding in a bush increases it. And when you spot someone, they are highlighted for your entire team, including through walls and terrain. If you can't instantly get behind cover after bieng spotted, you are pretty well just dead.
Remember how I said avoiding taking damage is just as important as dealing it? Well, the best way to not take damage is to not be seen, which means hiding in a bush.
If you try to push up, you are no longer in a bush and will be spotted by other players who are in a bush before you can spot them. Once you are spotted, you are fair game for the entire enemy team.
The result? Your average match is basically inexperienced players pushing up, getting spotted, and having the entire enemy team open up on them and kill them before they can do anything. Experienced players find a bush and hide in it until someone gets bored, pushes up, and gets killed.
Another issue with this design is that it takes about three minutes to get into a match. Once you are in a match, you either die in the first three minutes, meaning you spend just as much time in matchmaking as you do actually playing, or you spend ten minutes sitting in a bush.
The progression system is also awful. Now, to be fair, they made it completely F2P with zero P2W content, so credit where credit is due, but that does not change the fact that it sucks.
Basically, you start with four tanks and unlock more as you level your account up. The order you unlock the tanks in is fixed, so if you want to play with a specific tank, you need to unlock all of the other tanks that are in the list before it, or spend premium currency (though you can earn a small amount of it for free).
However, each individual tank has its own tech tree and abilities, which allow a small degree of customization. The problem is that they are flat upgrades, and you need to level up your tank in order to unlock them.
Basically, you need to play 5–20 matches (depending on your skill level) with an objectively worse version of the tank if you want to play with it in its maxed-out configuration.
I have no idea why this is a thing. It doesn’t even add extra playtime. You will need to do twice that to get enough XP to unlock the next tank in the list anyway.
And once you have unlocked all the tanks (which should only take about 30 hours), that's it, there is nothing new left to do.
And that is Tyr in a nutshell: a fun concept that is dragged down by developers who want to build a hardcore tactical game that appeals to casual players, ending up with a result that pleases neither. I get why players want to like it and why the reviews are overall quite positive, it is so close to bieng great. However, that is only because the game is still unsolved and there are enough new players to slaughter. Once the game burns through the players who are willing to try it and then leave because there is not enough worthwhile to stick around, it's going to be a very different landscape. Right now this is looking very much like it will end up a marathon situation, though I hope I am proven wrong. 4000 peak and a 84% positive when most of the reviews are from the playtesters who already decided they like the game is not a promising start.
And yes, for any defenders of this game I will admit that have left out a lot of the minutiae, there are counter points to the complaints I have highlighted, but there are also counter points to those counter points and counter counter counter points, and I figured that this review was long enough already.
A note about my low play time: I put 20-ish hours into the playtest before quitting because, as much as I want to like this game, the implementation is just awful. I played six matches with the release, and it is basically the exact same thing, though they have nerfed the travel time on the sniper tank shells to make it harder to hit moving targets across the map.
