Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Immersive"

It is hard to look at Dishonored and not compare it to the game Bioshock. That was actually my main reason to picking it up because I love the Bioshock games so much. (I think I heard there was a lot of people involved on this that have in fact worked on the Bioshock games before). The art style (which I love) is similar and the powers are very much like the plasmids.

There are so many things Dishonored does right and it is a lovely game, but I think it is more interesting to focus on the things it could do better. To get it into context I played the game on very hard and in a stealthy approach with almost all help turned off (like mission pointers and so on). This is something I recommend by the way, it was really satisfying to have to follow signs and find you targets instead of just following some floating arrow. It should have been the default setting and not something you have to turn on.

My main criticism of the game is the powers and equipment. Equipment first. Maybe it was because of my stealth approach (and not trying to kill anyone if not cornered), but I feelt that mostly all equipment except the sleeping arrows was unnecessary for my approach. It was extremely rare that I used the gun or regular arrows and I don't think I ever used any grenades or "mines". This also meant that the system of buying upgrades where very uninteresting. There was some upgrades that was very useful like the magnifier but the rest was just stuff I did not need so I ended up hording a lot of money around.

With the game focusing so much on choice (and doing it extremely well in many aspects) I had wish there was some more alternatives in equipment that fit my play style better. What about non lethal mines or smoke grenades for example? Or some noise device you could throw out.

My second complaint is that of the powers that I also feel very limiting. There are not really that much to choose from and you will end up using one or two powers a lot. I wish there was more variety here to. Also one power that makes you see through walls feelt a bit like it destroyed some of the tension and if you really would want to play the game as effective as possible you would want to have this on at all times because you can see all enemies and items higlighted through walls (including peoples line of sight).
I would have liked this power to have been disabled on the higher difficulty at least and I tried to use it as little as possible at the later levels.

Going back to comparing this to Bioshock there are some things that I feelt this game could have done better by borrowing even more from that game. There are a lot of books and notes in Dishonored and if you are like me you want to read them all to get all of the story. The problem is that many of them where quite boring and it pulls you out of the game to click on a note and have the game pause for you while you read. I really would have liked it if they just went the audio route and have you pick up some kind of audio recordings like in Bioshock that you can listen to while the game is running (there are some of these but very rare). Anything that pulls you out of the game is bad in my opinion. The same can be said about NPC characters. I really don't like the way Dishonored (and many other games) have so obvious "triggers" for NPC characters. You can really see two characters standing around and just waiting for you to move close enough to start their dialoge recordings. It feels very articifial and clumsy and I wish games would stop doing this.

Lastly I also think the games story could have been a bit more interesting, there seem to be some really interesting stuff underneath with the whale oil and the void dimension but it is not really used that much and feels a bit "unfinished". And the person that choose the credits music should get the boot.

As I said I wanted to highlight the things the game could have done better, but other then that there is an extremely well made game here that I could recommend to anyone. The gameplay is very satisfying and the world really draws you in with its graphical style that I love. Also I would like to note that the controls and the way your character moves and feel is probably the best in any first person game I have played. The way you climb and move around and climb really feels involving in some way and I can almost imagine my character in an Assassins Creed crouch jump position while dropping down a building. Its hard to explain but you will feel it when you play it. The closest I can think of is Mirrors Edge in terns of first person.



All pointers aside this is one of the most involving and in many ways fresh games I have played in a while and I look forward to the sequel already.