In Dishonored, you play Corvo Attano, a disgraced guard to the Empress, who is framed for her murder and thrown in jail. Your mission, with the help of a few Loyalists, is to kill the men who framed you, expose the plot and find the Empress's daughter so that she can be crowned as the new Empress. You do this with the use of mysticism, magic and your assassination skills, all the while traversing a city scattered with zombies and electrical defense systems.
Either you're going to love the ambition or hate the implausibility.
The city is called Dunwall, and it is a place reminiscent of Victorian times, with its industrial movement, its rat infestation problem and it's olden-English accents and figures of speech. This period concept, as we know, sometimes immerses the player from the very beginning, but I feel I have to say that I'm a cynic and so Dunwall felt needlessly cheesy and far-fetched on arrival
When I booted the game up and had played only a short while, I found that the only difference between Dunwall and Duloc is that Dunwall has guns, mysticism and Tesla machines far beyond that of Shrek times, the latter of which, initially, felt as out of place as anything I've ever come across in a game.
There were moments when I was half expecting Lord Farquaad in a jet fighter made out of toffee and Snickers, but he never appeared.
As well as that, the graphics, though not blurred, pixelated or any other game-making sin, were cartoonish and seemed underdeveloped and surreal. Not that cartoonist graphics are inherently bad, but in a game with a concept so out-there as Dishonored, it certainly would have helped Dunwall to be more believable had the graphics been more polished, gritty, edgy and realistic.
Brick can be perfectly grey and un-pitted, for instance. Facial hair is made of uniformly black or grey electrical tape fashioned into neat shapes. Guards often look like wind-up toys. You get the idea.
I was contacted by a mystical spirit-man close to the start of the game and endowed with my magical powers from my trip to the other side, to help me on my quest. Throughout the relatively short game, I had several outings to undertake in the large city, in different districts, which, unfortunately, I couldn't explore outside missions. My powers and abilities were fueled by some form of magical juice, and each ability drains certain amounts of my stuff.
The player can refresh their health using the menu system, which had only four weapon slots available for 'quick draw' and means that the player has to go through different menus to equip other weapons to the quick draw slots and then equip them for use. This kind of thing wasn't really a problem once I got used to it, but I do feel it could have been more refined.
The real problem was that the more I played, the more I found that there are very few instances in Dishonored that really grip the player, and it's a shame because one mission in particular showed a glimpse of what the game could have been. It involved a themed party in a house belonging to some powerful people, and the setting was great, the night's cover and the sneaking were enthralling and the end result, (one of a multitude of options, as the levels often are), which I will not disclose but found utterly brilliant, was a dark, grimly satisfying act. Unfortunately, this is the exception, not the rule, for Dishonored. And the fact that there was a robotic walking machine like something from 'War of the Worlds' or some other action sci-fi flick, at one point in this level, shows how far the makers have gone to be far-fetched.
This is somewhat of a pattern.
What Dishonored does is blend a historical theme, with an action/adventure type gameplay, and throws in magic, witchcraft and zombies. It is a very, very unique concept in itself, but more a blend of cliche's in practice, and although some parts of it work, like (most of) the aforementioned mission, often the delivery and context of these things falls short or feels out of place partly because of the mixture of unrealistic graphics, dynamics, and concepts, and partly because the level design is often frustrating and needlessly restrictive.
Too many times I've ended up at a certain height and found a totally viable way round to another side of a building only to find that an invisible ceiling stops me going any higher. Water is also a hindrance and there have been times I have tried teleporting round to an area only to fall in the water and have no option but to restart from my last save because there is no way out.
Combat in Dishonored is better foregone in favor of sneaking. The close quarters combat system has no targeting reticle nor crosshair for swordplay. Blocking and countering is often a game of chance, hit and miss, both rubbery and rigid at the same time. Sneaking is much more a coherent and polished gameplay mechanic, with teleporting up behind an enemy and plunging a sword in his neck being one of the more satisfying aspects of the game.
The variety of weapons and magic abilities is a plus point, and one thing that Dishonored does well is that it allows for some real originality in how the player kills (or doesn't kill) an enemy. The best missions in Dishonoured are the ones inside the more restricted areas of the game, safehouses and government offices, as these offer a more challenging experience and test the player's creativity and problem solving skill.
Among cheating scoundrels, lying politicians and corrupt religious figures, I had murdered my way through a plethora of people in the game (I choose the bloody route) and by the end, although I had experienced one or two great moments, I did feel like I had been cheated. Although a game like this is, admittedly, hugely ambitious, Dishonored does not make the player feel like this kind of world is actually possible, much less plausible. It does not immerse a player like some other games of the period genre do. This is a cult classic, and while it is liked by some, and probably will be liked by those same people ferociously and fervently, it isn't for everyone.
If you can forgive the unbelievable graphics, concepts and the fact that it isn't what the hype said it was, then Dishonored, purely as a creative exercise, is a great game. The thing is, I can imagine this game in such an immersive, realistic light that it might blow everything else right out of the water. And that's exactly the reason that Dishonored is really a great disappointment; it could have been so much more.