Dishonored is all about freedom. Freedom to decide how you want to complete the mission, freedom on who you want to kill or not kill and freedom to just have a helluva good time. Dishonored is blissful freedom…
Short nitty-gritty plot description from IMDb is as follows: In the plague-ridden capital of a steampunkish kingdom, a coup occurs. Empresses’ confidant, falsely accused of her murder, is left for dead. A mysterious man appears to him with a message: “The fate of the kingdom now lies in your hands”.
The story for Dishonored will take you through several different locations. You’ll be sneaking through an industrial section of a city, next you’ll be crawling your way through a brothel and before you know it, you’ll be donning a disguise so you can sneak into a masked party. The nice thing about Dishonored, is you won’t be sick of it, as it changes pace just at the right time and mixes action and surprisingly, horror.
Dishonored was a great game. It wasn’t super long (about 10 hours), but it had so much diversity with it’s level design, it’s a game you’ll want to go back and play again. You can decide to go crazy and kill all your assassination targets, or you can spare them and provide for them a different fate and one that is far worse than death. Deciding to go through the game and doing as much stealth as you can, is made possible by a variety of different paths, combined with some magical powers that you obtain. The best and most useful, is the ability to warp to different areas with the press of a button. This allows you to climb up high and sneak past plenty of potential and deadly confrontations. In my play through I upgraded this ability (upgrading is made possible by finding runes hidden throughout the levels), along with being able to stop time and possess animals (rats, fish) or even humans. When possessing humans, you can only walk and open doors, or interact with certain objects. If you decide to go the crazy route, you can obtain abilities that range from calling upon a swarm of rats to devour enemies, or even one that will turn people to ash. I didn’t use these at all and look forward to going through the game again and massacring as many people as possible. Be mindful though, that depending on how many people you kill and how much chaos you cause, will greatly affect your play through (more enemies, more rats) and even the ending.
Sound work is great, with the voice acting being the biggest highlight. Several Hollywood stars provide their talents, such as: Lena Headey and Brad Dourif to name a few. One complaint I do have, is the repetition of lines from a few of guards, which can become super annoying, if your doing the stealth route. This could hurt your play though, cause you’ll barely be able to contain your rage, as you hear the same line for the seventeenth time and your eye suddenly starts twitching.
The graphics in Dishonored are pretty darn nice looking, but do expect some low resolution textures every once awhile. This is a small nitpick, as the design work is phenomenal and really shows off a hybrid steam punk, revolution type era. The design work can be dark and dirty, but the next level will be bright and colourful. Think of this game as a cross between Bioshock, Assassins Creed and Half-Life 2.
That’s basically what Dishonored is; a combination of some great games. Taking bits and pieces here and there and combining them into a stellar package. I had a blast with this game and I’m thinking you will too. It’s hard to find negatives, but don’t’ get me wrong, it isn’t perfect. Still, you’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t pick up Dishonored.
Story – 3.5/5 – The story behind Dishonored is basic, but provides plenty of twist and turns. The ending “fight” is a little bit of letdown though.
Gameplay – 4.5/5 – Plenty of diversity, with several different ways to play the game.
Graphics – 3.5/5 – A stylish game, but is unfortunately hindered by some low textures.
Sound – 3.5/5 – Voice acting is good, with several actors providing some nice work. The rest of the game sounds nice as well, but the repetition of lines from guards can be annoying.
Overall (not an average) – 4/5 – Dishonored is a fun, fun game. You’ll be playing through it several times and be loving every minute of it.