Dishonored
PlayStation 3
Dishonored is a game I have owned for several years now, but for some reason had never gotten around to playing until just recently. Back in 2013 or 2014 I had found a used copy of this game at GameStop for dirt cheap. I also had a gift card for the store which had more than enough on it to cover the cost of the game. Nothing else caught my eye, so it was a no-brainer that I would pick this up.
Little did I know that the game would sit on my shelf, untouched, for years and years to come. If you have been following this blog at all, you should know that I have more games in my collection than I know what to do with. Dishonored fell into the same trap that many other games have fallen in to. "I'll get around to playing it..... eventually."
Well, eventually finally came in 2017.
Dishonored takes place entirely from the first person perspective and is set in a very unique fantasy world. You play as a man named Corvo, who is a trusted informant of the Empress of Dunwall. When the game begins you are returning from a mission to seek aid for a plague that has struck Dunwall. You meet up with the Empress to deliver your results. The meeting is ambushed, the Empress is killed, her daughter is kidnapped, and you are framed for the crime.
Six months later, your character is busted out of jail by a group of loyalists who don't like or trust the new regime in charge. They want you to find the Empress's missing daughter, take out all the traitorous thugs who framed you, and restore order to Dunwall.
Your first mission is the prison break. This is where Dishonored eases you in and teaches you all the game mechanics and controls. Game play is mainly stealth based. You want to sneak up on your enemies and take them out, preferably in a non-lethal fashion. You actually can attempt to rush through this game fighting everything in sight if you choose. The game doesn't force you to play either way. But health and ammo is a little scarce in this game. If you do choose to go the combative route, it will drain you of all your items very very quickly.
I always try to play stealthy. Even though I have been playing stealth games like Metal Gear Solid, Thief, and Manhunt for a long time, I am still not very good at them. Something always happens. A guard I didn't know was there will see me. Or I'll accidentally make a noise. Or I'll get impatient waiting for my opening and make a dumb move that gets me spotted. It is always something. I had the same experience with this game as well. As much as I tried to stealth it up, I would often fail miserably.
Like other stealth games, when you are spotted the enemies all flock to your location. Unlike other games though, it is not an endless supply of enemies. You can kill them off. But as I said before, it is very draining on your item and ammunition situation. You can't just blindly run through this game trying to fight everyone and expect to have a whole lot of success. In fact, there are some areas that are pretty much downright impossible once you have been spotted. It took me a LOT of trial and error to get through these areas.
If I had to compare this game with another game, it would be Thief. The comparisons are obvious. Similar setting, similar character, similar first person game play mechanics. There are a lot of differences, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was playing Thief all over again when I first started this. And I was not a huge fan of that game, if you can remember my initial review. So by default I didn't like this one too much either. I know it really isn't fair to make that comparison, since this game came out before Thief. But I had played Thief first, so I couldn't help but hold this game up in comparison.
This isn't a long game. Probably about ten to twelve hours. Even still, it took me over a month to finish this game. I just could not get into it. I wasn't having fun. Playing was like a chore.
About halfway through the game, something changed for me. I still wasn't the game's biggest fan, but I began to not dislike it as much as I had before. I started to "get" it, if that makes any sense. The mechanics became more natural to me. I became a pretty skilled fighter. I still sucked at the stealth aspect, but I was beginning to at least show some improvement. And when stealth failed, there was always combat to fall back on. Or hiding. Shameless, shameless hiding.
In addition to being similar to Thief, the game also shares a lot of common traits with Bioshock. The overall environment of the game is pretty cool, much better than that of Thief and more comparable to that of a Bioshock game. The story line is okay. A lot of the game play mechanics like listening to tapes and picking up items are similar to the way Bioshock does things. Not only are there regular attacks in the game, but you can also earn supernatural powers along the way, very similar to Bioshock's Plasmids.
While I enjoyed the second half of the game, I still was not enthralled by it. It has its moments though. There is one mission in particular I really liked. You attend a costume ball in a posh mansion and have to find and eliminate one of its residents, who is helping your opposition. As you get deeper into the mission, you are given the choice of killing this lady or helping her run off with her lover. Either way, she is off your hands and out of the picture. Normally I am a heartless bastard and make all the evil choices, but I actually helped her get away. I thought it would add a little more intrigue to the story. And it did.
This game gives you choices like that every once in a while. Every in game choice you make affects the way the game's story plays out. In fact, the very style of play you choose plays a major role in the advancement of the story line. If you kill a lot of people, you inadvertently help to intensify the plague that is ravaging Dunwall. If you play in a more peaceful, stealthy manner, things will be a lot more rosy at the end of the game. Or so I've heard. I have only played through the game once and got the shitty ending because I had to resort to fighting so often.
Dishonored does a lot of things right. Graphics, story line, music, sound effects. Creating a nice, believable fantasy atmosphere. It plays and controls well. Clearly a lot of time and effort was put into making this a really grade A game. From a technical standpoint everything here is top notch.
That said, it doesn't matter how pretty or technically advanced a game is if it is not any fun. Not to say this game isn't any fun, but it does drag its feet quite often. It starts slow. It didn't get me hooked immediately. The whole first half of this game I trudged through. It was kind of a chore to play, to be honest. I only started playing regularly so I could finish the game and move on to something else. The game eventually did win me over, but it was almost too little too late.
So how do I grade a game that I half hated, half kinda-sorta enjoyed? I was going back and forth between D+ and C-, but decided to settle on the latter. I simply can't ignore all the things that this game does right. All the TLC that went into making this a really detailed and engaging fantasy world. It is not the most fun game out there. Definitely one of the least enjoyable games I have played in the last six months or so. But it doesn't deserve to be in the D range.
If you love Thief, you will love this game. If you love Bioshock, you may love this game. But if you hated either, then Dishonored definitely will not be for you.
Overall:
C-
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