Game Review: Dishonored

If you haven't watched the trailer I recommend you do before reading the review... You watched it right? Wasn't that awesome? Dishonored is the story of Corvo Attano who is the bodyguard of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin in the city of Dunwall. Upon Corvo's return from a mission he is on his way to see the Empress and when he gets to her to give his report some assassins teleport in and murder her and kidnap her daughter. Corvo is then framed for the murder and kidnapping and is thrown in jail to await his execution. He receives a note from "A friend" that gives him details on how to escape and thus starts Corvo on his path to revenge by becoming an Assassin in order to clear his name. At some point in the game, Corvo gains access to supernatural powers through an entity only known as The Outsider who is neither good or evil. I must say that the story for the game is pretty good and even though they said this game was not an open world game like the Fallout series by Bethesda, it is still possible to explore different sections of the city through each mission and it is recommended in order to find items that will greatly help you in the game's progress. While Corvo does not have access to a lot of powers, the ones he does get are pretty useful and more than make up for the lack of variety, I didn't even get them all but depending on your play style you'll find some more useful than others. It is also not possible to get them all in your first play through but believe me, there are some powers I was just unwilling to use because of the way I played the game. Some of the powers Corvo has access to are Blink which is a teleport spell that is probably the single most useful spell, but he can also use Bend Time, which slows or stops time altogether depending on your level, there's also Possess that allows you to possess animals and at higher levels humans in order to bypass areas or get into secret areas, and these are only a few. While the game is fun and has a good story there was also a few things that ruined it for me. First of all is the length of the game, it only takes about 10-15 hours to complete, making it a rather short game. The graphics also have some problem when rendering in some parts giving the game a blurry look for bit, while it doesn't hurt the gameplay it can be bothersome as it goes from blurry to grainy and it can be distracting. The single most hated part for me however was the fact that even though Corvo becomes an assassin the whole point of the game is to not murder anyone, not even boss characters. It is entirely possible to go the entire game without killing anyone as there as different methods to avoid kills but if you saw the trailer for the game you can tell how fun those kills look, it would have been awesome to do that but if you kill too many people a few things happen in the game. First of all you get a lot more enemies called weepers which are pretty much zombies that vomit on you and they are pretty powerful in later levels. See the more you kill, the more rats in the city, the more rats there are, the more they spread the plague in the game and that creates more weepers, as if this wasn't enough the game has a chaos meter and more kills generate more chaos if you finish the game at high chaos you get the bad ending. If you play the way I did the game is still a lot of fun and you'll finish it with low chaos which guarantees the good ending, but I feel like I missed an opportunity to make the game more fun by actually performing kills like those in the video. The game also allows you to upgrade not only your powers but your weapons too, giving them more damage, range, different ammo and better blocking for your sword, sadly I fired my gun about 3 times the entire game, never used my mines, grenades or incendiary bolts and while you can upgrade to carry more ammo, it doesn't let you upgrade the carrying capacity of sleeping darts which where my best friend the whole game as I didn't want to kill anyone to get the good ending. Still I consider Dishonored to be one of the best games I have ever played I just wish I could have been a bit more of an Assassin in my game about an Assassin.

Drake's Review's Score 8 out of 10