Great experience. I wasn't expecting so much when I started this game but it really delivered. I love the kinda steampunk setting with the plague background; it's recognizable enough while still feeling really unique. The gameplay is top-notch; you get enough skills to kill or stealth, even though there probably could've been more (stealth-wise you really only need Blink and maybe Dark Vision and the majority of the weapons are useless when stealthing). The level design is where this game really shines though, and it's really great to finally have a game that shows a route that you can actually take, climbing up ledges on walls and bypassing entire areas. This game will definitely teach you to look up. The writing was engaging enough, I liked most of the characters, even if some aspects of the plot (like everything with the Outsider) could have used some more development, and the ending felt kinda abrupt too. Graphics and soundtrack complemented all the things the story wanted to do. All in all just glad to have experienced this game, as I had a lot of fun with it and always looked forward to playing it.

This might be a superb game– bordering on perfect– but there were elements in my playthrough that marred the experience.

The apocalyptic tone of Dishonored story encouraged me to play villainous eschewing my normal RPG playstyle of a very moral character. I killed so many people, folks, often pointlessly and brutally. There was a lack of grace and a stupidity to my methology so maybe that’s why some mechanics felt so empty? It made the game not as infectious as I would hope. That and the fact I took a multi-month break in the middle of my playthrough.

I can imagine a replay would shine this game brighter, which I am planning down the road. The visuals hold up very well and the world is so immersive. The game length is about just right. So will I adore this game down the road? We’ll see. I think this game is fairly great– maybe I’ll see it for the masterpiece it’s known to be?

The gameplay is just so good and satisfying and every frame of the game feels like it is from an oil painting.

Only if the story was anywhere remarkable and I also don't like how it punishes you for a bloodthirsty run I mean C'MON! You have so many cool superpowers and weapons at your disposal and the knife is always on the screen and you are a FREAKING assassin!! and you just expect me to babysleep the enemies?

There should be a chaotic good ending too!

I hate when games give you the illusion of choice. Gameplay wise, this is one of the best games of its kind. But story wise, it falls flat. Its kind of a generic plot and then there's my personal biggest issue. The game constantly hands you some of the coolest and creative ways to kill people, to absolutely massacre the world you're in. And then the story actively punishes you for being lethal. I'm not a fan of that at all. A game that touts multiple ways to handle situations, when really there's only one option if you don't want a shitty ending. Be quiet, don't kill, do the "hidden" dispatch.

Review EN/PTBR

One of my favorite games from the Xbox 360 era that I can't even tell you how many times I've played, many aspects of the story that didn't capture me as much at the time but leave me impressed today, as do the political issues surrounding the universe and how much the game adapts around your playing style

All this without mentioning the fantastic level design with each scenario being so different from the previous one, making it a pleasure to explore all the ways to reach your goals.

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Um dos meu jogos favoritos da época do Xbox 360 que não sei nem dizer quantas vezes já zerei, rejogando hoje em dia percebo muitos aspectos da história que não me conquistaram tanto na época mas hoje me deixam impressionados, tanto como as questões políticas envolvendo o universo quanto o jogo se adaptando ao redor do seu estilo de jogo

Isso tudo sem falar no level design fantástico com cada cenário sendo tão diferente do anterior dando gosto de explorar todos os meios de chegar aos seus objetivos.

One day, I’d like to offer some thoughts about the rest of the game but, tonight, I’m here to kill Chaos.

Dishonored on its face is a tightly crafted game. You are Corvo Attano. You’re here (Dunwall) to kick ass and protect the Empress and, thanks to a bunch of cartoon rogues and one extremely cool guy, you are all out of Empress. Well, maybe 98% out of Empress. Let’s just say you have a head full of silent protagonist and a heart full of a familiar sounding lady who knows the exact geographic location of all of Satan’s heretical artifacts. Either way, revenge is on the menu and everyone is your main course.

The game looks and sounds pretty great for its age and the setting works well. Dunwall evokes a sort of hyper-Victorian era scummy English or New English port town. Nothing looks like it’s in good shape and scientific advances are confined to cures for a horrible and mysterious zombie rat plague, guns, and security systems intended to vaporize a normal burglar. The music, ambient or otherwise, isn't much of a main attraction aside from a somewhat outrageous but undeniably catchy ending number. As sounds go, you're here for enemy chatter that's difficult to forget and a solid cast of voice actors for the main characters, aside from - conspicuously given the sequel - Corvo himself.

Gameplay works. Dishonored has a solid gamefeel that reminds me in some ways of DOOM 2016; you feel very agile and capable of parkour in a way I haven't been primed to expect from a first-person game. You have an assortment of powers which, to be honest, feel pretty eclectic. On one end, you can teleport all over the place, which feels pretty incredible and adds to how nimble Corvo is to play. On the other, you can summon giant rat mobs and tank more hits and regen faster, which...playthroughs differ, of course, but these never struck me as especially useful or fun to play with. Levels, for the most part, are all larger segments of Dunwall with some instances where you're left largely free to take guards and security devices out as quietly or visibly as you'd prefer. There's an incredible tactile satisfaction to the wrist-mounted crossbow you have that I never got tired of and that I never really picked up from other weapons the game hands you such as grenades, guns, and, barring a noteworthy exception, your cool sword.

The story isn’t going to be your main attraction. Admirably for a relatively prominent title in a larger franchise, the game answers most of the pressing questions it puts forward. The answers are all kind of ridiculous. What narrative appeal there is comes from two things and it is the second I want to really focus in on. First, the gameplay and setting come together to give the proceedings a unique character that would otherwise be pretty much nonexistent. It’s a grimy city full of outsized personalities and there is certainly something to the individuals Corvo interacts with. Satan talks to you whenever you pick up certain items that advance your character and it’s hard not to be at least a bit charmed by being beneath the watchful eye of a teenaged, socially puzzled atheist who also is responsive in some ways to your morality. Which…

Okay, yes. Let’s talk about the morality. Let’s talk about Chaos.

Dishonored is a fundamentally confused game. I wonder in some ways if it wasn’t to do with trends at the time in the broader gaming landscape but, based off developer interviews, that likely doesn’t fully capture it. You are a man left for dead out to get revenge against a heinous cabal of elitist creeps who had your wife murdered and your daughter taken. The game gives you a large suite of options in terms of how to carve your way through your enemies or, better yet, tricking them into carving themselves up against their own tools or against dark forces beyond mortal comprehension. But it is also a game that cannot help but make it clear to you that, as unbelievably awesome as killing is, it is also very wrong and you are a bad person if you indulge in it.

Now, lest anyone worry, obviously that is correct. But Dishonored feels like it was built around playing a gleeful vigilante. The Chaos System, the game’s morality meter, is violently at odds with that. You are chastised by the game for indulging in High Chaos actions but it’s so obviously the path the game is begging you to choose that the whole idea of a video game morality mechanic comes across as very confused and to the game’s detriment. A Low Chaos player has very few tools at their disposal for interacting with the game; you can sneak around and avoid being seen and either choke or tranquilize guards that you can’t avoid. This as opposed to a player less concerned with all that who can drop carnivorous rats into rooms full of people to distract them, blast people into walls with telekinesis, or resort to the visceral satisfaction of just stabbing them, picking them off with crossbow bolts, or what have you.

This is only superficially the issue. Corvo, at the end of the day, is the hero of the story no matter how gruesome his methods are. His enemies are all, barring one cool and one troubling exception, as cartoonishly evil as you could imagine. So Dishonored has to be a story of revenge no matter where any given player falls on the Chaos scale and it has very clearly obligated itself to make the player feel like, even if he isn’t a killer, his enemies get what is coming to them. Low Chaos Corvo does things that are almost absurd: he consigns foes to work as slaves in their own mines; he brands a man to live as a disease-riddled, penniless leper; he hands off a woman who may have done little wrong other than sleep with the wrong man to her stalker. It’s hard to really say any of this is much better than killing his enemies in the night. But since Corvo doesn’t actually put the knife in himself, he is a good person and Dunwall by extension is a good place.

To me, it’s a somewhat difficult to ignore flaw. It shows a game that is fundamentally at odds with itself. A game that, even without this, would still be a game that peters out at the finish line, telling the player—at one point—to kill or stun every enemy on the map with a magic electrical device rather than engage with stealth or combat in the course of the level. A game that, even if it did feel consistent, would still be a game ending on a 3D clipshow telling you that you either did good or did bad after an easy map with a host of antagonists who are not worth Corvo’s time. Make no mistake: for two-thirds of its length, Dishonored is a solid game made by people with a clear sense of what world they meant to build and with tools for a player to have a more than solid time playing at being Edmond Dantes. But it is a game that never goes past good to great because pressures either from within Arkane or from games at that time led to a product that seems fundamentally confused and unable to come to any coherent moral conclusion about what it believes you ought to be doing, to such an extent that the game itself feels less enjoyable as a whole.

pretty solid gameplay but it's really dumb that a game that's so insistent that you should "play your way" punishes you for using like half of your options. you get a worse ending for using a pretty huge chunk of the abilities you have and that is quite dumb. to be clear, i don't mind the idea of alternate endings, but if you're gonna literally label one of them as the "correct" one and if you're gonna market your game as one that gives you a lot of choices i'm gonna be annoyed.
With that said there is a lot to like here. The level design is actually quite good. The areas all have a really tangible sense of being real places and the game does a good job of providing a lot of ways to accomplish your goals. The really key thing here is that it does this by letting you do things that make logical sense given the areas you're in rather than just giving you multiple rigid routes with little room for creative play.
It's a shame that stealth loses a lot of its tension by how powerful your combat powers are but it hardly ruins the game
It's worth playing if it interests you but do yourself a favor and ignore the part where the game tells you killing bad and just play in the way you enjoy instead.
Or, y'know, play deus ex, because a lot of stuff this game does well is stuff deus ex did first.

Мне нравится, что, несмотря на отказ от стелса, игра смогла доставить мне удовольствие альтернативным стилем прохождения - меч в лицо всем врагам. Боевая система красочна и имеет много механик. И разные оружия, и скиллы, и виды противников не дают заскучать, а управление сносно, хоть я и имел некоторый скептицизм к ближнему бою от первого лица. Такая проработка побочного аспекта игры дало мне понимание, что разработчики уделили должное внимание всем её системам и это было не зря. Что я ещё смог заметить за пятичасовое прохождение? Стелс так же имеет много классных механик и удовлетворит людей, жаждущих стать бесшумными убийцами. Касаемо лвл-дизайна, это конечно не Хитман с тридцатью способами разобраться с целью, но на каждый ваш шаг на большом уровне есть достойная альтернатива. А на каждую цель - два-три способа расправы. Присутствует нужное ощущение, что игрок нашёл свой способ прохождения и что могло быть иначе. Атмосферно и сюжетно Dishonored прекрасна. Дизайн на полную катушку раскрывает сеттинг. Та игра, которую можно приводить как пример идеального стимпанка фанатам жанра. Моя оценка в 9 баллов основывается по большей части на доверии игре. Мой личный игровой опыт можно назвать очень ограниченным, но я не верю, что ошибаюсь, нахваливая её.