This review contains spoilers
Steam punk Assassin's Creed mixed with a hint of BioShock.
I remember playing this game back when it was new and hearing a lot of mixed opinions on it from friends. Some people hated it while others had nothing but good things to say and when I first played it, I can't say I was a huge fan but now that I'm older coming back to it I found it much more enjoyable.
Gameplay: Dishonored is a 1st person stealth based game with shooter, choice-based elements and Magic abilities. You play as a dishonored royal protector on some alternate planet from ours set in a steam punk timeline. This game has some very minor horror-ish elements with a big focus on stealth and choice making. In this game you can decide how you play by either being evil and going a high chaos route and killing anyone you want or going low chaos and not killing anyone or few people. You go from mission to mission in the story to a bunch of small semi open world maps where you have a main target to either nonlethally neutralize or assassinate with a small handful of optional side quests that usually aid you in either getting a special kill or nonlethal take down. It's very open-ended and the whole dynamic gives this game a lot of replay ability. There is a bunch to explore, and I think almost every time I play, I find a new way of moving around the map I didn't know about before. A lot of fun to be had here, you also have a really fun to use and upgradable kit of a crossbow, foldable sword, grenades, a steam punk musket and razor wire traps. You also get sleep darts and magic powers that allow you to teleport, see though walls, summon rats, possess people and more. The powers all remind me of BioShock and the whole general theme of killing lords, royalty and leaders of a falling empire all shout BioShock, but the gameplay feels like a first-person Assassin's Creed with some classic Bethesda side quests and glitching (I’ll get to that in a minute). The gameplay is fun but there is a big problem with the gameplay, that is the reason a lot of people don't like this game. killing people and going high chaos gives you the bad ending and the game punishes you for it by causing more rats and weepers (which are basically plague zombies, I’ll get to that in a bit too). Now as an adult I get it and get that the whole moral is your actions have consequences but for the average player that doesn't care about that kinda stuff they are definitely going to find this agitating. As I mentioned earlier, I ran into quite a bit of glitches, mostly in the dlc but the number of crashes and graphical errors I ran into were not great and when you are trying to shoot for different achievements this can get very frustrating. Speaking of frustrating, the rules on what counts and doesn't count are crazy vague. For example, I ran through the entire game and didn't kill anyone but also didn't get seen I got every achievement for this except the one for not killing anyone. In the mission stats it says on every mission I'm clean, but the achievement never popped, and I read online some vague reasons as to why but honestly there really is no excuse. For a game to have such a tedious set of achievements it should have this system down because I honestly have no idea what I did wrong here, it feels more like a glitch than anything. Also the flooded district level sucks balls and man of course that's the mission I had to play though like 5 times because I either missed collectibles or someone somehow saw me somewhere. The base mechanics for the powers, collectibles and how the collectibles upgrade your kit along with being able to buy upgrades from merchants in the game is all well balanced and fun. I do wish this game had a new game plus so you can actually upgrade all of your powers in one go. They only give you enough to buy all upgrades once and then upgrade like 5 things to level 2 before you can't anymore and it's kinda lame. Speaking of dlc there was a bonus challenges mode that's purely all gameplay with very specific missions and objectives and I played a little bit of this, some of the missions seemed fun and I'm sure they are good but I was kind of burnt out on the game and put it down before completing these, maybe I'll go back to it at some point but one thing about the gameplay I will say is it definitely can get stale, especially if you are trying to get specific achievements and need to restart areas over and over again. The other dlcs are more or less extensions of the main story and just serve as story B about a side character.
Graphics, music & voice acting: The graphics in this game are pretty cool, the game has a unique art style where the environments look semi realistic while all of the people and animals have this almost cartoonish look. Some people's hands look bigger than their heads and a lot of characters have this stocky vibe. I don't dislike the art style but I'm not a huge fan of the way characters look. It's all personal preference and the graphics for a 360 game don't look bad at all. The music and original soundtrack is pretty solid. Aside from the cool credits song there isn't anything crazy memorable here and I remember the final area had this loud like horror movie music and it was Honestly super distracting and off putting. The voice acting is another area that's meh. It's absolutely not bad at all in this category but there aren't any groundbreaking performances to be had here either.
Story/ SPOILERS: Story wise I like and dislike this game and wanna talk about spoilers so be warned! Basically, this game takes place in a steampunk-ish empire called Dungwall ahhhiii mean Dunwall (seriously not the best name) a city that is in the middle of a rat plague that turns people into weepers, which are basically just zombies with some minor intelligence and right away the empress is assassinated, and her daughter kidnapped and you are dishonored and blamed as the assassin. From here, you pick your path and decide the fate of everything and everyone you come across. The openness is both fun and immersive and I think this is the strongest part of the game. The world also has some hefty back story for how the plague started and where the supernatural aspects come from in the form of audio logs and A LOT of reading. This is probably a complaint about all Bethesda Games. I love reading and notes in games but the number of books, notes, letters and memos you can find and read are way too much and I feel half of it is just there to pad the runtime. If you are looking to do and read everything aside from a good and bad playthrough of the base game the runtime of this game is easily pushed to like 80+ hours especially if you are looking to 100% the story and DLC. The supernatural aspect of the game involving the outsider is probably the most interesting part of the story. The whole story surrounding him and where he comes from is very mysterious and intriguing. The main cast of people you assassinate, save, interact with and get quests from are all... okay and some are more interesting than others unfortunately since you play as a silent protagonist in this game I find most of the interactions kinda fall flat and most of the entertainment comes from the missions themselves, the fun gameplay mixed with missions like House of Pleasure or Lady Boyles last party is really what drove me to keep playing. The game does have a few twists I didn't see coming the first time I played and neither did my girlfriend when I played it again. The biggest problem with this story is probably the lack of a compelling villain, you basically work to kill the guys that dishonored you and took the empresses daughter Emily only to get dishonored again and have to kill the guys that helped you the first time and save Emily AGAIN... and that's the end of the story. Also, unless you play the dlc for the real empress assassin Daud, I was honestly confused as to how his story even fit into this game. When we first run into Daud in the flooded district, he's like "yeah I know a lot of stuff assassin" and that's basically all he tells us other than his audio log and notes that tells us yup this guy was hired to kill the empress and man was I let down that was the farthest his story went in the base game. His dlc does fix this and explain what he was doing the whole time and I’m glad because I really like him and his little group of assassins but i was hoping he’d play a better role in the main story. I don’t know what I expected his story to be, but he just felt like he should have been more important than what he does in his dlc. His DLCs are fun but for me they were riddled with glitches and pretty much just exist to set up the villain for the second game. Some of those levels are great and some not so great. Overall, the base gameplay is fun, the environments are cool and the core story about revenge isn't anything groundbreaking but fun and fit for a game like this. If you like Assassin's Creed, Bethesda Games, BioShock, or steampunk stuff then you'll probably love this game. It is a good game, maybe not a 10/10 masterpiece but definitely worth trying out but I can see how some people may lose interest.
Overall: 7.5/10
I remember playing this game back when it was new and hearing a lot of mixed opinions on it from friends. Some people hated it while others had nothing but good things to say and when I first played it, I can't say I was a huge fan but now that I'm older coming back to it I found it much more enjoyable.
Gameplay: Dishonored is a 1st person stealth based game with shooter, choice-based elements and Magic abilities. You play as a dishonored royal protector on some alternate planet from ours set in a steam punk timeline. This game has some very minor horror-ish elements with a big focus on stealth and choice making. In this game you can decide how you play by either being evil and going a high chaos route and killing anyone you want or going low chaos and not killing anyone or few people. You go from mission to mission in the story to a bunch of small semi open world maps where you have a main target to either nonlethally neutralize or assassinate with a small handful of optional side quests that usually aid you in either getting a special kill or nonlethal take down. It's very open-ended and the whole dynamic gives this game a lot of replay ability. There is a bunch to explore, and I think almost every time I play, I find a new way of moving around the map I didn't know about before. A lot of fun to be had here, you also have a really fun to use and upgradable kit of a crossbow, foldable sword, grenades, a steam punk musket and razor wire traps. You also get sleep darts and magic powers that allow you to teleport, see though walls, summon rats, possess people and more. The powers all remind me of BioShock and the whole general theme of killing lords, royalty and leaders of a falling empire all shout BioShock, but the gameplay feels like a first-person Assassin's Creed with some classic Bethesda side quests and glitching (I’ll get to that in a minute). The gameplay is fun but there is a big problem with the gameplay, that is the reason a lot of people don't like this game. killing people and going high chaos gives you the bad ending and the game punishes you for it by causing more rats and weepers (which are basically plague zombies, I’ll get to that in a bit too). Now as an adult I get it and get that the whole moral is your actions have consequences but for the average player that doesn't care about that kinda stuff they are definitely going to find this agitating. As I mentioned earlier, I ran into quite a bit of glitches, mostly in the dlc but the number of crashes and graphical errors I ran into were not great and when you are trying to shoot for different achievements this can get very frustrating. Speaking of frustrating, the rules on what counts and doesn't count are crazy vague. For example, I ran through the entire game and didn't kill anyone but also didn't get seen I got every achievement for this except the one for not killing anyone. In the mission stats it says on every mission I'm clean, but the achievement never popped, and I read online some vague reasons as to why but honestly there really is no excuse. For a game to have such a tedious set of achievements it should have this system down because I honestly have no idea what I did wrong here, it feels more like a glitch than anything. Also the flooded district level sucks balls and man of course that's the mission I had to play though like 5 times because I either missed collectibles or someone somehow saw me somewhere. The base mechanics for the powers, collectibles and how the collectibles upgrade your kit along with being able to buy upgrades from merchants in the game is all well balanced and fun. I do wish this game had a new game plus so you can actually upgrade all of your powers in one go. They only give you enough to buy all upgrades once and then upgrade like 5 things to level 2 before you can't anymore and it's kinda lame. Speaking of dlc there was a bonus challenges mode that's purely all gameplay with very specific missions and objectives and I played a little bit of this, some of the missions seemed fun and I'm sure they are good but I was kind of burnt out on the game and put it down before completing these, maybe I'll go back to it at some point but one thing about the gameplay I will say is it definitely can get stale, especially if you are trying to get specific achievements and need to restart areas over and over again. The other dlcs are more or less extensions of the main story and just serve as story B about a side character.
Graphics, music & voice acting: The graphics in this game are pretty cool, the game has a unique art style where the environments look semi realistic while all of the people and animals have this almost cartoonish look. Some people's hands look bigger than their heads and a lot of characters have this stocky vibe. I don't dislike the art style but I'm not a huge fan of the way characters look. It's all personal preference and the graphics for a 360 game don't look bad at all. The music and original soundtrack is pretty solid. Aside from the cool credits song there isn't anything crazy memorable here and I remember the final area had this loud like horror movie music and it was Honestly super distracting and off putting. The voice acting is another area that's meh. It's absolutely not bad at all in this category but there aren't any groundbreaking performances to be had here either.
Story/ SPOILERS: Story wise I like and dislike this game and wanna talk about spoilers so be warned! Basically, this game takes place in a steampunk-ish empire called Dungwall ahhhiii mean Dunwall (seriously not the best name) a city that is in the middle of a rat plague that turns people into weepers, which are basically just zombies with some minor intelligence and right away the empress is assassinated, and her daughter kidnapped and you are dishonored and blamed as the assassin. From here, you pick your path and decide the fate of everything and everyone you come across. The openness is both fun and immersive and I think this is the strongest part of the game. The world also has some hefty back story for how the plague started and where the supernatural aspects come from in the form of audio logs and A LOT of reading. This is probably a complaint about all Bethesda Games. I love reading and notes in games but the number of books, notes, letters and memos you can find and read are way too much and I feel half of it is just there to pad the runtime. If you are looking to do and read everything aside from a good and bad playthrough of the base game the runtime of this game is easily pushed to like 80+ hours especially if you are looking to 100% the story and DLC. The supernatural aspect of the game involving the outsider is probably the most interesting part of the story. The whole story surrounding him and where he comes from is very mysterious and intriguing. The main cast of people you assassinate, save, interact with and get quests from are all... okay and some are more interesting than others unfortunately since you play as a silent protagonist in this game I find most of the interactions kinda fall flat and most of the entertainment comes from the missions themselves, the fun gameplay mixed with missions like House of Pleasure or Lady Boyles last party is really what drove me to keep playing. The game does have a few twists I didn't see coming the first time I played and neither did my girlfriend when I played it again. The biggest problem with this story is probably the lack of a compelling villain, you basically work to kill the guys that dishonored you and took the empresses daughter Emily only to get dishonored again and have to kill the guys that helped you the first time and save Emily AGAIN... and that's the end of the story. Also, unless you play the dlc for the real empress assassin Daud, I was honestly confused as to how his story even fit into this game. When we first run into Daud in the flooded district, he's like "yeah I know a lot of stuff assassin" and that's basically all he tells us other than his audio log and notes that tells us yup this guy was hired to kill the empress and man was I let down that was the farthest his story went in the base game. His dlc does fix this and explain what he was doing the whole time and I’m glad because I really like him and his little group of assassins but i was hoping he’d play a better role in the main story. I don’t know what I expected his story to be, but he just felt like he should have been more important than what he does in his dlc. His DLCs are fun but for me they were riddled with glitches and pretty much just exist to set up the villain for the second game. Some of those levels are great and some not so great. Overall, the base gameplay is fun, the environments are cool and the core story about revenge isn't anything groundbreaking but fun and fit for a game like this. If you like Assassin's Creed, Bethesda Games, BioShock, or steampunk stuff then you'll probably love this game. It is a good game, maybe not a 10/10 masterpiece but definitely worth trying out but I can see how some people may lose interest.
Overall: 7.5/10