Disbonored

Good morrow fine sir/madame, prithee, look upon my Dishonored review with good taste. I just felt like introducing my review that way because everyone in Dishonored wears frilly shirts but sports the drabbest of American accents. When will someone make a Downton Abbey video game where you can play Jack the ripper and kill everyone with a samurai sword carved from Edgar Allen Poe’s bones?!

Dishonored, the bastard child of Thief and Bioshock but to be honest I think Bioshock should get a DNA test because it looks a bit more like fable than Thief, but hey I like Fable too so maybe we can leave Jeremy Kyle out of it for now.

You play Corvo a rubbish bodyguard turned misunderstood magical assassin who seems to have misunderstood the meaning of the job title ‘assassin’ since you have to not kill anyone to get the good ending but the bad ending isn't that bad anyway so who cares?

First impressions of the game it looks like an old pc game, I'm not usually the graphic nazi type, I think complaining about graphics is something that is reserved for the elite class of pc gamers and eight year olds, and the average gamer has bigger things to worry about like game-play and storyline. Nevertheless the game looks a bit ‘rough’.

Anyway, moving on; So yeah Corvo is this bodyguard who for some reason is returning from a holiday somewhere doing something vague. Just in time to be framed for the ruthless shishkebabing of his employer. Within the space of a minute the plot is painfully obvious. It’s the basic power struggle; evil dude wants to be the new king of everything so has to kill the present king of everything to rule with an iron fist... (in Morgan Freeman’s voice) ‘a plot line as old as time’

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So Corvo is banged up because as a silent protagonist who doesn't sign, his defence case didn't have a leg to stand on. So after being bashed on the bonse you wake up in prison and we’re meant to believe he’s been there for a substantial amount of time to justify butchering all his prison guards.

 Bingo bango he’s been head-hunted to join a group of exceptionally uninteresting and lazy rebels as the man who goes on suicide missions while they sit in the pub all day thinking up new ways to get him killed. They give you a shiny disappearing sword and a really subtle mask that says ‘I'm just going about my daily business officer’. Although I don’t really see the point of the mask since everyone and their mum attacks you on sight anyway as if them knowing who you were would make a difference.

The game play is pretty fun it does feel like Bioshock with a bit of climbing thrown in. You also get like a steampunky pistol that is oddly satisfying to fire because it has a great noise and big puff of smoke like a musket or something but this hurts the ebb and flow of a stealth game a wee bit. I like the little things like the magical disappearing sword that he hold front grip in combat and reverse grip while stealthing.

As a magical assassin you might not be surprised to hear Corvo can pull a rabbit out of a hat then shove it up someone’s arse. He can also teleport, possess living things, summon rats, see in the dark, stop time and.... make....wind!?

Ok so teleportion; probably not the best word because it’s just line of sight dashing really you can’t travel through matter you can’t even go through a fence, but it will be the power you use the most as most of the time it’s the only one you can afford because all of the good powers take too much mana to use.

Onto possession, this was the most promising power and it’s the reason I was interested in the game but like ten minutes in and I’m reading a loading screen that’s telling me when possessing someone all you can do is open doors and walk about.... so what’s the point!? All that hype and it’s just a less effective version of 47 changing clothes. Also you don’t even get to possess people until later so you spend the first part of the game just getting close ups of rat arses.

Summoning rats is pretty cool if a little specific, you summon a bunch of rats to distract/eat everyone while you go on your merry way. It’s a pretty cool power but I didn't end up using it very much since the rats once summoned don’t seem to want to eat anyone that isn't directly in front of them. They don’t even want to eat the zombies in the game (Yeah the game has zombies too, spoiler alert*) a task you’d think they’d be perfect for because they all huddle together and there’s lots of them but no, these rats seem to be connoisseurs and only the freshest of douchbags will do.

Seeing in the dark is pretty self explanatory and you can also see through walls and see their cones of vision, the wind power is just that you create wind, it’s magic not rocket scientist most things in front of you won’t be in front of you when you use that power.

The best power is probably the time slowing/stopping power but of course time powers in games are treated like fire from mount Olympus ‘Man is not ready for such great power! We must regulate it and make them rely on drinking lots of potions and only allow them to stop time long enough to make it completely useless.’

Why do games these days give us ultimate power but only a teaspoon at a time? Whatever happened to magic meters recharging? Deus Ex would have been perfect if the main character wasn’t completely dependent on chocolate bars. There have been games about stopping time and possessing people on much older consoles that were awesome, so I can only assume games are getting gradually worse.

Once you’re over the initial wonder of the powers the game gets a little repetitive and there aren’t even that many powers, everything about it is borrowed, it has no original ideas or characters and no atmosphere whatsoever. The characters are wooden and boring and you’re supposed to care about the empress dying even though you only meet her for literally a minute before she’s killed. How do you care about characters when the game is so formulaic and leaves no room for character development?

The game claims to be like thief yet there is only one free roaming area you only visit twice which has like two sub-missions then it’s just one linear level after the next with a bit of exploration thrown in. Also what’s the obsession with whales all about?!  You collect whale bone runes to increases your powers and every machine in the game is powered by ‘whale oil’. Also why is the rune locator a heart that talks?! I thought that would be something to do with the main plot but it just seems to be random. Like it could just well have been a throbbing hamburger but that wouldn't have been as cool.

I don’t get what this game has against killing people you don’t usually see assassins trying to find alternative methods of conflict resolutions that aren't stabbing someone in the neck. The morality of this game makes no sense because the alternatives for killing people in the game usually involve fates worth than death, like being sold into slavery. This is the reason I hate morality system in games not because they’re a bad idea because morality in games is an important framework, it’s just usually implemented in the worst possible way.

 For instance; giving you the option to save or drown orphans then getting mad at you for choosing to drown them... YOU GAVE ME THE CHOICE!! I don’t see why you should be penalized for making a binary choice. Games designers just use morality as a tool to make you play the game twice, it doesn't matter to them if it makes sense.

Where I think it fails is it has no sense of humour, it’s trying to be like thief and fable but it takes itself far too seriously. It’s just blank and emotionless and it has no sense of fun or real character. It just thinks it can throw together a bunch of game elements stolen from other games, tack on a tired plot and away it goes, without any real effort gone into atmosphere or character development.

It also makes me laugh that games designers think they can put books in games to add sub-narrative and back story but don’t realise the game has to be interesting to make you want to learn the back story  why would you want to read more filler?!

I think if I made this game I would have taken more time to get to know the characters, I would have made the intro much longer like fable so the empress’s death was more hard hitting and so you could see the conspiracy slowly unfolding just short of actually stopping it. Also I would have made Corvo’s prison time playable. A) Because I love games set in prisons and (not because of the showers) B) because it would give Corvo more character because it just seems like he goes from heroic body guard to shadow stalking neck hater in the drop of a hat. Also more free roaming sections with sub-missions would give the city of Dunwall more character. I just think the game feels rushed and unpolished with a distinct lack of direction.

All in all the game is just a massive let down for me, I really had high hopes for this game as Bioshock , Fable and Thief are some of my favourite games and this game just failed to deliver that sense of atmosphere and immersion. It didn't take me anywhere it didn't do anything new or interesting it just didn't work it’s like putting all the best music in the world into a machine to combine them and then Justin Bieber moonwalks out and brings about the end of days.