Let me start this out by saying Dishonored is an amazing game. It’s full of insane kills, devouring rat swarms, swords and knives, guns, stealth assassinations and all of that awesomeness. The acting is pretty good, and while it’s not the best looking game out there, it’s completely playable, and the more cartoon-ish graphics lend it a sort of atmosphere that just feels right when playing it.
The problem is that I’m just so lazy, and therein lies my discontent with this game.
If you’ve got the spare time to do multiple play-throughs, you’re gonna have a great experience. If you’re one of those people who loves crafting a sneaky assassination, or setting up an elaborate kill scenario, this game is for you. You can do it all: slap a mine on the back of a rat and then freeze time to run the rat in between two unsuspecting guards, then un-freeze time and let the mine tear them to shreds? Check. Lure a guard into shooting you, freeze time while the bullet is still in mid-air, then possess the guard to make him walk in front of his own bullet, effectively killing himself with a headshot? Check. This game has literally endless possibilities and ways that you can eliminate your foes. it is easily one of the best games this year.
But what if you don’t have the time to put 30+ hours into it?
When you scrap all of the creativity and attack this game as a maniacal sword-wielding madman, slicing and dicing your way through swarms of enemies like you’re late for dinner, you uncover one of the games’ biggest let-downs: it’s really short. I’m not talking Heavenly Sword short or anything, but you’ll quickly find that this game is set up for you to take the stealthy route, and most of – if not all – of the fun is basically had while playing that way. While it’s fun to hack everything in sight, you can get that thrill from a variety of other games that allow you to do so while presenting it in a fun way. Dishonored, however, feels repetitive and boring when all you’re doing is meleeing everything with a pulse.
I went back after completing the game to try to do it in stealth mode. I thought that it would give me a “new game +” sort of mode, where all of my hard-earned powers would still be there, making it much more fun to play the sneak through the games more mundane early levels. Wrong. You start from the beginning, no powers, just reset. After one level, I was done. I understand that I could have played it again, but that’s not me. I’m not one to do multiple replays through a game (Final Fantasy games excluded, of course). And so my time with Dishonored was over, and I was disappointed. Not from lack of awesome, but from lack of desire.
What did you think of Dishonored?
