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Product Features

Genre
Action and Shooter
Publisher
Bethesda
Release Date
October 12, 2012
Available Platforms
PC, PlayStation 3, XBox 360

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Dishonored

Dishonored Dishonored is a first-person stealth action game from Arkane Studios, the makers of Dark Messiah of Might & Magic and Arx Fatalis. It's a game about assassination where you don't have to kill anyone. It's a game about infiltration where you can set up traps and slaughter the entire garrison of an aristocrat's mansion rather than sneak in. It's a game about brutal violence where you can slip in and out of a fortified barracks with nobody ever knowing you were there. It's a game about morality and player choice where the world you create is based on your actions, not navigating conversation trees. The player controls Corvo, once a bodyguard for the Empress, who seeks vengeance against Lord Regent who framed Corvo for the assassination of the Empress. The game is presented in open world...

  • George Orton October 18, 2012 360
    ****

    Isn't it great when a brand new franchise comes along and blows you away from the very first moment?

    Such is the case with Dishonored, a wonderful new game that's been described by many as a mash-up between the Assassin's Creed and Bioshock series, but which is far more original and distinctive than that shorthand description suggests. Set in the fictional city of Dunwall - a huge late-19th-century coastal metropolis with a society built around fishing and whaling - the game casts you as Corvo Attano, a former bodyguard turned assassin, who's tasked with clearing his name and stopping a political coup in the wake of a kidnap and murder plot against Dunwall's rulers.

    However, that brief description doesn't do justice to the breadth of what the game has to offer. As you'd expect for a game with this kind of storyline, there are all sorts of RPG elements at play here: secret plots are hatched, characters' allegiances are questioned, and the overarching plot contains a fair share of twists and turns to keep you engaged on a story level. But what will really hook you isn't the story - it's the mechanics of the game, and the way it puts a huge variety of tools at your disposal before encouraging you to go off and do what you like with them, inspiring creativity and innovation rather than placing you in a straitjacket of limited gameplay options.

    In order to achieve your various goals - which tend to include stealthily infiltrating locations and assassinating people - you have an array of weapons, gadgets and stealthy options to choose from, in the kind of manner we've already seen in these sorts of games before. However, Dishonored amps things up by also gifting you with a wide range of supernatural powers, all of which can be enhanced and upgraded as the game goes on. These powers including the ability to teleport, see through walls, control time, or even send an army of deadly plague-infested rats at your opponent. It's a fun array of abilities that opens up all sorts of different possibilities for tackling each and every mission, and encourages you to consider wildly different ways to achieve the goals that you're set.

    At the same time, Dishonored couples these neat gameplay mechanics with an interesting rewards system based on your actions. Rather than a simple morality-meter (as in games like Red Dead Redemption and the Mass Effect series) that decides how good or bad you've been, this game employs a 'chaos' system that makes changes to the game's world depending on just how much carnage and chaos previous missions have caused. This means that your past actions affect both smaller elements of the game (such as the way in which characters respond to you) as well as larger aspects (like the extent of the plague that ravages the city), and even feed into a selection of different game endings that reward you with different outcomes depending on how you've chosen to achieve your goals.

    And on top of these clever and original gameplay mechanics, the game simply looks beautiful. There's clearly been a lot of effort put into the design of the world of Dishonored, with a strong steampunk sensibility mixing with a funky fantasy vibe, informing minor aspects of the game - such as costume and weapon designs - just as much as bigger elements like the overall look and feel of Dunwall. And rather than the clean-edged, smooth finish that we're used to in this high-definition era, the textures here feel much more varied, with some of the backdrops almost having the feel of lush paintings rather than simple photo-realistic shots of skies and buildings.

    In case you can't tell, I really rather enjoyed this game - and I was especially impressed with how good it was given that it doesn't have an existing big-name franchise upon which to build. Instead, it's a true original, and one that's definitely worthy of your support.

    My only real complaint with the game is that it's a little short - I finished it in less than a week, and I don't even consider myself a particularly great gamer - but given the many different possible ways you have of getting through the game, it's something I can definitely see myself returning to and trying out new things, even though I've completed it once already. Apparently - or so I've heard - you can even complete it without killing anyone at all. But where's the fun in that?