I'm hoping that I enjoy this more than Thief et al - this is another of those games where I want to like it but I may not be able to get past some stuff. Looking Glass games, basically.
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Oh yeah, swords. Another damn melee system with a timed-block mechanic. I only got the chance to try it once and I kind of managed it, so hopefully it won't be another irritating one.
I played up to the point where I got DISHONORED and also imprisoned. The art design is great - painterly lighting, slightly caricatured character design, and an industrial England/Mediterranean/Discworld-y feel to the setting. And by far the best video game rats I've ever seen - great models full of character that scamper about, sit up and look around, wash themselves, and when they run into a dark corner all you can see is their little white eyes glowing out at you. It's good at teaching you about the mechanics and setting in an integrated narrative way, too.
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I'm progressing slowly through and I've now realised why the rats look so good in this game - they're plot-relevant and also have some mechanics revolving around them. They swarm around the place, reducing bodies, living or dead, to a bloodstain in seconds (an amusing puzzle was having to distract them by flinging some corpses their way). Also, apparently I'll be able to possess them at some point.
The design is all still very nice, lovely character design with the big Olly Moss hands, and a pub setting with a rebel drinking a pint of ale while he spoke to me that almost made me exit the game and head down to my local. I also noticed a food item labeled "Pratchett Jellied Eels", which was a nice nod.
I've been through the standard 'mystical zone with floating bits of walkway and what have you' section and have started picking up some cool powers like dash and 'heart which guides you to pick-ups and also tells you secrets about whichever character or place you point it at'. It's all fairly linear so far, but I assume it'll open up a bit. Dark Messiah wasn't that open, but I get the impression this leans closer to immersive sim territory. I found the very first stealth-or-fight option they presented me with to be impossible to stealth through, but apart from that everything has felt pretty sturdy - even rope-climbing! Also the block mechanic seems pretty forgiving. I think maybe it will always block but you have to time it correctly to daze the opponent, which feels like a good way to do it.
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I'm kind of not enjoying Dishonored so far. I'm getting annoyed by stuff on both the RPG side (e.g. confusing objectives) and the combat side (e.g. long reload times), plus the two aspects are constantly at odds with each other. I'm very much getting a Dark Messiah vibe where they want me to do lots of cool and clever stuff but then make it really fiddly to pull it off.
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Okay, I'm enjoying this again now. I've levelled up a fair bit, and quite early, so stuff is feeling a bit more satisfying now. My general strategy is to sneak around as much as I can, collecting runes and what have you, but as soon as anyone spots me, kill 'em all. Stealth is far too difficult and unrewarding to be worth the effort; for example, you're normally fine to loudly and leisurely empty an area of enemies without worry of reinforcements. The other thing to get used to is that basic combat is no use if you have more than one opponent on you, so at that point it's best to either bullet-time your way through the fight, or get to high ground then summon a gang of rats to eat them.
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I'm still doing a lot of standard RPG scavenging, which isn't always the best, but the setting is great and they pack a fair amount of interesting content in there to find. The wolf-hounds are as wonderfully designed as the rats, too. I just wish there were a way to knock them unconscious without sleep darts. I've had to kill far too many of them.
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I'm around 75% through this, I think. I just did the bit at the masquerade ball where you and your mask fit in so you can chat to guests, pick pockets and sneak around for clues. That was fun (although once you're spotted doing something naughty before you work out your target's identity, you're basically screwed).
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I'm enjoying this, but not as much as I feel like I should be. I'm having a tough time figuring out why, though. I think it's the weird balance where it acts like it wants to be an RPG, but then you pretty much get forced into combat. And that would probably be fine - it's how I'm playing now - but the combat is let down by the AI, I think. Basically, you trip an alarm, you get a line of four guys running straight at you and then they just crowd in front of you and wale on you. So you either just shoot them one by one, or bullet-time stab them one by one. I really have to force myself to use the more outre powers like death-by-rat. (I've also never had a need to possess a rat or dog.) It's basically a less successful version of the Bioshock or Jedi Knight combat. The blocking mechanic is great, though; I wonder if the combat would have worked better with sword and magic only, no other weapons. Perhaps fewer but tougher enemies who will chase you over rooftops and such, and maybe actual ammo for each power so you can't just spam one over and over. Should designers "protect players from themselves" by pushing them to play in interesting ways? I think so.
And the RPG stuff is generally pretty dull, too. It's a cool setting, but the meat and bones of it is the usual trinket-hunting, diary-reading and politics-discussing. The only interesting character I've met is the 6 year old girl.
There is an impressive amount of detail and the design is generally great. It's nice to have new stuff show up in the hub if you bother to keep an eye out - one time I discovered the tech nerd spying on a maid having a bath - and little things like chucking a body in the water and watching the fish rush to their dinner are fun to notice. You also do often feel cool, when you pull off a mid-air kill or successfully repel a couple of swords and deal out finishing moves while they're stunned. It's not a bad game, it's just a mix of two genres and is merely satisfactory at both.
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I'm still a little bored by this. I took out the Regent, got back and was (utterly unsurprisingly) double-crossed by the dudes at the pub. Then it was the old 'recover your gear' level plus a ton of zombies and spitting plants in a sewer level. There's still some stuff that is consistently fun, like pulling off some nice swordplay or blinking around the place, but I'm not finding the story or characters particularly interesting (although I do like Emily and Samuel, so I am at least invested in rescuing the former and sad that the latter is disappointed in me just because I essentially helped invent the atomic bomb), and when I see a level swarming with enemies, I don't get that buzz of anticipation I got from the Crytek games for example, because I'm just not enjoying the combat or stealth that much, it's all too fiddly.
I'm on the last level now, it's a dreary dark rocky bit.
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Done. Quite disappointed overall, for all the reasons I've gone into. Lovely art design, although even that started to get a bit dull by the end, but the story and gameplay just didn't click for me.
Watching the credits, though: wow, that voice cast. Susan Sarandon, Lena Headey, Carrie Fisher, John Slattery, Brad Dourif, Michael Madsen and Chloë Grace Moretz!
Rating: Orange
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