Tag Archives: dishonored

Nov 21 2016
9 Comments
gaming

Thoughts: Dishonored 2

dh2_boat

I’m a big enough man to admit that my review of the original Dishonored was a little on the harsh side. Indeed, it was deliberately so, since I felt at the time that the universal praise it was receiving from all practically all quarters of the internet was a little bit over the top and wanted to provide some balance. And so I went to town on Dishonored’s structural problems and gave it a thorough kicking, and in the process glossed over far too much of what it did that actually worked, and worked well. Much of that has only really become apparent to me in hindsight as I’ve played other games that have tried similar things only to stuff them up quite badly, but that’s just made me quite excited for the Dishonored 2: the first one was a good game with some serious flaws, but what are sequels for if not fixing what you couldn’t get quite right the first time around?

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Oct 17 2012
17 Comments
gaming

Disshonored: Dishonored.

Can you make a game out of nothing but neat touches? This is a question that I had hitherto not really considered before buying and playing Dishonored, a game which appears to be the answer. The world and art style are neat, but simply having an interesting world doesn’t make a game on its own. The profusion of secrets and easter eggs scattered throughout the various levels and missions are neat, but the definition of a secret is that it’s secret. You can’t build a game around secrets. The way the various powers can interact with the world and with each other are neat, but these are the tools you use to tackle the game and their utility/entertainment value is contingent on the game providing you with the appropriate opportunities to use them. It is both a testament to just how many neat touches there are in Dishonored and a damning indictment of how rotten and worm-ridden the underlying structure they’re bolted to is that the whole thing doesn’t instantly come crashing down around the player’s ears. Instead it takes, oooh, a good seven hours for that to happen. So I guess you can make a game out of nothing but neat touches. Temporarily, anyway.

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