Recent reviews by Somberlain

Dishonored is an exceptional action stealth game from Arkane Studios. It's farily unique and interesting visual style and steampunk world provide a backdrop for a very good stealth game, where you traverse through large and quite open levels in pursuit of your assassination targets. Dishonored offers you a wide array of tools to eliminate your targets (which can also be done non-lethally), they most interesting ones being your powers. These magical abilities allow you stop time, teleport short distances, possess humans and animals and much more. Aside from being plain fun, these powers offer you many, many possibilities to proceed through missions. While there are many scripted ways of doing things, the powers and gadgets at your disposal allow for creative and dynamic solutions.

The game is not without problems, though, but most of them are related to difficulty, which is not relevant to all gamers. Dishonored is a farily easy game for a few reasons. First of all, the powers are a bit too good. This is not a problem with the actual powers per se, but with the fact that some of the mana you use (all of it, in case of ablitites that use only a little) regenerates after a while. This means that you have almost unrestricted ability to teleport around, see enemies through walls and so on. Some abilities, like Bend Time, use a lot more mana, mut mana potions are plentiul as well. Secondly, ammo and the upgrades for your gadgets are very cheap. You can miss half of the money in game and still easily get every single upgrade. Ammo is also found in a lot of places, which makes buying it unneccessary in most cases. Third problem has to do with AI, and is something that can also be see in the Thief games: you can take out as many guards as you like, and the rest of them won't notice anything. Even when all their fellow guards disappear one by one, nobody cares, which is a bit silly and makes the game a lot easier than it could have been. Final problem is the lack of non-lethal tools. Dishonored allows you to complete the game without killing anyone, so there are ways of rendering enemies unconcious. Sadly, the only real ways to do so are Sleeping Darts and choking the enemies, which is fairly disappointing, considering how many lethal tools and powers there are.

Luckily, most of these problems are fixed with the excellent DLCs The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches: money and Runes are rarer, difficulty is higher, level design is more interesting and new non-lethal tools are there. The DLCs also add new powers, though some powers from the base game are missing. I found the DLC powers to be more interesting and I didn't really miss the removed powers, however. Like the base game, the DLCs are a bit short though, which is a shame. But then again, it just shows how good the game is: it leaves you wanting for more.

8,5/10 for the base game, 9,5/10 for the two DLCs.