Dishonored 2

Exit the apartment and head downstairs and then jump through the window to unlock the back door of the Black Market Shop. You can now search the shelves for ammunition, grenades, Copper Wire x4 [1444/3834], and Processed Whale Oil x2 [1464/3834] and don’t miss the cash register with Coin x5 [1475/3834] and the Silver Ingot [1550/3834] next to it, as well as the Rune and Location of Sunken Supplies Map on display.

Dishonored 2 review

A rich, detailed world, tense stealth and frenetic action. Dishonored 2 has it all.

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Need to know

What is it? A Thief-like immersive sim about magical assassins.
Reviewed On: Windows 10, i5 6600K, 16GB Ram, GTX 1070
Price: $60/£40
Release Date: Out now
Publisher: Bethesda
Developer: Arkane
Multiplayer: None
Link: Official Website
Buy it: Humble Store

The most dismissive thing I can say about Dishonored 2 is that it’s a lot like Dishonored—one of my favourite games of all time. At its worst, it offers a similar experience to its predecessor, which is to say, it offers tens of hours of extraordinary first-person stealth and action. Frequently, Dishonored 2 does more than that. While the moment-to-moment experience is broadly the same, the whole thing is elevated by both small, crucial details and big set-piece missions. Put simply: it’s brilliant.

Set 15 years after the events of the first game, Dishonored 2 follows either Empress Emily Kaldwin or her father, Corvo Attano. Emily is deposed, on the anniversary of her mother’s assassination, after a coup by the Duke of Serkonos. You, as either Emily or Corvo—a choice made at the start of the game—must escape Dunwall and travel to the Southern city of Karnaca, the home of the Duke’s cabal of conspirators. I’m deliberately skipping over a lot of plot, but the upshot is what you’d expect: a hit list of traitors to murder or disable, this time with the goal of taking back the throne.

As in Dishonored, your targets are people of means. They’re protected, and getting to them requires either a lot of sneaking, a lot of stabbing, or a lot of stopping time, possessing the guard who just tried to shoot you, and walking him in front of his own bullet. Emily and Corvo have magical murder powers, granted by the mysterious Outsider—think Star Trek’s Q if he’d grown up listening to My Chemical Romance. Both Emily and Corvo have a different set of abilities, but you won’t be able to fully upgrade them all. Dishonored 2, like all great immersive sims, is about choice and consequence. Where do you go? What do you do? Which eldritch horror do you inflict on that poor, unsuspecting guard?

You can trace Dishonored 2’s lineage back to Looking Glass and Ion Storm, and the design philosophies of games like Thief and Deus Ex. It’s not just that this is a first-person game that lets you choose between sneaking or combat; between lethality or pacifism. The legacy of these early-2000s classics is of worlds that follow consistent rules, allowing you to plan your actions safe in the knowledge that things will either work as they should, or go hilariously wrong for reasons that, in hindsight, make sense.

I’m surprised when a guard is immolated after I shoot him with a sleep dart. But it happens for a reason. In Dishonored 2, certain bottles of alcohol burst into flame when smashed—a trick useful for burning down the nests of Karnaca’s parasitic bloodflies. This is a universal rule that exists outside of the player’s direct involvement—a rule that can trigger when, for instance, a recently tranquilized guard drops their drinking glass onto a bottle. It’s not about realism—this is a game in which one of the main characters has a parkour tentacle—but it works, and feels immersive, because everything has its own defining laws within the fiction. The biggest joy of Dishonored 2 is in discovering these systems, and manipulating them to your own ends. That wouldn’t work if you couldn’t trust in its simulation of the world.

Having played through the game once, and after replaying a couple of sections to try alternate solutions, I trust Dishonored 2’s simulation. It knows what its players will try, and always seems to have an answer. The first time I play the opening mission, I kill my target. Later, a guard announces to his men that their leader is dead. The second time through, I again kill my target, but hide his body in a secret room, locking the door behind me. This time, the guard announces that their leader is missing. With no way to access the room containing his corpse, his fate remains a mystery.

It’s a tiny thing—a single voice line—but it builds that trust. It would make sense for the game to treat dead or alive as a binary state, but Dishonored 2 knows that these details are important. It respects your ingenuity, acknowledging when you’ve done something clever. This is taken to the extreme during a later mission, A Crack In The Slab. I’ll be aggravatingly vague to avoid spoilers, but an act of petty revenge results in a change so far outside of my expectations that I can’t help but marvel. This isn’t an objective, nor even something hinted at by the game’s achievements, but it’s something possible—arguably even obvious—within that mission’s conceit, and the payoff is impressive for something so few people will see.

You can trace Dishonored 2’s lineage back to Looking Glass and Ion Storm, and the design philosophies of games like Thief and Deus Ex.

Abilities, too, have their rules within the world. I played as Emily, whose power set feels tailored for sitting and thinking through the possibilities of your approach. Her best power, Domino, lets you link multiple characters together. What happens to one then happens to them all. Choke out one, and the others fall asleep. Stab one, and the others drop dead. Emily also has a power called Mesmerise, which, when fully upgraded, can hypnotise up to three people, letting you pass by unseen.

The limitation of Mesmerise is that often a room will contain more than three people, and the others will be alerted by the gibberish of their hypnotised friends. But if Mesmerise is an effect applied to a person, then can it be transmitted via Domino? Sure enough, yes. Thanks to this, I’m able to set up great chains of hypnotised guards—strolling through busier rooms without a care.

Another power, Doppelganger, allows Emily to create a clone of herself that distracts guards. It, too, is a physical humanoid entity, and so it, too, can be linked with Domino. That’s bad news for any linked guards that catch up to and shoot it. I love this stuff. While each power has its own, basic use, the implications of the systems create so many possibilities when used in combination.

In addition to powers, Emily and Corvo have a multitude of weapons and tools. Many will be familiar to players of Dishonored, from the pistol and crossbow, to the spring razor mines that shred any enemy unfortunate enough to get near. The crossbow gets a couple of additional bolt types, though, and like many of Dishonored 2’s changes, they’re designed to give more options to non-lethal players. Howling bolts blind and deafen enemies, while stinging bolts cause them to flee in agonising pain. More than ever, Dishonored 2 realises that stealth and non-lethal options aren’t one and the same, and takes steps to provide tools that cater to both methods.

You can kill silently, sneak by undetected, burst into a room and render everyone unconscious, or murder everything in a cacophony of grenades, guns and rat swarms. This is reflected in direct combat, too. Swordplay is no longer a fight to the death. Parry an attack, and you have the option to disable your opponent with a chokehold. It won’t work if you’re surrounded, but there are other options for that and, once again, they aren’t all lethal.

I enjoy stealth, but play stealth games in the most infuriating way—quickloading the moment I’m spotted. Here, though, it turns out I like playing non-lethally. I’m fine with being spotted, as long as everybody is incapacitated with their head still attached and their miscellaneous viscera intact. In one mission I was spotted more than 20 times, the kind of thing that would have made me balk in the original Dishonored. Here, it was a number that reflected some panicked action sequence, a liberal use of sleep darts, and a cool shadow walk power that lets you render a target unconscious with a tendril to the head.

How to pick between Emily and Corvo in Dishonored 2

If Emily has the more manipulative powerset, Corvo is your man for getting into a fight. Possession is a great, broad stealth ability with applications outside of combat, but Windblast is a boon for crowd control, and Devouring Swarm is a literal, lethal swarm of devouring rats. While Corvo’s base powers are the same as those available in the original, each now has multiple upgrade options. Blink—the short-range teleport that is the bread-and-butter of your traversal options—can be upgraded for a longer distance, but also to knockdown enemies if Corvo blinks into them. Far Reach, Emily’s parkour tentacle, functions almost identically, except that its upgrade let you pull enemies towards you, killing or knocking them unconscious in mid air.

What powers you chose to upgrade should be defined by your emerging playstyle. If you want to take out multiple enemies at once, go for Doppelganger’s final upgrade—two clones of Emily who’ll fight alongside her. If you want the time to escape a bad situation, Corvo’s Bend Time can, with its final upgrade, pause the action entirely. Each mission has an objective, and usually a prescribed solution to let you complete it non-lethally, but the route to that point is a systemic sandbox of possibilities. More importantly, those interactions feel good. Swordfighting is basic, but can be enlivened with some creative motion—sprinting, sliding and jumping to maximise a sort of frenetic survivability. Stealth is considered and satisfying, and imbued with the thrill of unpredictability—guards feeling less robotic, thanks to the natural fluidity of their pathing.

Then there’s climbing, which, as in Dishonored, is a delight. It’s a pleasure to leap from balcony to balcony, either using Blink or Far Reach, or putting your trust in the mantling system. Dishonored 2’s environments feel huge, and part of that is how vertical each location can be. Not every building can be explored, but there are enough balconies and rooftops to create winding routes overhead. This is just one of the ways Dishonored 2 distinguishes itself from the recent Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. That game did stealth well, but many of its primary methods of traversal felt less polished, and the levels, while large and open, didn’t have the same sense of scale.

Where Dunwall was a caricature of Victorian London, Karnaca is Southern Europe. It’s bright and sunny, with attractive buildings sprawling across hills overlooking the glistening water. And yet, while in stark contrast with the grey, drab Dunwall, it’s no less dark or grimey. Landing at the docks, your first sight is a long channel of blood, winding down from the fisheries and out to the ocean. Quarantined buildings are covered in sheets, warning people of the deadly bloodfly infestations within. Even the brickwork is stained and grubby. The beauty is a facade. Scratch the surface and you’ll find squalor and suffering.

That’s reflected in the writing, too—one of Dishonored 2’s strongest elements. The world is full of notes and diaries, often referring to characters that appear over multiple missions. There are individual stories of love, heartbreak, triumph and failure, and larger, more detailed explorations of choices and their consequence. There’s a lot to read, if you want to engage with the deeper stories of this world. And if you don’t, there’s lots to loot. I mentioned Dishonored 2’s Thief lineage, but the direct comparison is that much of my was spent poking into draws and cupboards—looking for things to sell. A black market on each level lets you spend this coin, but illicit finance wasn’t the reason. It’s just incredibly satisfying to systematically work through a building, tracking down its valuables.

Even on a higher level, though, the writing feels more nuanced and subtle than in the original game. Things were rarely black or white in Dishonored, but here the motivations often feel more desperate—a sense that the inequalities of this world have forced people into a corner. This also applies to your targets. They’ve done bad things for bad reasons, but the route of their choices is often something more sympathetically tragic.

There are individual stories of love, heartbreak, triumph and failure, and larger, more detailed explorations of choices and their consequence.

While Karnaca has an aesthetic theme, each level offers something new—either visually, thematically, or, in the best cases, systemically. The two standout missions, The Clockwork Mansion and A Crack In The Slab are both fascinating—the former taking stealth exploration and pathfinding to an ingenious extreme; the latter committing the cardinal sin of restricting your abilities, but more than making up for it with a strong central hook applied masterfully in both presentation and execution. Both were shown off in pre-release videos, but I won’t reveal their central mechanics on the off-chance that you avoided such spoilers.

Dishonored 2 is also a story about its protagonists, who here are more than just vessels for the player. In Dishonored, Corvo was ultimately a cypher whose personality was expressed through action. That comes across here, too, but Emily is also a character with a proper story arc. That said, some of the internal dialogue isn’t as revealing as I’d have liked. Often, it’s short statements—sometimes limited to just saying the name of the conspirator whose portrait I’m inspecting. Surely the actions of these characters warrant a bit more introspection? The protagonists often think in broad, crude strokes, at odds with the subtleties of the people around them.

This is one of only a few, minor complaints that I have. (Another being that the new lean system is a bit awkward, requiring that you hold down the Alt-key for fine control, and even then often not working as smoothly as I’d like.) Fortunately, I’ve experienced very few of the launch issues many have been struggling with. The launch version of Dishonored 2 was a mess, with performance problems resulting in low framerates and control issues—even on a GTX 970. The first patch, now available in beta, seems to have eased many of the problems. Performance is generally better, although a few of my colleagues are still experiencing some framerate drops. Even then, the mouse stuttering fixes make it feel much smoother. Dishonored 2 is still demanding—you’ll need a powerful PC to get the most out of it. It’s still not acceptable—even in a world of Steam refunds, it shouldn’t be too much to ask for a game to work on release. A dedicated performance patch is planned for next week, so it seems Arkane is at least working to correct its mistake.

I’m happy it’s being fixed, because Dishonored 2 is a game I want to celebrate. It’s easily as good as its predecessor, and frequently better. As much as I’ve delved into the specifics of each individual system, what makes Dishonored 2 so exceptional is how it’s all connected. The writing sheds light on the world, which sheds light on the systems, which sheds light on the environments and characters. For everything that works in isolation, the real trick is that Dishonored 2 feels unified—a powerful piece of world building where everything happens for a reason.

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Video Walkthrough

Note that I will be doing a whole Video Playthrough of this game, identical to the text here, which you can watch here:

• https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVBHCZXojrJcaZ8livVwMVji0-BdPmT5i

Новинки

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Страна / регион: Украина

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Story:

Dishonored 2 is set 15 years after the Lord Regent has been vanquished and the dreaded Rat Plague has passed into history. An otherworldly usurper has seized Empress Emily Kaldwin’s throne, leaving the fate of the Isles hanging in the balance. As Emily or Corvo, travel beyond the legendary streets of Dunwall to Karnaca, the once-dazzling coastal city that holds the keys to restoring Emily to power. Armed with the Mark of the Outsider and powerful new abilities, track down your enemies and take back what’s rightfully yours.

• The Assassins
  As fully voiced characters, Emily Kaldwin and Corvo Attano now bring their own perspectives and emotional responses to the world and story. Use each character’s set of powers, gadgets and uniquely-tuned weapons in creative ways as you explore the world – whether you fight your way through the city streets or sneak across the rooftops — and which enemies you decide to eliminate or spare.
• Supernatural Powers
  Advanced bonecharm crafting and all-new upgrade trees allow you to customize your powers in vastly different ways. Become a living shadow to silently stalk your targets, link enemies so they share a common fate, or mesmerize your foes and dominate their minds. Choose from nearly infinite combinations of violence, nonlethal combat, powers and weapons to accomplish your objectives.
• Imaginative World
  From the grimy, rat-infested streets of Dunwall to the lush, exotic coasts of a decaying Karnaca, immerse yourself in stylized locales created by Arkane’s premiere art and narrative teams. The world is a character in its own right, rich with story, architecture and eclectic characters. It is also punctuated by signature mission locations, such as the Dust District, ravaged by dust storms and warring factions, and a madman’s mansion made of shifting walls, deadly traps and clockwork soldiers.
• The Void Engine
  Dishonored 2 is beautifully brought to life with the new Void Engine, a leap forward in rendering technology, built from id Tech and highly-customized by Arkane Studios. Designed to support world-class art direction and take full advantage of the powerful hardware this generation has to offer, the Void Engine allows for significant advances to all game systems, including responsive stealth and combat Artificial Intelligence, lighting and graphical rendering, impressively dense urban environments, and story presentation.

© 2016 Bethesda Softworks LLC, a ZeniMax Media company. Developed in association with Arkane Studios. Dishonored, Arkane, Void Engine powered by id Tech, Bethesda, Bethesda Softworks, ZeniMax and related logos are registered trademarks or trademarks of ZeniMax Media Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. All Rights Reserved.

Dishonored 2 Review

Any time I’m given a choice between stealth and action, I go stealth. I love the hold-your-breath tension of hoping a guard didn’t spot you and the hard-earned triumph of executing a perfectly timed plan. Dishonored 2 delivers that sneaky satisfaction, arming you with stealth essentials like hiding bodies, peering through keyholes, and silent takedowns. But it’s also an incredible engine for gleeful chaos, one so engrossing and amusing that I kind of accidentally beat the entire campaign raining hilarious, elaborate death on my enemies.

I kicked people through skylights, blasted them off seaside cliffs, lured them into bottlenecks and watched as my carefully placed shrapnel mine shredded them. At one point, I got murdered badly, so I reloaded a recent quicksave, shot a guard with incendiary bolt, and blew up another four with one grenade when they ran to help. Sadistic? Yes. But also incredibly satisfying from a gameplay standpoint. Moments like that happen frequently in Dishonored 2 because it’s as much a toy box as it is a game. It’s meant to be experimented with. It rewards and even demands creativity.

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Now Playing: Dishonored 2 — Video Review

Gallery

This was true of the first game, and it’s true here as well, mainly because the sequel simply takes the original formula and builds on it. You’ll find more ways to engage enemies without killing them, like nonlethal drop attacks and parries that stun opponents momentarily, allowing you to grab them and choke them out. There are new weapons and gadgets, including crossbow bolts that blind enemies or send them sprinting in a chemical-induced madness. Weapons can be upgraded in new ways, so your starter pistol can eventually be modded into a semi-auto hand cannon with explosive, ricocheting rounds.

And most importantly, there’s an entirely new protagonist with her own set of powers. You can still play as classic hero Corvo and enjoy all his original supernatural abilities like pausing time and possessing rodents, but Empress Emily Kaldwin offers some exciting new choices, most notably Domino: All marked targets suffer the same fate, so knocking one unconscious puts them all out, for example. Emily can also hypnotize enemies with Mesmerize and become a moving shadow with Shadow Walk. She can even mimic Corvo’s signature teleportation ability with Far Reach. Much like the weaponry, the diverse and inventive mechanics inherent in these powers turn the gameplay in a joyful cycle of experimentation and reward. Nearly all can be used in a variety of ways—lethal and nonlethal, straightforward and unconventional—to accommodate whatever strategy you happen to hatch.

Part of what makes the experimentation fun is the fact that your enemies are genuinely threatening, which makes cleverly dispatching them feel that much more empowering. They parry, dodge, flank, kick you away, even throw rocks to keep you off balance, and they never relent. Rather than telegraphing their attacks or waiting patiently for you to strike them, they just come at you, which both gets your adrenaline pumping and makes your one-hit-kill counterattacks feel earned. Even if you ignore your supernatural assassin skills and focus purely on swordplay, Dishonored gives you plenty of options, including sprinting slide tackles and combo-driven executions.

And if you’re a stealth player, enemies are aware enough to present a real challenge, frequently breaking from the «preset pattern» behavior observable in many stealth games. Tricks that might not draw attention in other games get noticed here. Guards remember, for example, that another guard was standing nearby a moment ago. Rather than shrug off the absence, they’ll either investigate or jump straight to sounding the alarm. This definitely creates a bit of a learning curve; you can’t sloppily run and fight everyone and expect to get far. I had to play for a few hours before I really started to understand and enjoy the game—though the payoff for that upfront investment proved substantial.

The experience may be demanding overall, but weirdly, the campaign doesn’t really grow more challenging as you progress. You’d think you’d face new, more intricate scenarios or larger numbers of tougher enemies, but that’s not really the case. Unexpected new enemies types do emerge, but feel underutilized, as they’re limited to certain levels and areas. By the end, I actually felt overpowered because the game never demanded more of me. Messing around with the mechanics is a lot more fun if you’re presented with varied scenarios that force you to be skilled, clever, or creative enough to succeed. Removing the challenge undercuts some of the fun. Dishonored does such a stellar job of consistently adding new gameplay elements, it’s a shame that never culminated in a grand, all-encompassing challenge.

Much like the weaponry, the diverse and inventive mechanics inherent in these powers turn the gameplay in a joyful cycle of experimentation and reward.

The story also doesn’t evolve much over the course of the campaign. The original game opened with a bloody power grab that sent you on a quest for vengeance; the plot here is essentially identical, just with most cryptic occult gibberish. You’re primarily still tracking down and murdering a series of people, and your motivation for the entire ordeal hinges on a single rushed scene at the very beginning of the game. Ultimately, the plotline is fine, but the delivery proves lackluster. Contrary to the gameplay, the storytelling holds your hand, bombarding you with heavy-handed exposition. You character constantly states the obvious in game, then narrates their exact thoughts and feelings over motion comics between missions. I frequently felt like I was just being told stuff rather than living and participating in an active story.

Still, Dishonored’s world is undeniably intriguing thanks mainly to its vaguely steampunk aesthetic and the tangible history hidden in every detail. The characters you encounter are, by and large, interesting and well developed, and the expansive areas you visit feel alive and burst with unique details. Areas are larger than those found in the previous and seem much bigger than they really are—a welcome illusion that makes the world feel more believable. There’s also plenty of side content to uncover in the hub areas, from unearthing backstory to finding the one ultra clever way to break into a fortified black market shop. And of course, you’ll constantly be hunting for hidden runes, a process that takes up just as much (if not more) time as the core gameplay. Some are obvious, some are cleverly hidden, some are excruciatingly frustrating, but you’re forced to find them because they fuel the progression system.

Most impressively, individual missions frequently distinguish themselves by offering a unique gameplay hook. There’s a mission late in the game that involves time manipulation and might be one of the most unforgettable standalone missions in any game ever. It is masterpiece unto itself. There’s also the intricate, mind-bending clockwork mansion, which turns the entire level into a giant Rubik’s cube. And just like before, you can find elaborate, story-driven ways to «eliminate» every major target without actually killing them.

If you use your powers creatively and judiciously, you can be in complete control. It feels exceptionally empowering, especially since when you mess up, you realize your enemies really are smart and powerful enough to kill you quickly. Dishonored 2 might lack challenge in its later levels, but the basic tools are a joy to play with regardless. And with two characters and two basic play styles to choose from—both of which noticeably impact the story and the world as you go—there’s a lot of longevity to be wrung from the campaign. It’s an incredible shame you can’t restart the campaign with all your powers intact once you beat the game, but you can, at least, bring up old saves, adjust the difficulty, and see what unfolds.

Pros

• + Phenomenal sense of place
• + Satisfying supernatural abilities and solutions
• + Gorgeous presentation

• — Many characters don’t get enough time to develop
• — Some brilliant mechanics get constrained to a single level

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Dishonored 2 is subject to what I’ll call the ‘BioShock 2 effect’. Because the first game fired on all cylinders, with a rich, original world, intoxicatingly empowering gameplay, and intricately woven story threads, there’s little room for improvement in the inevitable sequel. And while you’re essentially getting more of the stellar same in this first-person, stealth-action follow-up, it doesn’t sparkle with the sheer newness that made the first one feel so special. Regardless, Dishonored 2 is a fantastic game in its own right, even if it doesn’t revolutionize the fresh ideas put forth by its predecessor. This tale of systematic revenge imbues you with all the tools, tricks, and tactics you need to feel like a super-powered assassin, delivering an immersive power trip no matter how you choose to play.

It’s been 15 years since the events of the first Dishonored, and under Corvo’s guidance, little Emily Kaldwin has grown into a regal but dispassionate Empress. Her boredom is broken by the arrival of Delilah, the supposed sister of Emily’s slain mother who’s come to usurp the throne in Dunwall. At the onset, you’re given a choice between our two protagonists — Corvo or Emily — with the other turned to stone during Delilah’s coup, forcing you to stick with your pick for the remainder of the campaign. Playing the first Dishonored and its substantial DLC is practically a prerequisite here; without the context from Corvo’s undertaking or Daud’s behind-the-scenes perspective, newcomers will probably have no idea what’s going on and miss the full impact of Dishonored 2’s rapid-fire story beats.

Emily and Corvo each have a unique set of supernatural abilities granted to them by the mark of the enigmatic Outsider, but both are equally adept at skulking around, sniping enemies with a miniature crossbow, or clashing with alerted guards in close-quarters sword fights. In terms of traversal, our heroes are pretty much identical — Corvo’s Blink teleportation and the shadowy tendril of Emily’s grapple-like Far Reach function in much the same way — but their other abilities provide plenty of creative ways to elude or eviscerate your adversaries. Some powers (and their clever upgrades) are definitely more satisfying than others, and you may start to rely on your favorite combinations before long, but the sheer number of possibilities they offer is a source of continuous excitement for the next encounter or upgrade.

Best of all, using Void magic to adeptly execute your approach — or quickly adapt when things don’t work out the way you planned — is immensely satisfying, whether you’re rendering a room of guards unconscious, tearing them apart limb from limb, or sneaking past them entirely undetected. You even have the option (complete with Trophy/Achievement incentive) to reject the Outsider’s powers altogether, a unique challenge that highlights melee duels, close-range gunplay, and smart use of your many mechanical contraptions. Once again, the cadence of acquiring new powers is directly correlated to collectibles, which can be satisfying or irritating depending on your patience for seeking out some cryptically hidden trinkets.

In terms of overall refinements, one of the biggest improvements to Dishonored 2’s core combat is the ability to go for a non-lethal knockout after parrying an incoming attack — so pacifist players don’t need to immediately revert to a Quick Save if they wind up alerting a few goons (though perfectionists will definitely appreciate the simple, efficient Quick Save system that’s baked into the pause menu). The non-lethal approach also gets a much-appreciated buff in the form of drop attacks that can end with your prey unconscious rather than dead and/or beheaded. More bloodthirsty assassins should appreciate the return of truly gruesome executions, which look even more painful thanks to Dishonored 2’s spectacular animations.

As in the first game, each level is a self-contained district full of vermin, Victorian architecture, and wide-open vistas moderately populated by civilians and armed guards. Fleeing from Dunwall, you lay low in the balmy, bayside city of Karnaca to devise a plan for taking down Delilah and her conspirators. It’s easy to become transfixed by Karnaca’s sunny climate and seaside views, as you soak up Dishonored 2’s lush visuals that blend the original’s stylized proportions with crisp, palpable textures. The change of steampunk scenery is certainly appreciated, though the layout of Karnaca feels awfully similar to Dunwall, only with mountains, verdure, and favelas in the distance in place of grimy smokestacks and skyscrapers.

Because you typically don’t revisit stages after you’ve eliminated your target, you don’t get a great sense of Karnaca as an interconnected whole — though you also don’t have to deal with the tedium of backtracking. And despite the segmented progression, the sense of atmosphere in Dishonored 2 is just as stunning as the original. Myriad notes and novel excerpts scattered throughout each building, ornate interiors that perfectly play into sneaking along unseen, eavesdropped conversations, the environmental storytelling of objects arranged in little vignettes (like arrows through mannequin heads used as target practice, or exotic taxidermy arranged in manners most bizarre) — it all envelops you like a thick, aromatic smoke of flavorful world-building. You’ll get lightheaded trying to sift through all the little bits of lore and backstory during your first run through, and Karnaca bears revisiting for its ambiance alone, on top of the potential to go for an alternate playstyle.

The plot’s brisk pace doesn’t quite work in Dishonored 2’s favor, because it seems to resolve its most intriguing mysteries and brilliant level mechanics almost immediately after they’re introduced. There’s a constant churn of fresh ideas and ingenious wrinkles which completely shape the levels that contain them, and I won’t spoil their brilliance (any more than the Dishonored 2 promotions already have). But they end up as single-use gimmicks, and never accumulate into some grand, mind-expanding design. Nonetheless, it’s always exciting to see what adaptations you’ll have to make when presented with these complications, as you set out to accomplish your mission in whatever way you see fit.

Morality is mostly a binary choice here: slaying your enemies throws the city in chaos, while showing them mercy (and uncovering some crafty methods for taking them out of the picture) results in a happier ending. Dishonored 2 does try to expand the scope of your decision-making by letting you hear the dark secrets of any NPC with the return of the psychically whispering Heart. It’s certainly a neat touch, but ends up having little significance: as in Watch Dogs, these insights into people’s past wrongdoings are randomized, so they won’t likely sway you from deciding to take or spare their lives. The Heart also provides some fascinating insights into how the villains turned out the way they did — though it feels a bit silly that whole minutes can be spent standing idle in front of an incapacitated antagonist, pumping the Heart for numerous drips of backstory before you really get a sense for who they are.

In the end, any criticisms of Dishonored 2 feel like nitpicks of a thoroughly entertaining, mechanically complex, impressively realized world, just like the first. My primary playthrough as a stealthy, nonviolent Emily clocked in at over 15 hours — and though I sometimes found myself wishing for more character development in the overcrowded story, I was never for a moment bored with the otherworldly abilities of my agile assassin. With the potent possibilities inherent to its gameplay, ample replay value, and mesmerizing environments, Dishonored 2 certainly feels like more of the same — and that’s a very good thing indeed.

This game was reviewed on PS4.

Источники:

https://www.pcgamer.com/dishonored-2-review/&rut=e49c37f68ebce9fb0ca47b98b7a8cc20cfdc767552b9be19505ef7181f9d473f
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishonored_2&rut=ab3148589a3087898f97d6c1cee8a861b353e9491b8c52da121b8a09ac84db0f
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps4/168516-dishonored-2/faqs/74246&rut=f24cbf1374c78ea14bb5531c92faa83e132b906429e6240e9a9dcde193ca4cfa
https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP1003-CUSA03642_00-DISHONORED2NAMER&rut=63acccde69d8511dd6ab43cb6ba092ca2df4c25635cad73f522869aa0e7d578f
https://www.gog.com/en/game/dishonored_2&rut=1c7feb6b6b2ae75b3a981f738d7eefc6205826f8da2ccf19d784c5afcd5388ad
https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dishonored-2-review/1900-6416571/&rut=1610adbec63c08e1fd8a467355083d3d70184a2184abec52f983870a2aca4426
https://www.gamesradar.com/dishonored-2-review/&rut=8f4258bd105fb398336f0d42f181383ecfb0f02effae129bd310b491e1692c20