Dishonored

Last night I finished playing through Dishonored, a game I'd been wanting to play since its release but hadn't got around to until this past week. My verdict on it is that it's an absolute masterstroke. It pretty much perfectly blended together the stealth elements of Thief with the combat/power management of Bioshock, both of which are games I've played and enjoyed.

It was interesting to see that I got a different ending than my wife as I'd largely gone for the 'low chaos' route of trying to not kill people, whereas she'd gone through and had ended up on a 'high chaos' route. Characters reacted differently towards me and apparently even the ending part of the game played out differently for me because I hadn't gone through killing everyone. While good/bad systems have been in games for a while now, it was interesting to see this one play out as I genuinely had no idea that it would have that sort of effect on the game.

The level of choice as to how you played through the game was also impressive. Once you get out of the 'hub' area and off to the area where you're going to carry out your task you pretty much have free reign as to how you go about it. For instance, on the last level my wife opted to sneak as best she could through the front defences, which was problematic due to the number of guards and electric fences that were about, whereas when I attempted the same thing, I snuck my way around to one side and found an outlet pipe that I snuck into, bypassing pretty much all of the fuss. Then, once you reach your target, you get the option to outright kill them, or work out a way to take them out of the picture non-lethally.

There aren't many games I can think of that give you such a level of choice when playing through it, but Dishonored was a welcome change and while I don't feel another game in the series is needed, hopefully this isn't the last we see of this style of gameplay.