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Dishonored. I...
*deep breath* I really wanted to like you. Given the developmental
antecedence of the studio that spawned thee, there is absolutely no reason why I should
not want to wile away the wee morning hours fondling every clammy crevice of your venerated
no-no places. Yet the combination of well-meaning design choices that were ultimately calamitous,
a story that makes even the most 'furverted' Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic fever dream sound
like Tennyson, and some of the most repugnant, derivative art design you will...
EVER have the misfortune to behold, have somehow congealed to unceremoniously suck this game's
potential dryer than Bob Newhart's memoirs. To clarify, this game is eminently playable.
Even outright fun. Given only a fleeting glance, it seemed to have all the makings of an instant
classic. But, alas, the first cracks in the facade
materialize in the form of one of the least compelling video game narratives I am... ever
likely to be subjected to! Dishonored... is a standard revenge tale. And a standard revenge
tale - absent a compelling narrative - outright requires the presence of a magnetic, innately
appealing protagonist. Which makes the immutable fact that Corvo has all the appeal of a school
bus fire all the more egregious. Corvo is a human piece of flotsam, adrift in an ocean
of fictitious mediocrity, lingering for pondersome intervals for no other reason than to fall
victim to yet another painfully uninspired plot point. And - like everyone else in this
game - he also happens to be uglier than Quasimodo... 's retarded cousin... 's herniated ***.
Earth to the art designer: You may have been shooting for the love child of Garrett and
Altair, but between the hood, the mask and the Yngwie Malmsteen jacket, what you wound
up with... was Hobo Skeletor. And don't disregard a criticism of the game's
story as immaterial, either! Unlike shooters, RTS games, and the entirety of Infinity Ward's
output... story is central to the success of a given stealth game. If a stealth game
fails to immerse the player... then it already fellates festering fields of feculent phallus.
ALLITERATION! You see, stealth thrives on tension. Tension thrives on a sense of menace.
'Menace' is a byproduct of an imposing game world. And the game world is inevitably castrated
if its central story is inane and forgettable. As Corvo, you phone your way through mission
after mission, murdering or sparing complete *** strangers you've yet to be provided
with a sufficient reason to give a *** about, continually anticipating an original storyline
twist that just... never arrives. In so doing, Arkane have inadvertently reduced the impact
of Dishonored's already immensely flawed core stealth gameplay!
Gameplay which suffers mightily, by the way, from the absence of a viable stealth feedback
system. My overpowering distaste for Metal Gear Solid notwithstanding, at least Solid
Snake's radar offers relevant information regarding the noise level and visibility of
the player without simultaneously turning them into a supreme *** demigod! Dishonored
wants to be a modern successor to Thief... but Arkane Studios, the developmental Mr.
Magoo, sadly lacks the competence and vision to fashion an audio engine robust enough to
make subversion a viable alternative, without resorting to the outlandishly overpowered
x-ray vision upgrade! Without the vision upgrade, you're the son of Helen Keller and with it,
you're the son of God! Which, once again, might have been ameliorated, had the designers
not held fast to their fanatical 'first-person ONLY' premise like Jim Sterling clinging to
the final bearclaw in the dozen. It's a considerably less Herculean task to
disguise your bowling-shoe ugly graphics engine when these amateurish animations, last-gen
textures that have more pop-in problems than a defective *** appliqué, and Fable-***-Disney
art style aren't, thanks to glorious first-person perspective, in a perpetual state of being
shoved in your floating, disembodied face! I recognize that everyone's got to go their
own way on this issue, but with no due respect, the outright myth that first-person perspective
is inherently 'more immersive' needs to take a seat beside the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus
and Obamacare in the waiting room of prevaricating purgatory.
To say nothing of the fact that it's outright dogshit that Corvo's face is plastered all
over every Dishonored ad, poster and promotional item, yet for some reason when the actual
*** game starts, he skips town like he's dodging alimony!
Further, It feels as if Arkane Studios are so busily engaged in their perpetual narcissistic
***, tossing their own salad for fashioning open-ended levels with innumerable methods
of infil-and-exfiltration that they wound up supporting only two styles of core stealth
gameplay: You can either play as Corvo, which inevitably
entails crouching behind riot shields so conveniently placed it makes the opprobrius chest-high
walls of Gears of War look like permanent scenic fixtures by comparison. Cranking your
sound effects to 11 on the remote chance that you may, in fact, hear a human footstep at
five feet's *** remove, leaning further to the left than Harvey Smith's Twitter feed,
and praying to the Nine Divines for a *** light gem, because there's no practical method
of determining how hidden you actually are! Or conversely, you can play as Hobo Skeletor!
The omnipotent engine of death who can peer through walls, stop time and launch ***
tornados at will! The unkempt übermensch that can teleport directly above you and slam
his goofy retractable plastic sword into your epiglottis and dispose of the corpse by summoning
an ashen quintet of starving rodents. Which he will then possess in order to flee the
*** scene, presumably while on a lunch break from his day job of kickboxing with
bengal *** tigers! And here's the thing: Exactly one of those
playstyles is actually ***' fun! 90% of the game's intended audience want to play
as Corvo, only to find the game's flawed mechanics accomodate playing as Hobo Skeletor exclusively!
If lead designer Harvey Smith's name instills even the faintest sense of deja vu, it's because
this man has worked on Looking Glass and Ion Storm masterpieces such as System Shock and
the original Deus Ex. However, the man has more baggage than Mary Poppins, in that he
also worked for Ion Storm during the development of Deus Ex: Invisible War and Thief: Deadly
Shadows... both of which, he has on numerous occasions expressed considerable disdain for.
And if that's the case... then Dishonored is the most frenzied overreaction to his displeasure
with both of those titles. In an effort to assuage the sense of increased linearity in
the former... he has unintentionally given rise to Dishonored's wafer-thin, bromidic
narrative. In an attempt to mitigate the former's shoebox-sized levels, he's instead fashioned
morbidly obese, multifarious missions completely devoid of dramatic context. The immensity
of the levels in Thief and Deus Ex works precisely because both those games have such enthralling
stories. A massive level awash in playstyle options yet devoid of a compelling story...
is an empty sandbox! Grand Theft Auto is fun to *** around with for an hour... but it's
the brilliant storytelling that keeps Vice City discs spinning in PS2s across the world
to this very *** day. The disparity between what we were promised
and what arrived on store shelves is as wide as Harvey Smith's mind is narrow. And equally
as self-deceived. Arkane told us to expect a compelling balance of otherworldly powers
and practical real-world stealth. Then we booted up the game to discover that Corvo's
powers are more unbalanced than Mike Tyson with a collapsed eustachian tube.
In synopsis, I would have to reluctantly convey upon Dishonored the dubious distinction of
being a 'playable disappointment'. It doesn't blow every *** in a 5-block radius, but what
I bore horrified witness to while playing this game was Victor Antonov, the art designer
on Half-Life... generating some of the most irksome, uninspired designs of his entire
career... and Harvey Smith of Deus Ex fame positively languishing in mediocrity. Set
against the doldrums of modern development, it's an amusing, but ultimately faulty, release.
It's only when Dishonored takes its rightful place in the long shadow cast by its predecessors
that this game at last emerges as the unmitigated disappointment that it truly is. I won't incite
you to outright avoidance, as this game is, at least, very much playable. But if the gaming
press were spinning any harder in this game's favor, they'd have to assign IGN its own hurricane
name. Rent if you must, but temper your enthusiasm,
rageaholics. And if you have occasion on Twitter, inform Harvey Smith that he's an inflamed
***. I'm RazörFist. God - ***' - speed!