2.5/5 ★ – Jrdotan's review of Dishonored 2.

I went to Dishonored 2 with a skeptical mindset, the first game didnt impress me and while i have seen plenty of opportunities for the setting to shine, more often than not where my mind reached, the game didnt, it was creative bankrupcy and i wasnt that keen on its sheer repetition, however i knew Arkhane and i certainly had faith on their designers, believing they could genuinely build something great using that foundation. When i booted the sequel up the first thing i could notice was the one aspect i knew couldnt disappoint me in any conceivable way, the visuals are STUNNING, the illumination is very natural, the city is very detailed as you can observe even small things such as small cracks on bricks of old houses or rats moving towards an old stablishment to eat junk or pieces of cheese, it is a visual treat and its rare to see anything wrong with the visuals aside from maybe some textures not loading correctly here and there. The sound design isnt far behind with flies being very easy to idenitfy, sounds of footsteps being accurate to the kind of tiles X or Y person walk at and even the sound of blood spilling being extremely organic compared to the real life. The only aspect of the game i think its lacking when it comes to sound is the game's soundtrack which is quite shy on the composition side with very generic use of string instruments in the quite generic "desert-like" kind of songs im quite exhausted of hearing, when its not that, they are just very silent in an almost ambient way that doesnt seem very memorable when it comes to "make the setting come to life", it certainly tries to reinforce an atmosphere to the game, but it fails due to reasons i ought to explain later on. The gameplay mechanics is where most of the praise the game receives is at. Now theres a parry mechanic that makes you able to knock enemies out as well as way more abilities for non-lethal playtroughts, which were lacking in the OG, such as the usage of stun mines for example, this + the huge ammount of powers means that the player now have an GIGANTIC ammount of player agency to the point that this may be the most impressive gameplay mechanics for a game inspired by the older Looking glass IM SIMS. What falls flat a bit in gameplay however, is the level design itself, where theres some levels that are memorable such as the clockwork mansion level and the time travelling one, most levels bland together and ends up being quite repetitive due to a bunch of stuff, for one the architecture of houses suffer from a lot of copy-pasting, the kind you wouldnt expect as much in a shorter title such as this one, it feels like theres only one or two masons in most towns and they certainly arent very keen on experimentation as a LOT of houses have the same stairs followed by 2 or 3 rooms in the right side of it by floor, i havent seen it show up once, twice or 3 times but atleast 10 times during my playtrought, constantly opening the door and seeing that long white stairs going up, my mind would turn on with thoughts coming at me in lightining speed, i could hear a "here we go again" by a mile and at this point i already knew exactly what i would find. Aside from that, i could see they tried to add to enemy variety with wild things like witches and the clockwork soldiers but even tho theres way more enemies, they arent very well distributed between levels, meaning you will at best fight clockwork soldiers in 2 stages for example, while witches are prominent in only one level and hidden in most others (at some few optional locations) and the enemy you will keep fighting and fighting again will be average humans, this is a far cry for the enemy progression in the original thief, in which you went slowly from lowly humans to undead/demonic creatures at a blink of an eye. The one point in which this game fails spectacularly is its writing tho. It takes place after the OG dishonored, Emily, daughter of Corvo (the protagonist of the first game) has everything stolen from her when Dalilah, her step-sister, returns from the dead, usurping the throne and turning either her, or her father into stone. At this point you can choose either Corvo or her to play the game as, You would once again, stumble across the Outsider (which works like a god-like figure in this world) and receive powers, this time going after revenge or just to restore your reign to what originally was. The problems start once you figure that the outsider needs your help this time, but even if he knows a LOT about what is happening, he wont tell you, letting you explore the world for long stretches of time while searching for the location of Delilah and her servants, which not only is outright bad for him, but for the entire kingdom. Common game-design logic will tell you that this happens because theres the need to be a game as much as Lord of the rings could be solved in 4 seconds but there was the need of having a long journey, when it comes to logical thought, this makes the narrative less believable as everything that could have been solved isnt by the singular fact that this is indeed, a game. Its easy to look upon most other elements of the story and notice that this is a very common theme across this title. As you walk upon the dark streets of Karnaca and hear/read the stories of opression and torture that paints the setting as this cruel/horrible nightmare, with people having to go as far as to perform rituals and live within demons to escape the hand of the fucked up empire Dalilah had built. At the same coin, villains will be malevolent cartoons, with long mustaches and often comedically evil ideas, you have everything from the mad scientist archetype which would go as far as to commit mass murder if for the good of science all the way to the evil rich baddie that look down on poor people and would kill anyone just by looking at them in a way they dont like. Its silly and as a result it feels like a game. One that is constantly fighting itself unsure of which tone it should go for. Even the setting is a bit lacking writing wise as we dont even get to know whats the main economic resource when it comes to the production of the whole kingdom? where are the fabrics? where do people cultivate the many fruits that are all over the place? i see a bunch of grapes but no grapevines nor agriculture, meat but almost no animals or herds, density is lacking here, specially if compared to something like Bioshock. To close it, i can say that this isnt a bad game. It has phenomenal gameplay mechanics and they are certainly surprisingly deep to the point it vastly overshadow other games like that with the sheer ammount of things you can do, but everything revolving around the mechanics and technical quality is rather lackluster with the writing being outright bad, which is why the game ends up being a mostly forgettable title like the first one. Something you can play once but wont even recall after a month or two. Rank: - 5/10