2.5/5 ★ – sirreldar's review of Dishonored: Definitive Edition.

Dishonored follows the story of Corvo, a royal guard, who is framed for the assassination of the empress. Throughout the game, the player must make new friends and new enemies in an attempt to clear their name. The player has a plethora of gadgets, weapons, traps, and skills at their disposal for dispatching enemies and traversing the world. The player also would make choices that would affect the world around them in interesting ways. I found Dishonored quite enjoyable, overall. The story was interesting enough, the combat was generally satisfying, and the lore/world building was ample. Unfortunately, I did not find the stealth mechanics very fleshed out or consistent. I feel like Dishonored suffered from many aspects which I generally dislike in stealth games, primarily consistency. Sometimes enemies could be 5 feet in front of you, looking straight at you and unable to see you. Other times, they can hear the smallest sound from down the hallway and come to investigate. Furthermore, once stealth is lost, typically the alarm gets raised and you must fight off half a dozen enemies. Overall, this made most stealth mechanics feel more frustrating than fun, and require a degree of trial and error that became tedious. In retrospect, I wish I had played more combat-centric, and mostly neglected the stealth approaches in the game. The storyline was generally interesting and kept me engaged. However, there were moments during the story where the player would talk with an ethereal character who spoke cryptically. These moments felt important, but unfortunately were mostly lost on me. The esoteric dialog often didn’t make sense to me in the context of the game, and I found it a bit pace-breaking. This character was never fully explained, and probably would have required more lore-collecting (or multiple playthroughs) to fully understand. Which brings me to my final nitpick. Many aspects of the game felt geared toward replayability. While I would generally consider this a perk, I felt like a lot of content was gated behind decision outcomes. While I have no problem restricting more mechanical aspects of a game (e.g. builds, focuses, weapons, armor sets, etc) to subsequent playthroughs, I do not like missing major character development or plot points without replaying the entire game. This is a matter of personal preference, and seems typical during that era of gaming, so I do not consider this a criticism of the game itself. The combat was a lot of fun, and felt very fluid and satisfying, especially considering the game’s age. Weapon upgrades, unlockable traps, and new skills kept the combat feeling fresh and interesting. Again, I wish I had played more focused on combat, because I found it quite fun, but I understood that too much combat would lead to the “bad” ending. Many of the objectives had multiple routes to accomplish them. Secret passages, optional enemy or NPC encounters, or previous decisions all could lead to new and interesting ways to achieve your objectives. I enjoyed this but felt disappointed that I would need to replay the game (or at least the level) to find and try the many various routes. Overall, I had a fun time playing Dishonored. I would definitely recommend it to someone that really enjoys stealth games or enjoys replaying games to find collectables or new content. I would like to replay this game again sometime to experience some of the other content and endings, but I probably won’t. Instead, I may play the second one and focus more on combat, while mostly ignoring the stealth mechanics.