Framed for the murder of the Empress of the Isles(Stewart, wise) and presumed responsible for the disappearance of her daughter(Grace Moretz, spoilt. At age 10, that's understandable. The aim to put her on the throne is made questionable by that fact), you, Corvo Attano(seldom speaking and never heard by the player, so little personality that we don't care
the blandness of other characters ensures that's endemic), the bodyguard of both, is thrown in prison. Sprung by The Loyalists, a resistance group, you are tasked to remove the tyrant and the strongest in his government, including the leader of the Overseers(an extreme religious group, because those make easy villains
we never get a sense of threat from the witchcraft they fight, but they sure are fun to use. System Shock 2 and other works by Looking Glass Studios give us far more even core conflicts), his physician, etc.
This has a number of similarities to the Thief series, albeit it gets key aspects very wrong. Guards do not always make noise, much less enough. You're not moving carefully between shadows, you're breaking the line of sight, something that is better done in Commandos 1-3. Why? Because bird's eye view and cone of vision. Too often, you're trying to avoid the enemies increasing the angles at which they can see you, until you luck out and/or give up on that one, even if it looked promising. Still, this offers emergent gameplay: you choose what to do and when, how to get past the, sadly here linear in order, obstacles. Distract by picking up and throwing only glass bottles, cups, fine china
each is thus: one-use, loud, and easy to recognize from afar. In general, you know where to go, especially the direct path, which, of course, may be costly.
Defenses you have to bypass include stilt-walking, armored men known as Tallboys, Arc, (think Tesla Coil!) and Wall, of Light. Each of these run on tanks of processed whale oil, which, if hit with a projectile or just tossed, explodes. Remove it, and they no longer work. Rewire, and it turns against them! When you come upon the first of these, you can also bypass it by going further(at risk of being stopped), or even sneak through a small tunnel, less obvious to see, by possessing an animal, such as a fish. Doing so lets you, yourself, move to a new area and not merely recon it. There are 6 magic powers total(well, active ones. There are 4 passive ones. In the same menu. Ugh), including teleportation, thermal vision(which it seems to expect you to employ liberally), and a Wind Push(not telekinesis, no sir!). Gathering Runes, you can unlock both ranks to them in the field, and get halfway through them all before completion(the low replayability isn't helped by that), so as expensive as they can be, you still don't have to choose much more than the order and they don't have the weight they should, even though you, thankfully, can't undo these choices.
The Chaos system has the plague spread the more violent you play. This is an especially clever and well-integrated use of the classic device: the carrier rats literally feed on the dead. You can summon some, or use ones already present, to hide your victims, heck, the former is an attack! They'll come for you, as well, and being hounded by a pack of rats is tremendously creepy! So is facing the Weepers, humans with their minds gone from the sickness, they come at you Rage-zombie style, grabbing you and vomiting infected blood and saliva onto your face! Did I mention this really likes to disgust you? It gets to be white noise learning about the horrors of life here in the city of Dunwall, with its mix of steampunk and Victorian era, leading to many cool designs and visuals. You can listen to and read notes and excerpts from scientific papers, textbooks, diaries and, among other fiction, romance novels. The volume of lore and backstory, of sheer detail, is impressive.
This does seem to lure you to the worse side
there are too few stealthy options, and especially non-lethal ones. An explosive trap, a grenade, taking down someone by "landing" on them, none of these let you stun. For that, you have to use tranquilizer arrows for the not-entirely-silent, long-range(zoom with your mask, and snipe!) crossbow(which also comes with incendiary and regular ammo), or, much worse, be directly behind someone, and entirely unnoticed. With Splinter Cell: Blacklist coming out, we're reminded, by way of what the franchise masters, of how many options we can get: sleeping gas, shock mines, etc. This draws the eyes towards one of the weaker sides, which is being able to play this as an FPS. There are far less tools there than BioShock, and it just isn't as interesting. That is overall fine, as we have plenty of gold in that genre. And it does warrant mentioning that, if caught, you *can* fight and/or run to safety, and the combat has blocking and different tactics for not only you, also your foes.
The weapons can be upgraded over the course of this, giving something to work towards, albeit ultimately, you can get all(I think) of these in just one go. These include speed, accuracy and the like. The pistol can be made to take several bullets at once, and the carry capacity limit of 10 per ammo type can be expanded. You are almost never made to kill, especially not people, including targets. It would be nice if it let you figure these out on your own, instead of dumping them in your lap. And objectives regarding them to boil down to "eliminate and/or move this person". The settings are fairly varied, exploring the whole city. The cutscenes are purely in-engine, and from the one POV.
There is a lot of brutal, disturbing, gory content in this. I recommend this to fans of this sort of thing. 7/10
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