RETRO – An incredibly unique and beautiful world opens to us in Dishonored, an FPS game from Arcane Studios, which mixes stealth, actin and RPG elements together. If you liked Deus Ex, Thief, Bioshock and Half Life 2, chances are high, that you will just love Dishonored.

Corvo Attano had a wonderful career ahead of him. Being a high ranked noble, the personal bodyguard of the empress, and also a highly skilled spy, it was hard to imagine, that things could go very wrong for him. Yet, they do: the empress is murdered by a mysterious organisation, her daughter is kidnapped and Corvo gets framed for the murder of the empress. However, on the day, when he would be executed, he gets liberated from prison by another organisation and becoming a master assassin, our hero swears to find those who framed him and also to avenge the death of his beloved empress.

Something is rotten in the city

This is how the latest sneaky FPS game from Arcane Studios, Dishonored starts. If you like an extremely detailed, unique world with enormous amount of backstory, than Dishonored is absolutely your kind of game. Its universe mixes steam punk and gothic elements with some Orwellian feeling also added to it. It’s a living, breathing world, with its citizens always chatting, bantering, crying in fear, or laughing.

Sure, there’s little to laugh about in this world, where the pest is getting its victims, and more and more people becomes infected. While talking about the city, the graphics of the game should be mentioned, which are extremely stylish: it feels like a steam punk/fantasy painting became alive. Shame, the textures of the game are rather blurry, and some of the NPC-s have rather wooden movement, otherwise Dishonored would do pretty well in the graphics department as well.

Not just your ordinary assassin…

Since Assassin’s Creed we learned, that today’s assassins are not just the usual sneaking and backstabbing bastards. While Altair and his successors can jump and dive from the tallest buildings and land intact in a haystack, our scary masked assassin has other – even more fantastic – abilities at his disposition. For example Corvo can blink from one place to another – even if it’s fairly far away.

“You can also kill your targets the way you want (poison, blade, or other means) and kill, or spare some other important NPCs.”

His other talents, which are even more amusing, includes possessing the body of an animal (a rat for example), and run through places, where a human couldn’t fit, or they can even stop the time and restart it at his guise. Besides those superhuman talents, which he learns throughout the game, he can also get more and more deadly, and special weapons and other toys, which would make James Bond pale in envy.

The way you want

Not, it’s not a fast food meal advertisement, we meant that you can finish your quests in the way you want, no need to use just one solution. For example, you can choose, which way you use to get to your targets: either jump higher and higher on houses, to avoid guards, or you can just kill them altogether, or, you can possess animals and sneak in their bodies – to just name a few choices.

“It’s a living, breathing world, with its citizens always chatting, bantering, crying in fear, or laughing.”

You can also kill your targets the way you want (poison, blade, or other means) and kill, or spare some other important NPCs. If you kill too many people, the city becomes more sinister, with many zombie-like infected people and rats running around and attacking everybody.

We are honored…

… with this game! Even if it has some slight faults, a few small bugs here and there, and some small graphical problems, it’s still one of the bests Thief-like sneaky action adventure to grace our PS3. It’s also good to see the French Arcane Studios back to make real quality games, after the failed Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. Dishonored is really a game which makes them honor…

-BadSector- (2012)

Publisher: Bethesda Software

Developer: Arkane Studios

Genres: adventure, action

Released: 2012 November