Dishonored 2 takes everything that was great about the original, and makes it better. After playing through a mission at a press event in NYC, it’s safe to say it is time to get hyped.
While only given one mission to play through at a recent Dishonored 2 event, that’s all it takes to get you hooked. Without getting into too much spoiler territory, the mission involves you going into this crazy mansion with levers all over the place. Pulling these levers drastically alters every room, causing walls to shift in and out, staircases to disappear and new decorations to pop out of the ground.
While one can take the simpler route of going head-first at the target you must eliminate, it’s possible to duck behind all of the moving panels, letting you slink around unnoticed. It felt reminiscent of those moments in Portal when you get behind the testing chamber walls.
With all these secret passages and moving walls, it’s easy to get lost. Thankfully, that’s kind of a good thing in Dishonored 2. With so much going on, it ensures no two playthroughs will ever be the same.
For example, a coworker and I both got to try the extended demo. After he finished, he came up to my station. Once he saw my screen, he asked “are you playing a different segment?” My route had led me on such a different path, it looked like a different area despite actually being the same demo.
In the demo, I also had the opportunity to try out Emily Kaldwin and some of her new powers. The real highlight is Domino. This ability allows you to link enemies together, and if something happens to one, it happens to them all. This was great for trying to do a low-chaos run, because you could link guards together and put them all to sleep with one sleep dart.
The improved heart also adds a huge layer of depth to Dishonored 2. In the first Dishonored, the heart would tell you secrets about the people in the game, but ultimately these secrets don’t matter. In Dishonored 2 , these secrets reveal information about the people, and your actions have different consequences based on this information.
When pointing the heart at a regular person during the mission, the heart might reveal they kidnapped and murdered someone. Killing this person will not really affect your chaos rating, as they clearly are evil anyway. I once used the heart on a guard, and it revealed that the guard was sneaking food out to feed a hungry, homeless dog. Killing this guard would have much more of an impact, because the guard is a good person just doing her job.
Every NPC is either sympathetic, guilty or murderous. The dialogue the heart gives you will change on playthroughs (the same characters had different lines when my coworker and I compared notes) but their place on the scale stays the same.
As far as gameplay, things are as tight as ever. Controls were pretty much perfect in the original Dishonored, so there’s no major changes to actually slinking around and making kills. The one big addition is you can now peak out over the tops of tables and ledges in addition to being able to poke out from behind corners. Melee combat still feels great and the ranged weapons work just like they did previously.
Combine both the depth of gameplay with the expansiveness of options for completing your mission, and Dishonored 2 is shaping up to be quite the dense experience, requiring multiple playthroughs to be able to experience everything. If the quality from this one mission carries through to the rest of the game, we could be looking at one of the year’s best in Dishonored 2 .
Dishonored 2 releases on PS4, Xbox One and PC on Nov. 11.
So what do you think? Are you excited to try out Dishonored 2 for yourself? Are you interested in playing as Corvo, Emily or playing through once with each character? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
