Dishonored Review: Thar She BLOWS

I have been playing a lot of Wii U lately and remembered the stack of new games that ended up in a pile due to the yearly deluge of games in November. I had seen a lot of really great reviews for Dishonored and decided to throw it in the 360 and have the blast that was being promised by these reviews. I was immediately impressed by the beauty of the game and the wealth of colors. The art design is a bit cartoony but not to the level of say Borderlands. The game is billed as stealth FPS with a plethora of choices of how to accomplish your missions, but you only get rewarded for the low kill stealth approach.

Dishonored is quick to establish your role as a soldier/ personal guard to the queen named Corvo. You are in a sort of steampunk world that runs off of whale oil rather than steam (so whalepunk?) You are coming back from a secret mission that the amazingly rendered NPCs  tell you went well. You are brought before the queen and go through litany of dialogue which essentially breaks down to establish that Corvo likes the queen,  Corvo likes her daughter the princess, the queen and the princess both like Corvo a lot. This conversation is eventually broken up by an attack of ninja-esque assassins who kill the queen and kidnap the princess and knocking you semi unconscious, awake enough to hear that you are now being setup for the queens murder and the kidnapping. 

You wake up in a prison and have to break out. From here the game takes a huge dip and never really recovers. The prison and proceeding sewers are an extended tutorial, which teaches you how to kill and the basics of your weapons. All of which you are penalized for using through the rest of the game. When you eventually get out of the sewers a boatsman is waiting for you to paddle you to the resistance, a group of NPC quest givers that somehow know of the betrayal perpetrated against you and they want to help.

Everyone knows who Corvo is so they give you a creepy ass mask that is meant to hide your identity. This is all well and good but almost no one else in the game wears masks, so why do you not stand out from the crowd in the mask?  The mask is a mechanic that sets you up with features that are standard for an FPS game (scopes for zooming in for long shots) and you get super powers (more like ok powers that seemed borrowed from Jedi knight barring the lame rat command power) that help you along as well, this is where I feel the game falls apart. To earn abilities you have to spend runes that you find thought the game. A good deal of these are in areas where if you are going for the best "low chaos" ending that it's better to skip them. 

As a bit of an achievement hunter I found it really hard to get achievements as they all revolve around limits. Things like no kills after the tutorial level, or beating the game with only the ability upgrades that you get thru playing the story. The worst offender is to not be discovered. The reason I think it's bad is this is a FPS with no way to change the camera, so there is no way to exit a hallway or door and be 100% sure no one can see you. This game has a high frustration factor and there is no way to play in a way where you're not seen and have fun. Please don't get me wrong I love stealth games having a long love affair with Tenchu and Splinter Cell, but in those games I felt like the game was designed around stealth rather than having the stealth option thrust upon you in a world that was open and rife with people that really needed to be killed. I have seen other games that reward players for a kill free play through but I don't see how being limited is fun. For me the point of gaming is entertainment and escapism, this gets interrupted too often by achievements used as stretch goals rather than enhancing the fun. 

Ultimately I played the game I wanted to play and just killed as I went, slowed time and commanded rats. I had fun, still had to reset here and there, had to listen to and read odd stories about whale oil, but playing this way reduced the game down to between 10-20 even with collecting items. In fact I noticed once I stopped caring about being seen the missions are all quite short.

Honestly I don't feel this game is worth the still $60 price tag on it, maybe wait on it for a lower price or try to rent, it may be something you can beat in one sitting but definitely too short for the cash. In my honest opinion Assassin's Creed 3 is a way better use of your funds.

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Disclosure: This is a non-sponsored review. All product was purchased by me and the purpose of this review is based solely on my own interests. No product or monetary compensation was given to me by said company. 

We did not NintendoLand, NintendoLand-ed on us

I have been gaming literally almost as long as I remember . I remember a Christmas morning waking up and finding a Fivel Mousekawits stuffed animal under the tree and then blank then my dad setting up an Atari in a thunderstorm. I don't have that cool memory of unwrapping the Nintendo that my parents got a few short years later. I do have a memory of my tiny hands plugging the wires into the wall behind what was loosely called an "entertainment center" which consisted of a blocky TV and a VCR that we used to tape movies off of basic cable. I sat mesmerized waiting for my brother's Mario to die so I could have my turn (4 years old and I was able to establish a complicated structure that most non-gamers will ever understand, called "You died, my turn")

I recently purchased the Wii U and let the waves of nostalgia wash over me like I was Dionysus and Link and Mario were wine. I had purchased the Deluxe set which has black finish and comes with a copy of NintendoLand. NintendoLand is a game that at first I had written off as filler, as I was really paying the extra $50 for the quadruple storage space and didn't care too much about whatever else came with it. I soon realized that this was folly. 

NintendoLand, for those of you who haven't seen it yet, is a mini-game collection loosely connected together with an overworld built as an amusement park. There are several different things minigames that are fun and have their own unique art style to them as well. The Legend of Zelda: Battlequest attraction was my instant favorite. The person with the gamepad plays as an archer and if you have others join you they play as swordsmen and you fight varying enemies all the while on a "rail" so forward moment is done for you. The art style of the attraction is that of a patchwork quilt, with different looking materials making up the backgrounds, enemies and clothing. It also seems that you are miniatures due to zippers that run along pathways that in scale are quite large.

The game itself was a blast but it caused something I never thought would ever happen, my wife who hasn't played a video game, under her own volition since Donkey Kong Country (1994) would play the game with me and ask to play! At one point I actually found her looking up strategies and looking for help on IGN. So for me this is the game that saved my marriage (only a slight exaggeration.) 

My second favorite is Balloon Trip Breeze, a game that has you glide along with balloons keeping you afloat, which in turn are kept up by wind, which you control by swiping the stylus on the gamepad. While this sounds complicated it is actually quite easy and takes seconds to learn. The difficulty comes in with obstacles that pop one of your balloons, that when they get to zero you fall and die. There is also the threat of instant death if you go to low and a giant fish pops out of the water below and eats you whole. There are other balloon travelers that are your enemies and you have to pop their balloons before they pop yours. The whole game is a single player affair, and actually does get quite difficult quite fast.   

All in all there are more games that are fun, either alone or with friends, than not. NintendoLand for me is a buy, either separately at $60 of sorta for free with the deluxe Wii U and certainly cheaper than having divorce papers drawn up. 

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Disclosure: This is a non-sponsored review. All product was purchased by me and the purpose of this review is based solely on my own interests. No product or monetary compensation was given to me by said company.