PAX PRIME: Dishonored

At times, I feel so uncoordinated. I think I naturally suck at first person games no matter what the title. Not only does the viewpoint of character limit what I can see around me…versus, say a third person perspective. Seeing through the avatars eyes, I can never remember where certain things are mapped and hit the wrong buttons constantly. I’m like twitching, overcompensating, and moving in the wrong directions. I end up an easy mark for invisible people. My aim is shaky as hell. I usual miss targets that are right in front of me, I just simply have a hard time getting the hang of it no matter the amount of time I put into it.

Arkane Studio’s genre defying stealth-adventure-survival horror-first person shooter, ‘Dishonored’ felt different for me. Inspired by 1800’s London, the Steampunk revenge fantasy gives you the pay how you want on how you dispatch your targets. The mission that was set up for us sits partway into the games long list of objectives. A comprehensive skill set was already at our disposal and allowed us to pick and choose the way we could go about it. Would we sneak around and use are detective know how to find the correct target, or raise the alarm and mow down everything in our path. The gameplay was quite a bit more in depth than rotating from victim to victim and button-mashing the trigger. It felt like each level is a mini sandbox, which you can go about, as you will. Each area in the mission I played could be tackled a number of ways, using different combinations of powers, and they’re designed to cater for this. I imagine that an all-guns blazing approach will be harder, but a more thought out assault, using everything at your disposal, will work well. It felt most natural to me to play in a stealthy fashion, but that’s just how I roll.

This is a very interesting new IP and at times it felt similar to, ‘Deus Ex’, dark and fantastical. The atmosphere of it had hints of ‘Bioshock’ but had it’s own visual identity. ‘Dishonored’ launches on October 9th.