What is it?

1st Person, Open Level, Steampunk, Dark Fantasy, Stealth, Action-Adventure

What’s good?

Incredible freedom of choice for character talents as well as mission completion, you can butcher everyone in sight or you can complete the game without a single kill, you can pick from a host of magical abilities or you can go for the Flesh and Steel trophy by completing the game without a single magical ability, deliciously crafted steampunk locales, superbly fun trophy list, satisfying lethal kills, unique skills and locales.

What’s bad?

No chapter select for trophy cleanup (I believe this has since been patched), oftentimes clunky melee combat that can quickly become rage inducing due to the 1st person camera perspective(especially when fighting on uneven ground), when playing without powers the jumping and navigation is often times enough to make you want to dick punch someone

Released 2016	Arkane Studios	Bethesda Softworks
Completed: 2017-01-08	Completion: 88%	Highest Trophy: Gold+

Full Review

To truly appreciate Dishonored 2 you absolutely need more than one playthrough. This is even more apparent if you happen to be a trophy seeker. The first choice to make is whether to play as Corvo the hero from the first Dishonored game or his daughter Emily. Each has their own set of abilities and separate trophies for completing the game. There is a trophy for completing the game as viciously as possible by killing anyone and everyone you come across. On the other hand there is a trophy for never killing a single foe. There is also the stealth trophy for avoiding detection and for an extra challenge there’s a trophy for beating the game without accepting any magical abilities. On top of that there are the obligatory collectible trophies available for anyone willing to seek them out.

With such a wide array of choices available it is a little daunting to decide which path to pursue. Not knowing if I would enjoy the game enough to complete multiple playthroughs I decided to go for the Flesh and Steel trophy first. It’s essentially the hard mode option which requires never taking any of the magical abilities in the game. I also chose to use Emily, find all the collectibles and kill everyone in sight. If I chose to do a second playthrough I would then choose Corvo, as his abilities are better suited for a stealth approach for the no kills and no alert trophies.

Midway through my initial playthrough I realized I had probably made a mistake. So many of the collectibles are in frustratingly hard to get areas and with none of the traversal abilities granted by magical skills it is fucking infuriating. I wasted so much time trying to search for them all that I probably would have been better off doing a quick third no stealth run with powers.

Traversal wasn’t my only gripe during the initial playthrough either. As I had decided to go balls out vengeful killer, I spent a lot of time in combat and with no powers that meant a lot of swordplay. Although I have to admit the gory kill sequences are some of the most satisfying of any game I have played, yes even more so than those in the new Doom remake, the rest of the sword fighting was pretty annoying. I found if I were on uneven ground, especially on stairs, the parrying didn’t work all that well. To make matters worse the first person perspective made dealing with a mob of assholes surrounding me all that more annoying. I had just finished playing the Return to Arkham games with their parry attack parry attack beat-em-up mechanics and having no joy in Dishonored 2. There were enough health kits scattered about that it wasn’t nearly a game breaker, it was just annoying as shit. I tend to get angrier when I’m playing an amazingly good game as opposed to a shitty game and Dishonored 2 is pretty amazing so every little annoyance seemed magnified. By the end of the first playthrough I was relying heavily on the use of stealth kills, projectiles and environmental traps just to avoid the irritating melee combat. The game offers so many ways to reach objectives or take on your enemies and really offers no hand holding to help you along the way that it’s quite frankly astounding. Trial and error and experimentation are what truly drive the gaming experience.

I felt the story was fairly mediocre and in a lot of ways it just seemed like a retread of the original Dishonored game. At the start of this game some slimy fuck stages a coup to steal the throne from Corvo’s daughter and replace her with some creepy goth bitch who alleges to be the rightful heir to the throne. It turns out the evil broad is Corvo’s dead wife’s sister or in other words she’s Emilys dear auntie that no one knew about for all these years. Either way the rest of the game is your quest to reclaim the throne, dispatch of all the conspirators that had a hand in the coup and rescue the protagonist you opted not to play as.

Aside from a few conversations in between levels there’s not a whole lot of in your face story telling. There’s just enough of a narrative to send you on to the next locale to find an assassination target and that’s all you really need. The world building of Dishonored 2 is a tour of force. The dark and grimy steampunk aesthetic just oozes out of the screen. It never for a moment mattered to me why I was in a certain location or why I was hunting for whatever mcguffin I happened to be after at the moment. All I knew was there was loot to find and people to eviscerate. While searching every nook and cranny for treasure I’d stumble across all kinds of interesting locations, flavour text items and the occasional puzzle to solve. If it weren’t for the trophy hunter in me I definitely would have missed out on a lot of the hidden intricacies built into the world.

After completing the game I definitely needed a break. I went on to beat a different game and when I was done with that buffer game I deciding to attempt playthrough in order to milk a few more trophies out of the game. I had been looking at my trophy list a couple days earlier and noticed I had completed the original Dishonored game on a Flesh and Steel run as well. In both cases I felt like the games were average games that had a lot of good ideas and some interesting mechanics but nothing that really stood out as spectacular. So to be fair I decided I should try this series with powers at least once. I wasn’t sure if I would just do a few levels and quit or if I would be able to go the distance.

Man what a different experience. Not only was I using powers but this time I was going for the complete stealth run. So that meant A no annoying melee combat, B no more losing my mind when the fucker wouldn’t jump across a gap my fat ass could clear in real life and C not rifling through ever fucking desk and cupboard looking for treasure. Basically everything that annoyed the fuck out of me was now removed from the experience. I also used the trophy guide to help with the random level specific trophies and the no kill run. Wow. I was amazed at just how phenomenal the level design is in this game. I knew it was pretty decent after my first run but the sheer volume of possibilities was never quite apparent.

I was able to stealth through missions in no time at all. Traversal was a breeze now that I sort of new the lay of the land. It was so easy I actually ended up collecting most of the runes instead of stealthing through and skipping everything. This allowed me to unlock and upgrade as many powers as I could. So many great abilities are on offer but my favorite has to be the Domino skill. It’s fucking sick. You tag a bunch of guys and whatever happens to one happens to all of them. So if you silently take one of the bunch down with a non lethal attack they all go down. It trivializes many encounters and makes you feel godly. There are other abilities that allow you to teleport, turn into a shadow, possess people, possess rats to crawl through holes that bypass complete areas. It’s a veritable playground of opportunities.

There are three standout levels that I just have to mention, the first of which is the clockwork mansion. The first time I stumbled through the level it just plain annoyed the shit out of me. Essentially it’s a transforming house with levers in almost every room that if you pull them they will alter the layout of the mansion in differing ways. It essentially means the level is one big giant transforming puzzle maze. Navigating through it was fucked. On the second run I was using a trophy guide for not alerting and not killing the assassination target in the mansion. How anyone found their way through that level without ever once engaging the puzzle is mind boggling, not to mention the level designers who created it to begin with. Arkane Studios deserves a lot of praise not only for their stellar world building but also for their level design which is truly top notch.

The second level that amazed me during my second playthrough was Stilton’s Mansion. It’s initially just an old dilapidated mansion but soon you receive a magic mirror that you can use to transport back and forth between the present and the past. It’s sort of like in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past where you keep bouncing between the regular world and the shadow world, or that level in last year’s Titanfall 2 that is fairly similar, it’s just much cooler in Dishonored 2. The mirror also offers a nifty feature that if you hold it up and look through it you can see the alternate timeline. This ability to peer between dimensions is essential for achieving the no kill, no detection run. All in all it’s a really clever implementation of a time worn mechanic combined with some of the best level design to date resulting in a masterwork of game design.

The third level I really enjoyed after my second playthrough is a town right before the clockwork mansion noted above. There are a number of ways to proceed as always but again if not for the trophy hunter in me I would have missed out on so much. There is a giant intricately locked door blocking entry to the clockwork mansion. You are told there are two warring factions controlling the town and if you align yourself with either one of them your new ally should be able to help open the door. As with most everything in this game it turns out there are more than two ways forward. If you are so inclined you could solve a complex logic puzzle given by a cryptic riddle near the door. The solution to the riddle is the combination but the problem is it’s a very complex solution and it’s different for every player. This means there is no online solution to lookup. Alternatively you could kill everyone in town and steal the combination from one of the faction leaders. You could also side with one of the two factions by fulfilling their request to have the other leader delivered to them dead or alive. Finally you could simply decide to stealth around and try to steal the combination. To make matters worse there are three trophies available here; one for solving the riddle and one each for siding with the different factions. I was simply blown away after hunting for all three trophies at just how complex the level design is and how varied the options given to players are. Dishonored 2 is truly a master class on level design.

How does it rate as a...		Other games in that category...
1st person game	A	Fallout 4, Battlefield 1, Far Cry 4
Open level game	A+	The Last of Us, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, Journey
Steampunk game	A++	Dishonored
Dark fantasy game	A+	Deus Ex: Mankiind Divided, Bloodborne, Diablo 3
Stealth game	A+	Metal Gear Solid 5, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided; Dishonored
Action/adventure game	A	The Last of Us, Metal Gear Solid 5, GTA 5, The Witcher 3, Fallout 4

If you are curious to see how I have ranked other PS4 games you can see the full list here: https://steemit.com/gaming/@johnquake/current-gen-game-rankings-ps4

Putting my money where my mouth is here is my personal Dishonored 2 trophy list: https://psnprofiles.com/trophies/5528-dishonored-2/Johnquake

* Note: These ratings are based on my personally rated games as of the time of this posting. Additions and Alterations made to after this date will not be reflected in the written review. For anyone wondering why I include a link to my trophy profile the answer is simple enough, it's an easy way to verify how much of the game I have actually played whereas with most reviews it's unclear if the reviewer had only spent a handful of hours on a game they praise or slam.

The best Dishonored 2 Trophy hunters resource: http://www.playstationtrophies.org/game/dishonored-2/guide/#