Soulriders 5.0: Legend of the Unending Games

I got Dishonored as part of a bundle.  Initially, I was really dismissive of Dishonored because it didn't do much for me, and I'm not hugely into stealth games (exception Deus Ex and DE:HR).  Since I got it in a bundle anyway, I decided to give it a shot.

First off, don't let anything else fool you: it's pretty much a Thief clone.  You get more powers, and you're ostensibly an assassin, not just a burglar ... but as Yahtzee notes in his Zero Punctuation, it 'cribs heavily'.  Right down to the end-of-mission total gold value stolen/in the level. 

Now, one thing that I really, really liked about DE:HR, was that it gave you a lot of tools to manage your stealth.  Even before you started investing points in powers, you had a HUD, and the 'cover' mechanic which also worked for gun battles.  Dishonored gives you ... the ability to adjust your FoV from the default 70 up to 110, and a short line-of-sight teleport.

The end result of this is that where DE:HR felt very methodical, and like you had to wait for good opportunities and set up distractions, etc., Dishonored instead has a much more 'active' feel.  You spend a lot more time just jumping into things and going for broke--  Well, also save/reloading constantly.

The game gives you a morality-balanced ending where the 'good' ending is that you don't kill people much, and the 'bad' ending is that you kill pretty much everyone who gets in your way.  Presumably there's a middle ground, but I'm guessing the final ending is determined by the 'chaos' stat, which starts at 'low' and climbs as you kill more people.  I went for the pacifist run first.

Admittedly, much like in DE:HR, my 'pacifist' run was to knock everyone unconscious and hide the bodies somewhere.  In DE:HR this is a chore, and you need to find good places to drag all the guys you've KOed so they're not found by some patrolling guard you missed.  In Dishonored, you can teleport while carrying a guy, not just drag them.  That makes 'hide the body' a slightly less tedious task, but the game does this thing where if you put a bunch of bodies in one area, it despawns them to recover memory.  That makes it difficult to know how many people you've piled up, because the visible count seldom rises over two -- but I'm pretty sure that final level had at least 50 guys in it ... on their island fortress that holds that many guys and has no beds or kitchens (rush job, art direction?  Everything before then was going so well, too...).

There wasn't a whole lot of music that I recall, though a track or two would play once your cover was blown, or alarms were sounded (which I think is pretty standard for stealth games).

The art and setting are nice, mostly.  It's a steampunk world where you live in what's obviously a thinly veiled reference to colonial-era England.  There's a militant religious group called 'overseers' who are entangled in the political structure, so their soldiers sometimes mingle with the casual guard, and for good measure, if the walls that remind you of Half Life 2's Combine aren't enough, they've got soldiers on Strider-like stilts firing explosive arrows at anything vaguely plague-infected or protagonist-shaped.

Opposing the Overseers is a mysterious entity called the 'Outsider', who some locals inexplicably pray to, even though he doesn't seem to be the most helpful guy for most people.  He's the one who gives the protagonist his powers, and actually some of your enemies as well.

Speaking of powers, and despite the 'good' ending requiring pacifism (or at least, not killing everyone you see), the vast majority of powers are combat oriented.  Some of them can have pacifist leanings or uses -- I wasn't really big on 'possession', so the game's most well known gimmick didn't see a lot of use from me.  Bend time was awesome, though -- at level two, time stops, and you can put a bunch of sleep darts in the air simultaneously.  Naturally, three of the four passives are killing/combat oriented, so I only bothered with the one that let you jump higher and move faster.  The loot vision power was handy for seeing through walls, since there wasn't an overhead map, and was also one of the two powers that didn't take more mana than Corvo could regenerate.  Those are the only powers I got, though I finished the game with enough runes to buy more.

Anyway, the gameplay was in general really fun, outside of a few very irritating moments where the context functions didn't work right, so Corvo would go to grab someone and instead menacingly hold up his sword in a guard position ... prompting whoever he was behind to turn around.  I don't know if this game would really work that well on consoles, on that note -- without save/reload, I think it would have to be a slaughterfest.

The story....  The characters weren't all bad, but the story itself really was mostly just kind of there.  It didn't really offer anything surprising, or even especially novel.  There may be more to it if you go the 'bad end' route and kill as many people as possible, but from what I've seen so far ... really underwhelming.

The game is also ultimately pretty short.  One of the criticisms was that 'some of the missions are very short, and aren't much larger than a single house'.  Well ... my thinking is that the game would have been better served with many more of those shorter missions, really.  Because some of them are really long -- most especially just before the end, when you have to cross something like seven maps for one mission.  When you can't find out for certain if you've managed to avoid killing anyone or being detected, or how much of the level's loot you've gotten until the very end, that grates.

On that note, why don't more games give you a better way to monitor things like that if you're trying to do a 'no kill' or 'no detection' run?  Admittedly, it's optional for most games -- but when there are achieves and better endings on the line, at the very least a page in one of the menus where you can check one of those things would be a great feature....

Anyway, I had more fun with it than I expected, but I'd also say that this game is worth about 29.99 at most, not its actual listed price.  Sorry, Dishonored dev team.  Needed a bit more content than you provided.  There is some DLC, but it's effectively trials/courses without (as far as I can tell) any plot beyond a quickly tossed out 'the Outsider thought it would be cool if you could...' premise.  The focus is on leaderboards and time trials, so I didn't even bother looking more closely.

I recently replayed this because it was so short, going for the 'non-pacifist' run.  The game advertises that your associates will regard you differently, based on your behavior, and that if you kill more people, there will be more weepers (plague victims turned into zombies), and rats.  It also says the ending and world would be darker.

The first sign of things being different was killing guards while escaping the prison.  Instead of saying, "the bad guy escaped!" the broadcaster guy goes on about your vile murder of dozens of people.  Okay, game, we're off to a decent start.  Things are feeling different.

Also, running in and just hacking people apart makes a short game way shorter.  Without the need to actually slow down and plan methodically, or save/reload if I blew cover, levels were kind of a blur -- especially once I realized there wasn't much point to bothering with stealth.  I'd gotten the stealth achieve with the pacifist, after all.

So I snuck around and was methodical, striking from the shadows to utilize my 'defeated enemies dissolve into ash when killed from stealth' power.  Then, instead of upgrading it to work even without stealth, I got 'adrenaline' which basically means, "Just chop dudes in half while in combat after a few seconds," because what did I care?  I was going to leave a trail of bodies to find out how much the world changed based on my actions!  The game says it's going to be different, and I want to see how much!

...yeah.


I chose to not slaughter everyone.  If there was an optional mission goal to rescue someone, I did it.  If someone didn't attack or threaten me, I'd leave them alone.  I was going for 'out for vengeance and armed with steel and dark powers' not 'it can bleed, therefore it must die'.

So, toward the end of the first serious mission,

It's just strange to play with the notion that your morality and actions appear to define that of everyone else ... when you're branded a criminal in the prologue.  I'm not really sure what they were going for.  They want to make your actions feel superior?  Say you're justified in killing/not killing so far because these people are terrible/noble?

It was weird.  I can say that much.

So I played on, not yet on the path of, "Screw it, I can just walk in the front door."

Nothing much else seemed different.  Encounters beyond that point didn't seem to be much changed at all.  In two places, groups of refugees were replaced with weepers.  There were more swarms of rats running around, but now I didn't actually care because there were plenty of other targets for them to go after.  It's possible I missed things because I was shooting people in the face and setting off alarms after I'd rewired security systems to vaporize the other guys.

At the base, one NPC didn't give me a key (I just picked her pocket and got to the same area anyway). 

The only real differences in characters were scene.  Now he's doing it because evidently he hates the other dudes too, instead of any particular concern for you.  And then after that, he ferries you to the final level and gives you an incredibly condescending derisive tirade before intentionally blowing your cover by firing a handgun and going off.

I really didn't care.  I mean, instead of acting judgemental, he was just acting crazy.  Why the hell would you even pick up the crazy assassin in the first place?  What's the sense in trying to piss him off, and then announcing your intent to try and screw him over at the last moment?[/spoiler]

Beyond that, one NPC that was spared in the 'good' route is killed, and the final level is more interesting.  Specifically,



There was very slightly more gameplay in the final encounter, which theoretically was a hostage situation, but I found a way around it, so I don't actually know if Emily was ever at legitimate risk and I did the right thing, or it would have looked stupid if I'd been less careful.

So ... the gameplay going the 'kill' route was great, and a lot of the traits and powers are useless except for combat anyway.  But the ending wasn't just 'dark', it was pretty bad.  More fun gameplay, less good ending, and daaaaaamn is it a short game if you tell stealth to GTFO.

Instead of going the Yahtzee route of playing each level twice, I'd really suggest if anyone plans on playing this game, go murder-route first -- or not at all.  Pacifist/stealth route is more rewarding and actually interesting, even if the gameplay isn't as engaging.

Weird way to go.