Dishonored

Dishonored is a stealth assassination game released in 2012.  The player has the option of assassinating targets as intended or seeking non-violent paths to taking out enemies.  As a big fan of the Thief series, it's impossible for me to avoid comparing Dishonored to my favorite stealth titles.  Dishonored isn't just a fan of Thief; it has several direct references to the games, and to my delight, most of them made me smile.  The game has enough innovations and tricks up its sleeve to be its own experience while maintaining a similarity for fans of its grandfather.  What sets Dishonored apart most is the main character Corvo's magical abilities: teleportation, possession, X-ray vision, time freezing, and more.  Using these abilities to assist in stealth missions is both fun and fitting.

The level design in Dishonored is a strong point.  There are fewer maps than in games like Thief and Metal Gear Solid, but the maps are large and have a lot of variety in ways to approach them.  You can travel through mouse holes to sneak in to rooms through possession, try and steal keys from guards, or scale the ceilings of the buildings and search for openings to rooms.  None of these options feel contrived or out of place, and they reward patient, observant players in addition to those who just want to rush in, guns blazing. Even better, the game seems fun to replay not just to take a darker or lighter route, but to find new paths through each stage.  If I have any complaint about the game's level design it's that enemies are so easy to murder that the difficulty seems stacked against nonviolent players, but since I haven't played the game in every possible way, for all I know it compensates in some way.  On the bright side, I definitely will play it again to find out.

Dishonored's plot is about what you'd expect.  Corvo gets framed for a crime and gets revenge by taking out the conspirators involved while learning about a mysterious plague that has overtaken the country.  Some elements of the story feel by the numbers, but it moves at a good pace, so I never found myself getting tired of politics or strategy sessions.  The game can be finished in under 20 hours with little issue, which is a huge plus to me.  I do think some elements of the world could have been fleshed out better during the game's run time, but I didn't read every book on every shelf so I was probably missing a few things.  Dishonored unfortunately makes the mistake many western games do in having so much pointless junk to read that it starts to dilute the stuff that's actually important.  This design decision bothers me in every game it shows up in.

Overall, I find myself with little to say about this game even though I enjoyed it immensely.  The game does what every stealth game should but many don't: it rewards the player for being stealthy.  The only control issue I had was that choking (the nonlethal take-out method) and blocking (which makes noise and can alert someone you are sneaking up on) are mapped to the same button.  Bizarre.  Dishonored is a fun and engaging stealth title that I highly recommend, and probably one of the better games released in 2012.

8

Ace Attorney 5: Dual Destinies

Writing about this game in too much detail would spoil the story, so I'll be brief.  This is the fifth main game in the Ace Attorney series, and if you've played the first four and enjoyed them, you should check it out.  One of the neater aspects of this game is that you control three different lawyers: Phoenix Wright, Apollo Justice, and newcomer Athena Cykes.  Cykes has the ability to read emotions, which meshes well with Phoenix's ability to tell people are hiding things and Apollo's lie detection.  Of course, the gameplay elements don't matter nearly as much as the story in these games.  All five of the cases are good, though not quite on the level of Ace Attorney 3, and the writers did a great job improving on Apollo Justice's character so it's easy to look past some of the bumpy territory from the previous game.  The game now uses 3D characters instead of the traditional sprites, and they look magnificent.  Phoenix & co. still have their classic poses and everything feels more vibrant and fluid than it did before.  The music, while not on the level of the first game, is pleasant enough and has a good mixture of old and new songs.  Ace Attorney 5 stands up well with the previous games even though things have changed so much in the game's world, and I highly recommend it, but if you haven't played the other games you should start from the beginning.

Of course, this is not to say the game is without weaknesses.  While the stories of the cases are solid (e.g. the "how" of the murders), I do feel like the writers are focusing way more on making an interesting case than they are developing the characters.  I didn't understand the motivation behind several of the murders in the game, and while it was a lot of fun putting all the pieces together (and I was always way ahead of the game characters, sadly) I do wish there were more interesting villains that could be seen as sympathetic or at least motivated by something other than greed like in previous games.  Also, the series seems to be bringing back old characters just as token appearances now, and while it did make me smile to see some familiar faces, there are still some I either wish showed up (Gumshoe, seriously!) or thought felt superfluous. (Pearl over Gumshoe?  Really?)  In all honesty, though, these are nitpicky complaints that didn't affect my enjoyment of the story too badly.  The only truly crippling flaws with the game are the poor localization (tons of spelling errors) and incredibly slow text speed.

I'm looking forward to Ace Attorney 6 if it happens, but I could also see the series ending here without too much harm being done.  Some would argue the series has already been run in to the ground, and I can see their point.  However, I'm happy to have what exists in this series, and at this point I'm so attached to the classic characters that I'd be willing to see whatever story comes next for them.  Ace Attorney 5 just adds more fun stuff to the table.

7.5