The new Dishonored trailer serves up a heaping helping of murder most awesome.
Sneaking around is all well and good, but sometimes you have to off a few dudes if you want to get your way. And for all the eavesdropping and peeping and general skulking about that makes Dishonored look so damn hot, it should come as no surprise to anyone that there’s a whole lot of dude-offing in the cards, too.
Fortunately for Corvo, the royal bodyguard-turned-supernatural assassin, he knows a thing or two about such unpleasantness. He’s good with a gun and better with a blade, but what we see in this video are a few of the special tricks he’s got up his sleeve: summoning creatures, bending time, making great leaps across open spaces and even possessing people and animals, all of which ultimately leads to the same grisly outcome: death!
I have to admit that I’m not really sure what’s going on in most of these kills. In the first one, Corvo conjures up a plague of rats and slows time, but then suddenly there’s some whiz-bang stuff, he’s rolling along the floor and then a couple dudes just sort of explode into goo. The slow-mo thing where he stops time, possesses dudes and then moves them in front of their own bullets is kind of cool but not exactly sporting, and those electronic gate things seem a little too easy to rewire for anyone’s good.
Creative murder is always fun and it’s never good to read too much into these things, but I can’t help thinking that our gallant hero looks just a wee bit overpowered in this trailer. After all, one of the things that made Thief, a game Dishonored is often compared to, so great was that the lead character was so grossly underpowered and utterly screwed if he got dragged into any kind of serious trouble. A magical hitman needs to be able to mess people up, obviously, but it won’t be much fun if he’s able to turn everyone he sees into paste just by laying down an inverted fist-pump.
Dishonored comes out on October 9 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.
