Dishonored 2 Review

Arkane spent this sequel proving what a level can be. The Clockwork Mansion physically reconfigures its rooms at the pull of a lever, and the intended play is to slip inside the walls and watch the machinery move, which turns a mansion into a puzzle box. A Crack in the Slab hands you a device that shifts you between the same house three decades apart, so smashing a window in the past changes what you can walk through in the present.

Nothing else in the genre approaches that ambition. Emily and Corvo carry entirely different toolkits, and Domino chaining four guards into one takedown is the sort of ability that rewrites a whole approach. Karnaca's sun bleached Mediterranean look is a welcome break from the plague grey of the first game. Against it: the story is functional at best, with a usurper villain who never becomes interesting, and the PC version launched with performance so poor it took two months of patches. The chaos system still nudges players toward a stealth run they might not want.