Dishonored: Dunwall City Trials Review

Dishonored was a great stealth game that gave you an arsenal of terrific powers and items, and that’s where the game failed in utlising its potential because it forced you to play stealthily due to the way it was designed. Sure you could go the action way and destroy everything in your path, but it was simply impossible to learn everything on your first playthrough. Maybe you could, but boy, was stealth the more satisfying of the two approaches.

The game set in a dystopian cyberpunk city of Dunwall, oozes charisma and terrific art design, and the latest DLC called Dunwall City Trails gives you a lot of scenarios to master in both normal and expert difficulty. They have a bunch of in-game challenges as well like not utilizing clues when tracking down a vague target, or trying to infiltrate a building and stealing things. The latter was such an amazing mission, and use of stealth in some missions is highly encouraged.

The main thing about the vanilla game that made it such a big success was due to the sheer amount of options it gave you for tackling a mission. You could, for example, kill everyone there is but at the end of the game the ending was something that wasn’t desirable, however, in challenge modes, some of the missions give you a free pass to do whatever you want. That brings out the complete game design of Arkane to the fore and makes the DLC  much more enjoyable than the vanilla game because you don’t have to worry about a bad ending.

There are 10 challenge modes in total, each different with varied objectives, and they are also incredibly diffuclt in the default difficulty, and you cannot use the trial and error method here to learn the placements because it’s randomized. The first mission had randomized clues and target so if you had to do everything cleanly you really have to concentrate and pick the right person to assassinate because otherwise it’s game over or the target escapes if you manage to alert people.

The second mission is about stealing six clockwork eggs which is pretty simple in practice but the mansion you have to inflitrate is multi storied and did I mention I really hate Blink? The power that allows you to teleport from one place to another is something that has really dragged the game down from greatness. It has increased the pacing and killed that tension you normally get in stealth games because of how overpowered it is.

However, the power is utilized well in the game with time-challenges that require you to use them properly to reach your destination fast. I love the mode where you get to kill a lot of enemies as you can slow down time, throw grenades, use all the powers available to you to kill people creatively and swiftly, and that’s where this DLC shines.

It is something that complements the main game well but it should have been included with the main game, because for now I feel they released this a bit too late where people simply don’t care about it. If you are a Dishonored fan, you could buy this, but if I were you I’d rather wait for some content DLC for the single player.

This game was reviewed on the PC.