It doesn’t feel like it’s been three years since Dishonored 2 released. This is one of many titles that I ignored entirely thanks to an unwillingness to subsidize a DRM scheme that threatens game preservation, and this one hurt more than the others thanks to how much I enjoyed the first Dishonored and its expansions. Playing Dishonored 2 now, though, I’m realizing that I wasn’t missing out on all that much. This game is aggressively bland. The strange thing is that it’s also incredibly similar to the first game, which leads to the obvious question of whether the series was always this unremarkable. Is it possible that Dishonored was only ever interesting because there were fewer stealth games when the first one came out?

The big additions to the sequel are voice acting—with the voice direction for every line apparently being “a sigh, but with words”—and larger areas. I don’t like these larger areas at all because there’s nothing outside of ammo, upgrades, and items that instantly turn into cash when grabbed to be found. It’s a small amount of content spread over an area too large to be interesting. Everything is cast in a brownish-gray hue, too, to the point where this might as well be a Ubisoft game.

That could be forgiven to a certain degree if the gameplay was interesting, but I’m playing as Emily Kaldwin (you have a choice between her and Corvo, the first game’s protagonist) and her powers are abysmal. She can create shadow tendrils to move around and pull enemies toward her for a nonlethal takedown, for example, but if the tendrils pull them into a wall, they’re dead and it counts as murder. Dishonored 2 has serious issues with what counts as a kill and what’s incidental; deaths don’t count against you if an enemy throws a grenade and blows up other enemies with it, but they do if you start choking someone out in combat and another enemy kills the person you’re holding with a sword slash or gunshot. Half of the challenge of a nonlethal playthrough is figuring out how Dishonored 2 assigns culpability for deaths in different situations.

I’m also encountering clockwork enemies who can’t be stealthily assassinated. Since the combat is jerky and awful, you’re basically forced to be stealthy. I’m sure there will be additional methods of dealing with them when items are more plentiful—or if you spend hours trying to get past the endless locked doors and safe combinations hiding extra runes and bone charms that might help—but I’m just not enjoying myself. Dishonored 2 is a wholly unnecessary sequel that awkwardly shoehorns its way between the first game’s events and its subsequent happy ending to manufacture additional drama while pretending that it has a compelling reason to exist. No such reason exists. This shouldn’t have been made.

Dishonored 2 is boring and unnecessary: Game Pass, part 2 first appeared on Killa Penguin