I picked it up during the summer sale.  Haven’t really put a lot into it yet, or at least it doesn’t feel like I have.  I picked Corvo and I’m up to mission 4 – the clockwork tower.

I really liked the first one.  There was a lot of freedom of movement, and you could approach nearly every mission from multiple angles.  There were only a few “hard walls” that required you to take a different path, and after about half of the game you had all the tools you really needed to move forward.  I played relatively safe, with only a few kills.  Plus the art/style was neat.

Dishonored 2 is different.  The skills are similar enough, two for movement, the rest for attacks.  The teleport/pull skill works well enough, making some portions easier to move through.  The shadow walk skill is less fun, since it changes your view point, slows you down, and enemy suspicion seems inconsistent.  It does allow passing through grates, bypassing some sections, but rarely to any benefit.  The art is still really solid, and the story/characters are better than the first.  Atmosphere-wise, it hits all the right notes.

I am not a fan of the map layouts.  Rather than have multiple paths that meet at certain points, this one feels more like a maze of dead ends.  There are generally less enemies, but there are more locked doors/paths, forcing your hand at specific puzzles.  I would rather entirely avoid the 3 guards than try to distract/stun the bunch and run through in shadow form.  There’s one part in the clockwork mansion where you slip between floors then are given 5 paths to take.  Two were locked, 2 were dead ends, and one was the way forward.  I must have missed something there.  I also seem to spending a very large amount of time in buildings, rather than outside of them.

I also dislike the clockwork robots, since you can’t take them out with stealth moves and they hit like a truck.

Exploratory/stealth games are measured by player failures.  Your ability to recover from a mistake.  I may just be worse at it, but I find myself reloading a lot more here than I ever did in the first game.  I really like trying out new ideas/paths and seeing what happens.  I just find that the timing is off and some places are designed for a single (or minimal) solutions.  It feels as this is a rogue-like game more than an exploration game.

I don’t necessarily regret the purchase, it’s just not what I had envisioned.  I’m sure I’ll end up completing it at some point, but over a larger span of time.