Finished the game in 17 hrs, no kills (well, somehow I killed 2 or 3 people in total despite not really doing it - I guess it was random guards walking into rewired Wall of lights (i did not know that they attack everything before mission 7) or maybe dogs (not sure about it, it seems dogs are not counted as 'kills' and i wasted probably the most of my sleep darts on those beasts). Gameplaywise it's definite improvement over the first part, but it's story and the atmosphere is actually worse. Not sure why, probably it was just a novelty and a treat to play a 3d-game in a Victorian/19th century setting in D1, but this time it was either less coherent (thanks to the start of the game, it's super atrocious) or just less depressive. Sunken district, brothel, boyles' mansion were coherent, interesting places to visit, while there's sort of more 'genericity' in the locations in D2 (except last mission, that was actually sort of weird and even a bit scary). If only they did a construction set or an SDK for 3rd party missions, hopefully there'd be some DLCs like Bridgemore/Knife, but if DXMD serves an example, it's highly unlikely.
Some recollections:
- Dust district (it's actually a great example of how the missions should be done - a lot of ways to do it, including your own brains, lots of branching inside the chosen path(s). It really payed off to wait and listen to get a better path to the objective and decide what to do.
- Castle. A big level, unorthodox enemies, again, several ways to do it, a somewhat unexpected way of dealing with the boss (I'd admit that I spent around 20 mins trying to kill the images but then i started fooling around and noticed what I really had to do and felt smug about it).
- Conservatory/Cyria gardens. Not sure why people thought it was generic, there was a lot of ways to get to the conservatory and several ways to 'solve' the problem (including ignoring the chief witch, I suppose, as I noticed that you can get to the storage without her key)
Well, and Jindoshes lair and Aramis mansion were also really good, although it's hard to explore the latter because of annoying nest keepers and dogs (I'm still not sure if killing them counts as a kill, so I had to either avoid them or waste darts)