Have you noticed that no Triple A console release is complete these days without its own little smartphone or social marketing game? Mass Effect 3, Assassin’s Creed and Resistance 3 all have Facebook tie-ins, while Kinect Star Wars had a handy iPhone and Android apps that turned your Twitter feed into a Star Wars-style text crawl. Sometimes they actually serve a useful purpose – like Fable Golf, which let you earn gold which could be spent in Fable 3. But sometimes they’re rather silly promotional pranks. Unsurprisingly, given the title, Dishonored: Rat Assassin squeaks into the matter category.
It is Fruit Ninja with rats – that’s all you need to know. The naughty rodents pop out of the gutter and you cleave them in half with your sword. The game does at least reference a key theme of the game – the fictional city of Dunwall, where Arkane’s steampunk stealth adventure takes place, is in the midst of a rat plague. In the main version of the game, these beasties are pretty useful – if you have the correct special power, you can call on them to scare off or covert the attention of pesky guards. You can also possess them to access difficult-to-reach areas. Here, you just slice them up.
Anyway, if you were looking for some rat dismembering action this weekend, this is a safer and more humane way of going about it than wading through a sewer with a torch and large kitchen knife.
