Still reeling from the shock that was Resident Evil 6. I feel you. Maybe a steampunk version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution will cheer you up. No? How about a half-naked princess fighting monsters? Now we’re talking!

Remember. Release dates are quite literally made at the whims of the publisher.  The following are subject to change without any warning.

Releases To Watch For This Week

Dishonored (Xbox 360, PS3)

Sunday October 9, 2012

Tired of simply assassinating your targets? Some games have dabbled with non-violent resolutions, but they usually boil down to rendering enemies unconscious instead of filling them with lead, which if you stop and think about it doesn’t really resolve anything. Can’t you just make them irrelevant some other way? Dishonored may have found way possible way.

In Dishonored, you play as a former bodyguard, Corvo, wrongly accused of assassinating the Empress of Dunwall. Fortunately for Corvo a shadowy group of assassins decide to give you a second chance and recruits him into their ranks with benefits, namely the ability to wield supernatural powers like teleporting short distances, freezing time, and even possessing other beings. One has to wonder the logic behind becoming an assassin when you’re trying to prove that you weren’t one to begin with though.

Corvo will always have multiple ways to achieve his objective. The most boring way usually involve barging in guns blazing slinging offensive powers left and right. A slightly less boring alternative involve sneaking around and removing obstacles strategically without ever setting off the alarms or getting caught. Even this method has started to become stale as well given how many other games pull it off, but Dishonored ups the ante by offering a third alternative specific to every target.

One such target involves a woman at a costume ball. If you talk to enough guests of the party enough, you will come across a man who is in love with her and offers to take her far, far away and never return so long as you don’t stab her or anything of the sort. She would never willingly go on her own, so you’ll still have to get her to him somehow. What happens to her after she’s taken away is left to our imagination.

Dishonored promises to be an open world game, at least to a certain extent. Each mission puts you in a certain segment of Dunwall, but that segment offers a wide variety of secrets and nooks and crannies that has nothing to do with your current objective, or at least not at first. Exploring these beaten paths may lead to alternatives to achieving your objectives or just useful items and ammo like any good open world games.

New IP or not Dishonored caught everyone’s attention from the moment it was revealed with an impressive trailer, and previews after that has been very positive. By all accounts, Dishonored looks well on its way to becoming a great game for 2012.

Honorable Mention

XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Xbox 360, PS3)

Tuesday October 9, 2012
The mere mention of XCOM will either engender absolutely nothing out of you or an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. For the former, congratulations! You’re young. Now get off my lawn before my shotgun makes you. For the latter, the announcement of its revival back in 2010 has brought dread to their hearts because this revival changes it into a First Person Shooter instead of a strategy game like they remembered it. Fortunately for them, Firaxis was also working on the re-imagining of XCOM intoXCOM: Enemy Unknown.

The story doesn’t get any fancier than aliens invading earth. Only the elite military group, XCOM, stands any chance of repelling this invasion. On the small scale, you get to control a group of four to six units into battle. Each battle will be turn based with you directing each individual unit around the map. Unlike most games of this kind though, their movements won’t be confined to some invisible grid. Instead they’ll be able to move just about anywhere you need them to.

On a much larger scale, you’ll spend time in your home base customizing your unit’s loadouts, managing resources, upgrading units, creating new units, and monitoring the entire planet for any alien incursions. At times you’ll have to decide where to confront the aliens when they invade in multiple locations at the same time.

If you get tired of bashing the computer in single player mode, you may want to give the multiplayer mode a shot as well. In this mode, you’ll be able to not only deploy human unit but alien units as well. You’re allotted a certain amount of points to spend on each unit and equipment they bring into battle. Stronger units and equipment cost more points, so do you want to swarm your enemies or hit them with one or two virtual tanks?

With last week’s release of Carrier Command, this marks the second week in a row we see strategy games getting revived and modernized. Given the console space’s lack of compelling games in that department, we could most certainly use more of these kinds of games on the market.