Deathloop (2021)

I find a lot to love in Deathloop. The discovery of the story piece-by-piece, utilizing upgrades, the slabs and weapons. Even the other players occasionally trespassing on your game (which I eventually turned off as a nuisance).

I did end up annoyed a few times by having to repeat whole days as I was unsure of what to do, or, in the end, failing the last mission - why would it fail if you kill the person you're supposed to, just not when intended?

There were also quite a few mysteries that I ended up not solving, which is great - those are for more hard-core investigators than I.

A brave AAA attempt at an Indie Idea

This is for all intents and purposes a Dishonored standalone expansion. Think what Far Cry Blood Dragon was to Far Cry 3, or what Far Cry Primal was to Far Cry 4. It’s not marketed as such but it really should be.

Let just get into it, Deathloop is a “roguelike” FPS Stealth Repeat’Em Up where you start each morning hung over on a beach and you have to plan your day around traveling to 4 different places at 4 different times of day; Morning, Noon, Afternoon and Evening. In a perfect loop you have to kill 7 important people and break the loop. You won’t break the loop in a while so, at the end of the 4 times of day (or if you die 3 times in one map), you loop back to the beginning, but with more knowledge, passwords and hints noted down for you and objectives track through loops, so you do make constant progress. Now you repeat. Try a map you did first last time in the afternoon and you’ll see things have changed and more hints and clues and objectives can be gathered.

So your mission is to find out as much information as you can by repeating these 4 maps over and over at different times of the day, as things around the maps change quite a bit and the important people move in reaction to what you do. Think of it as a more restricted Hitman game. Or better yet, Dishonored. It’s Dishonored in everything but name and gimmick. The abilities you can steal from the important people are all abilities from the Dishonored games. But now you have modern weapons.

Having just 4 maps might seem lacking, and it is, but we will get to that in a little bit.

Your objective is at first to enter a map and search around for clues as to where the important people are. You eavesdrop on conversations, find notes and audio logs, different buttons here, a lever there, you push and pull on everything to figure out how to get a perfect loop where you are able to kill all 7 in those 4 times of day.

4 maps. 4 maps? Yeah. It’s not great. But they are deceptively large and filled with secrets and lore. At first you might be extremely underwhelmed and bored. They start you with no powers, you start with the lowest grade guns that jam constantly, you start with barely any trinkets to put in your gun (basically bone charms but for each individual gun).

So my first run was boring, a slog, confusing and extremely underwhelming. I was downright bored. But I pushed through and little by little the game grew on me, but dear god the fucking patience you need to get anything out of this game is saintly.

The guns feel nice tho there is an extreme lack of variety. The variety comes in how you can change fire rate and accuracy with trinkets and the more rare weapons have a random or semi-random stat built into the gun. A shotgun with tighter spread, an SMG with a silencer built in, a rifle with exploding bullets etc. they all look the same. There is just one model for each, but they do get different skins so at least it’s something.

The story sure was there. Cut up in 10 second into conversations and audio logs and notes. So, yeah. It’s there. You’ll get somewhat of a story from just playing, but if you wanna know what is actually going on, get ready to play those 4 maps to fucking death and scouring for notes that might just be some guy calling another guy and idiot. It’s weak. Barely there. Extremely interesting concept. Botched in execution.

This was a full price 60 dollar game and it sure as shit does not feel like it. It feels like an experiment done in the Dishonored 2 engine. Which it was. The content is lacking at best. It feels like it should have been 30 dollars. Which it probably is now on sale.

First 2-3 hours were boring as all hell and I want to repeat that. It does not have the variety of kills and freedom that Hitman does. It’s just 4 small dishonored maps, repeated to death. You have to be a special breed of gamer to get something out of this and I’m not sure who I’d recommend it to, if any.

The gameplay is serviceable. It’s fine. It’s there.

So let’s talk about the invasions. Like everything else, it’s there. Randomly through your day, Julianna might spawn into your game and start hunting you down. She puts down a radar that you have to disable to leave the map. If you are online, Julianna will be played by another player, if you are single-player I’m pretty sure it’s a bot. If not I don’t see the point of having an online and single player option.

I personally played offline and the bot was competent at first when you have trash gear, but as time goes on and you get stronger weapons and powers and gear, she becomes trivial.

You can also play as Julianna and invade other people’s game. I tried it, it was somewhat fun, but it served as a distraction more than anything else. Because you still only play on those 4 maps. Over and over.

Listen, I’m boring myself to tears just writing this review and I am extremely unenthusiastic about ever picking the game up again. But.. I did complete it. Twice to get both endings. If you play the game, don’t go for both endings. I won’t spoil it, but when the time comes, DO NOT HESITATE.

The game did something right since I played it for like 53 hours, but I also find myself completing more mediocre games than I do good games, and I think it’s because they either are so formulaic that it’s like eating drywall, so I don’t complete it, or it has something a little special. It takes some risks. They had an idea and they ran with it.

I probably forgot a bunch of stuff that I should mention but these are the things that are left in my brain now after completing it. It tastes like drywall, but every now and then, there is something in there that gives it some life. Though you should probably consider what kind of life lives in drywall.

As a big fan of Arkane this was a massive disappointment, it feels like a step back from their previous releases in almost every way. While neither Dishonored nor Prey were masterpieces in this regard Deathloop is just average. Extremely thin characters, boring paint by numbers plot and a shallow world. This is not helped by how zany and quirky everything is, the game tries painfully hard to be a comedy while being maybe the least funny thing I've ever played.

The game looks okay. It's not great but not terrible. Overall I'd say it's pretty close to Dishonored 2 with slightly better textures but with a significantly less consistent and refined art style. The gunplay is mediocre however becomes extremely repetitive very quickly and it feels rather clunky, the same is true for moving around the environment which is weird given how smooth and dynamic every last action in the Dishonored series felt.

The powers are pretty much just worse and more limited version of what we got in Dishonored. The Loop gimmick is fun and novel exactly once after which it becomes nothing but an annoyance and a chore. The game is also extremely easy, to a point where you don't really have a reason for even doing anything except sneaking past enemies or just killing them.

It also quickly starts to feel more like a mildly tiresome chore where you have to deal with minor annoyances while you run from point A to point B where you have to do massive amounts of backtracking through these small, uninteresting and empty feeling areas. Is it the worst game I've ever played? Definitely not, but at its best it never rises above mediocrity while being outright terrible in other parts.

'Deathloop' masterfully refines and streamlines the first person stealth action gameplay the studio nailed in the Dishonored series while crossing it with some roguelite mechanics. With a new look, setting, and two very strong central characters Arkane fans will feel at home as they dive into this excellent addition to the imsim genre.

The time loop conceit that is central to the game allows for an extreme level of re-playability. While you only have four maps to explore, you can bomb around them each at four different times of day, and the areas have responded to different aspects of the story and changed accordingly. That's 16 maps to master if my math is correct.

Unlike previous Arkane games the loop ensures you can replay the mission and indeed often need to, building out of loop/run progression towards the story's climax with each pass at the map. This aspect reminded me of filling out my computer in 2019's Outer Wilds, which itself was simply storing your revelations so you didn't have to keep a notebook like you might have when playing the perhaps mother of all time loop games, Majora's Mask.

The time loop mechanic also exorcised me of my 'save scumming' habits, which was a very freeing. I really felt myself growing as a person. and gamer. In immersive sims of years past, I would smash my quick save button with borderline abuse, and here they had designed that crutch right out of the game. I instead had to rely on my own wits, and accept my decisions when things went sideways during a mission. The progression layer took the word 'failure' out of my vocabulary.

A version of Fromsoftware's invasion system makes an appearance as a light multiplayer mode that is well integrated in both the gameplay and story and can be left entirely alone if you so choose.

I'm excited to see what this studio does next, and I hope if you're an Arkane fan sitting on the fence about this game, you one day choose to give it a whirl.

When I started Deathloop I was at first overwhelmed by how much information it seemed like I'd have to keep track of. By the end I was kind of wishing the game wouldn't hold my hand quite so much.

As with the Dishonored games, your journey through an individual level is pretty much up to you—you choose which goals to focus on in any given iteration, and how to achieve those goals...up to a point. The main storyline is pretty well locked in though, and while there's some variation in how you go about finding the pieces (I never once had to visit Frank's place, for example), there's only one way to put them together, and you don't even get to figure it out yourself. It just felt a little unsatisfying.

Mechanically, the discovery of new slabs, weapons, trinkets, and upgrades is pretty compelling during the middle section of the game, but if you unlock infusion early on and focus on gathering residuum for a few loops, you very quickly build up a top-tier arsenal with room for only marginal improvements, particularly if you play how I do. While the game clearly wants you to be thinking about your loadout each time you go out, I just equipped my favorite weapon for each ammo type with generic trinkets that play to their strengths, equipped character trinkets that boost health, power, and hacking, and maybe occasionally switched out a slab here and there if I knew Shift or Aether would be particularly helpful (at the end I was just using Nexus and Fugue and barely had to do anything at all, though admittedly neither of those are particularly useful against Julianna, which I found out when I almost got looped on the night phase of my end-run before I even got to the party). All of which is to say you can definitely have a lot more fun messing around with loadouts than I did, which will probably also end up encouraging you to do more side-quests than I did.

Speaking of which, while I did enjoy the way you kind of stumble onto side-quests with very little nudging from the game (other than environmental clues, and let me just say here that the level design is, unsurprisingly, really good), I often just didn't feel like it was worth the hassle to pursue them, especially after a few less-than-stellar rewards for going out of my way (the plane in Karl's Bay was particularly disappointing, especially since I figured out how to get there on my own without even reading the note). In the end it just didn't feel like a good use of my time unless it happened to synchronize with a main story lead.

Which brings us to the end of the game. I liked it. It was fine. I'm glad I finished the game 2 days after the "Goldenloop" update which apparently added the extended ending. But I never really felt invested in the world enough to care all that much, which is ultimately, I think, what made it a good game but not a great game.

Still, it's the kind of game where you get out what you put in to some extent, so I could see people with a little more patience or more interest in messing with the loadout having a much better time with it.

p.s. Shift didn't feel like it worked as well as the similar powers in Dishonored, which was weird.

p.p.s. Getting the wolf mask just seems like such a hassle, why would anyone ever do that? I guess if you can infuse it then maybe.

p.p.p.s. Same with the residuum experiment in The Complex. Why would you go through all that trouble to get one trinket when by the end of the game you're drowning in trinkets? If it were a unique trinket, sure, but I don't know if there even are any unique trinkets. I was getting duplicates of gold trinkets by the end, and not even from Visionaries.

I really like how this game starts, and with the way that they have the island and time segmented out. It's really cool how they integrate multiplayer into a single player game as well. It's got a lot of cool stuff going for it.

Unfortunately it has some major problems. A lot of the little side puzzles which can often times be quite grueling often offer rewards that are not really worth the effort it took to solve them. I want some cool lore, or at least some cool loot, but that is very rarely what you get. In some cases you get nothing at all.

And at the end of the game you're left wanting. You have all this tension built up because you want to learn more about what is happening and you just never do. There are lots of hints at a story, at multiple stories really, but none of them ever come together. It's really bizarre.

Arkane Studios took what has worked in their previous games and improved on everything, most notably the story. Deathloop has you reliving the same day over and over with your character remembering intel, shortcuts, etc from prior days. Your goal is to assassinate 8 targets within a single day/loop, while a rival assassin tries to stop you. As you dig around for clues in this mysterious island, you learn information that makes your job easier. You can acquire "slabs" which give you special abilities, opening up freedom of play style and adding replay value to experiment with your loadout.

The controls work very well, the story is engaging throughout, and the experimentation with the weapons and abilities made this the most fun I've had in a game in a while!

Wow, did this game not live up to the hype. It's still good, but all those 10s made me expect something better. The game is mostly like Dishonored if it leaned more into being a first-person shooter which sadly means that this is a lesser version of Dishonored.

Arkane is not good at making shooters. The movement and aiming is awkward. It feels like the hit-detection is off. I mainly stuck to using a shotgun because that was my best chance of action hitting my target. It worked nicely for me though as I could modify it for accuracy, range, and faster reload speed. Towards the end of the game, I got a silenced pistol that was good for stealth headshots. That's all the weapons I needed. I also stuck to the same two abilities of shift (teleportation like in Dishonored) and nexus (linking nearby enemies together so killing one kills them all). These were the first two abilities I got, and I didn't need to bother with any of the others which is a bit disappointing.

The whole loop concept didn't do much for me. It's just adding a time of day requirement on the standard type of objectives you would get in a game like this. "Visit this building in the morning to set something up, and return to it later at a different time of day" type of stuff. If I screw up, I have to reset the day and start all over again. I mostly didn't have trouble completing objectives, so I didn't have to reset the day to try again too often. There is one objective that required me to restart the day multiple times to complete not because I screwed anything up but because it was written that way. That was actually annoying because I required me to kill the same enemies over and over again to power up some generators to flip a switch on a control panel.

Thankfully, the whole experience is guided. I'm not a fan of being left to my own devices to figure out where to go and what to do in video games. The game seemed like it was going to be aimless and a roguelike at first, but it's not that. I always had an objective to complete which set a waypoint on my map clearly marking where I needed to go. That's probably going to be a turnoff for some people, but that made this experience bearable for me.

Deathloop is not Arkane’s best work. However, it definitely gives some compelling gameplay. The weapons feel good, the powers are fun especially with upgrades. The sound design is awesome and the graphics are not the best. The premise of the game with discovering what’s going with the island, visionaries, and yourself was awesome. The multiplayer was fun because it made the run a lot more intense making it a requirement to beat a “human player” before you can beat the game for real. So I thought that was cool. However, that ending… that ending. That ending really left a bad taste in my mouth. Leaving with more questions than answers. And there’s no secret ending either so it makes it worse.

Overall, deathloop is an… experience to say the least. Great gameplay, great world/level design, great sound design, okay graphics, and a terrible ending. Play the game.

I followed this game since it was announced and got more and more excited as I saw the trailers and gameplay. I have to admit, I was a little on the fence all the up to release as I didn't know how involved it would be (I'm not a huge fan of having to collect/build things).

I got it on release day and dove in. The first thing I noticed was that you couldn't just pop in and out of this game and play it for 15 minutes at a time. You're gonna need 30-45 min at least per sitting (at least I did).

I was also afraid it was going to become too repetitive as you had to start over each time you get killed, but they quickly figured out how to skip over that once they have made their point about the loop.

The first few hours, I was still on the fence as I thought the world was going to be too big and there were too many things to accomplish. But then something clicked. And it just became, well, fun. Like, a LOT of fun. The leads, the different parts of each board to explore - and the voice acting! It's both hilarious and compelling.

I got to the point to where I couldn't wait to complete the next lead and see what was next. It was still challenging enough that I would get looped and it was so fun to be so very careful and sneak around in the beginning and then getting comfortable enough (with the slabs) to where I could go in guns blazing.

I have to admit, I did kill all the Visionaries in one day and nothing happened - but it was because I didn't complete the Julianna leads. Once I fixed that, I went back and did it again - and it was just as fun and compelling.

The weapons were different enough that each served their purpose (my go-tos were the Spiker, Trencher (shot gun) and Pepper Mill) and the SLABS! So much fun to play around with each, but my go-tos were Skip and Nexus. To be able to link a room full of baddies together and then take them all out with one headshot - so fun!! (And handy.)

The ending was okay (TBH I still don't totally understand it), but I know they had to wrap it up somehow.

Easily one of my Top 10 games of all time. Love the stylized look - wasn't cartoony but also they didn't try to make it look real. It's one of those games where I was getting sad towards the end because I knew it was going to be over. It's also one of those games I wish I could forget so I can play it again!

I don't know if there will be a follow-up, but I very much hope so. Again, this game is DIFFERENT and innovative in the concept and execution. Well done!