For a stealthy FPS that prides itself on the steady accumulation of power and understanding, the game also rarely makes either one feel particularly exhilarating. That’s liberating, but while it’s nice, and hilarious, that kicking enemies into the ocean is such a key part of Deathloop’s gameplay, there isn’t a whole lot that’s interesting about that. It’s worth noting that the main mechanical difference between Deathloop and Dishonored is that you can kill without moral consequence here. Because regardless of how powerful you are, or the guns and superpowers that you acquire across the campaign, the extent to which you’re allowed to come up with your own approach to a problem narrows the more you realize how each Visionary moves throughout their day, the least invasive way to take them out, and what powers will allow you to do it efficiently.īy that point, using one or two of the heavy assault rifles and shotguns that you find to slay your way into a building and get your information may end up being your preferred approach. In particular, a party at one of the Visionaries’ mansions turns into something resembling a super-powered Hitman level as it drags on, encouraging your creativity while also meshing well with the larger task at hand, since you had to find a way to get multiple targets to the party earlier in the day. There are moments where the elements repurposed from Dishonored feel as if they’re working toward advancing something new. In the end, Deathloop suffers from the same design flaw as those other games, in that you’re encouraged to come up with your own approach to every problem, but your player character is so frail for such a long stretch of the campaign that it’s obvious that the correct approach is the quieter one. While an emphasis solely on exploration would’ve been too little to satisfy what this game sets up, the same kind of careful stealth action that defines Prey and Dishonored is also insufficient. While your ultimate goals in the game are intriguingly realized, the tools to achieve them are straight out of the Dishonored playbook. And good luck doing so with Julianna constantly nipping at your heels, and in truly unpredictable ways, as Deathloop’s stroke of genius is how it turns her pervasive threat into a multiplayer option, with players being able to start the game as Julianna and invade other people’s gameplay sessions, Dark Souls-style, hunting Colt down while he’s on assassination duty.īut the online multiplayer’s narrative-interrupting function is more or less where Deathloop’s innovation ends. Rather, it’s the maneuvering that you have to do around Blackreef in order to get the job done with maximum efficiency before the day resets. But it quickly becomes clear, as he listens to conversations in progress, finds odd places to hide, hacks computers, and uses the information at his disposal to confront the Visionaries, that the game’s approach to exploration isn’t so obvious. But even worse is that Julianna is immune to the loop’s repeating cycle, and so she spends her infinite days waiting for Colt to remember exactly why she hates him so much, staving off boredom by occasionally finding new and creative ways to kill him.Īn inferior version of Deathloop might have limited Colt’s options as he goes about picking up clues and listening to audio logs in order to piece together the mystery of why he’s stuck reliving the same day over and over. Worse, though, is that the island is stuck in a time loop, where the day resets either in the evening or after Colt is killed. Our hero, Colt Vahn, wakes up on Blackreef with no memory, but he quickly realizes that everyone else on the Arctic island is trying to kill him, and that the one person willing to talk to him directly is Julianna, who seems to hate Colt with a nuclear fury. But it’s precisely because Deathloop is so surprising in its brio that it may leave you wishing that it had brought just a little more to the table. And the icing on the cake is the perpetually pissed-off main antagonist, Julianna Blake, an awesomely invasive presence throughout and a too-rare example of a well-realized black female playable character. The game doesn’t lack for tipsy gallows humor, and just about every component of it is brimming with personality, from the kitschy late-‘60s aesthetic, to its blaxploitation-inspired protagonist, to the wacky menagerie of mad scientists and amoral lunatics known as the Visionaries that run the ill-fated island of Blackreef. Arkane Studios’s Deathloop brings a considerable measure of liveliness to the by now moth-eaten concept of the time loop.
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