Oh waiter, more Deathloop trailers please!

Deathloop has a good idea on paper and it's sub-optimally executed. The looping days, gathering more info, and generally listening to Colt and Julianna bicker is the most enjoyable aspects of this game. The game is sort of built like Dishonored and you can play it as such; however you can play it like it's not Dishonored. Playing it like an action game quickly shows that it was not designed to be played like one. The AI is bad and dumb, they swarm you or don't realize 3 allies have died. The game is packed full of bugs that range from inconvenient to crashing so often I stopped playing for a year.

I was excited for this game because it's Arkane Studios. After playing Deathloop and seeing the disaster that was Redfall, I just want the Arkane that made Dishonored and Prey again...

"DEATHLOOP" is to Dishonored what Prey: Mooncrash is to Prey. Like Dishonored, "DEATHLOOP" levels are discrete sections that are patrolled by mostly the same enemies that don't provide much resistance if you're willing to sneak and kill quietly. The slabs worth using in "DEATHLOOP" are ripped directly from Dishonored. Further, in both games, each level is typically centered around finding one person and taking them out. I don't love the style of gameplay that Dishonored primarily offers. Nothing prevents me from savescuming my way through encounters to get the perfect run I am after. In Dishonored, overt combat is not fun, so anytime I broke stealth I'd just reset. Some people love this; I don't.

I prefer Prey over Dishonored because there are so many more creative or satisfying ways of dealing with enemies. This is due to many factors, one being the increased enemy variety means they have different weaknesses to exploit. More generally, the mechanics and environments lend themselves better to creative expression. If stealth breaks or if I don't want to be stealthy, I have options to make it through the section in a satisfying way.

I won't go further on base Prey, but what Arkane did with Mooncrash is mix in roguelike elements and different characters to encourage different playstyles even further. The potential upside of bringing this to a Dishonored style game is that it could do the same, making each attempt at a level fresh and encouraging creative gameplay. Unfortunately, Dishonored/"DEATHLOOP" really does not have the depth of gameplay where vastly different playstyles are fun to explore. Further, the permanent progression in "DEATHLOOP" meant that I never had to change my loadout once I had played for a few hours. Because the game uses a soulslike XP/progression system, where the currency you use to upgrade (residuum) is lost upon death, the rewards for progression needed to be meaty for the player to feel any stress around death like a true soulslike. This is a way in which "DEATHLOOP" uses a trendy mechanic that doesn't really mesh well with the rest of the game.

Another mechanic lifted straight from souls is invasion. I do feel this works much better as a way to spice up the otherwise repetitive levels, but this only worked for a few key hours in the middle of the game where I wanted to keep residuum for upgrades. Once my loadout was already overpowered, I didn't really care if Julianna invaded because I was just trying to finish the visionary quests which mostly didn't require you to get back to the tunnels alive; it was sufficient to make it to the quest marker and read whatever clue the game wanted me to. After that, Julianna could kill me and it didn't hamper my progress. The game suffers from lack of difficulty after the first few hours because progression is only player sided--the game never does anything to ramp up the difficulty of the levels you explore. In some ways, this game feels like "game-awards-bait" because it is easy enough for game critics to enjoy and it is littered with popular mechanics that game critics love to talk about because some asshole wrote a video essay on it. I've listed a few below:
-Demon's Souls style invasion.
-Demon's Souls style XP drop on death that you need to physically go pick up.
-Demon's Souls diagetic death and progression.
-Main character can't remember anything like Disco Elysium. ("ludonarrative resonance" lol)
-Roguelike with meta progression like Hades / Rogue legacy.
-Timeloops like Outer Wilds.
The problem is that every game example I've listed here uses the particular mechanic/design choice far better than "DEATHLOOP".

This review is quite negative so far; why is my score not lower? First, the conceit of looping over the same day does work fairly well with a Dishonored style game. Most importantly, it removes savescumming and, in the early hours, did encourage experimentation. Further, the visual style, the sound design, the music, and the voice acting is all superb. I think the writing could have been fleshed out a bit more but I like the world and the characters are interesting and distinct. It is really a shame that the artists, sound designers, and voice cast do not have their work attached to a better game. Also, I do feel that in some ways this game is charmingly ambitious. It is certainly much more risky in terms of it's mechanics than most high budget projects sheerly for the breadth of what they tried to do. I appreciate that, and I did somewhat enjoy my time with the game. It's a shame it wasn't more.

Deathloop is a spiritual sequel to the Dishonored games, but set in a semi-sci-fi 1970s-style setting. It received mixed reviews, which made me really want to like the game. It also has a very strong start; within the first few hours, I was sure that this was going to be my newest addiction and that I was going to blaze through the game as fast as I could. But after the initial tutorial levels, poor large-scale design decisions, weak combat, and overall lack of polish turned this game into a slog.

Groundhog Daze

The titular loop is an in-game phenomena whereby time resets at the end of each day, like Majora's Mask or Groundhog Day. In terms of the story, this is a really cool idea. I was immediately intrigued by the loop--why does it exist? What is its purpose? Why does Colt want to break it? Why are all these people on the island trying to protect it?
Unfortunately, the loop is not only a narrative conceit, but also a gameplay mechanic. The game is divided up into four time sections (morning, noon, afternoon, and night) and four areas. You can visit one area per time of day, and the areas have different features at different times (much like Majora's Mask). Once you get to the end of the day, the loop resets and you start back at the beginning. In essence, the game is trying to be a roguelike, but unfortunately, it makes several key design mistakes.
In most roguelike games, levels are procedurally generated so that each "run" is different. This is what gives the game replay value. In Deathloop, however, levels are handcrafted rather than procedurally generated. Instead of running through a set of "randomized" levels as far as you can until dying, you instead proceed through a series of Dishonored-type levels until you reach the objective or die.
Dying becomes frustrating because the default settings give you two respawns before you get "looped." Once you are looped, you go back not just to the very beginning of the level, but to the menu screen where you select levels. So if you die during a level, you now have to go through an extra screen just to get back to the very beginning of the level rather than reloading at a checkpoint within the level.
Getting looped becomes even more frustrating due to the gear system. Roguelikes generally have two ways of handling gear. In "traditional" roguelikes, all gear is lost between runs. In a game like Brogue, for example, you start with random gear and end up with more random gear in the dungeon. Gear is meant to be expendable and easily replaceable; in fact, part of the fun of the game is finding new gear in the dungeon and replacing old gear. On the other hand, "rogue-lites" allow you to keep some or all of the gear you find during each "run." For example, in Hades, there are certain buffs that only last during each run; however, you get currency during each run that can be used to buy permanent buffs or items in the hub world.
Deathloop has a terrible system that is the worst of both worlds. All gear is lost between runs. However, you can harvest Residuum in the game, which is a resource that can be used to "infuse" your gear and make it last permanently. Thus, instead of just finding gear and then keeping it, you have to find gear and find residuum and infuse gear. This might be OK except that you lose all your Residuum upon death. If you get killed, you can recover Residuum by interacting with the spot where you died, Dark Souls-style. If you get looped, all your Residuum is gone and so are all your weapons. This means that you can easily be put into the annoying situation of getting looped and having to start the entire level over without any of the weapons or upgrades that you just got. And since the levels are all the same rather than procedurally generated, this means that if you die you will play through the same exact section listening to the same exact voice lines being piped over the loudspeakers. Have fun grinding the same levels over and over again so you can get enough residuum to get one of the powers that Corvo was given in the first mission of Dishonored.
If this was not enough, the game adds an extra level of tedium due to its mission structure. The missions take the form of investigations; in practice, this means you go to A and find out B, which means that now you need to go to C. A lot of other reviewers complained that the "investigations" were too hand-holdy and linear. I don't have a problem with this because the game is primarily a "run around and kill people" game, not an "investigation" game, and also because I don't have unlimited amounts of free time to spend trying to figure out what to do. What I do take issue with is the convoluted mission structure. In Dishonored, a typical mission might go like this: "Sneak into the Duke of Chinchilla's parlor-> find the message from the Countess of Canteloupe saying that they will meet up at Lord Featherstoneaugh's mechanized tea party -> Listen to the Outsider babble about nothing for five minutes -> sneak into the tea party and murder the lovers in cold blood." All of this would take place on the same map with minimal backtracking. In Deathloop, on the other hand, you will get to point A and find a note asking you to go to point B on a different map at a different time of day. Instead of just being able to go places and do stuff, the game forces you to constantly backtrack through its large levels and wade through its morass of loading screens and menus in order to complete a quest. If you go to Genko Cobblestone's lab in the afternoon to complete an objective, only to find out that the objective is just a note telling you to go to Adrian von Stitzlower's mansion in the morning. This means that either you have to loop yourself to continue the story arc or you have to jump over to another quest--in either case, the momentum is lost and you will be backtracking across the same huge areas fighting or avoiding the same mooks for the 20th time. I'm sure this sounded like a cool idea on paper, but in practice it seems like padding in order to make the game seem longer.
And the sad thing is, all of these flaws could have been avoided if the game were just a linear game. The loop should have been a story device, not a game mechanic. The game could have still used the idea of going to different areas at multiple times of day, but just had the player play through each area and time in a predetermined order that fit with the storyline. This would have allowed the game to be a tight and suspenseful story-driven action game like Dishonored. Instead, the badly-implemented roguelike mechanics turn the game into an unenjoyable slog.

Dishonorable

These problems could have been avoided if the gameplay was any good, but unfortunately isn't not. The game's biggest inspiration is Dishonored. It is even uses almost the exact same HUD as Dishonored. It clearly wants to be Dishonored with guns, which sounds like a good idea on paper, but isn't.
Dishonored strikes a good balance between stealth and combat because your combat options all come with fundamental limitations. Guns are unwieldy and have limited ammo; Swordfighting isn't fluid and requires some skill to master; magic attacks are powerful, but are tied to your magic meter, which can be depleted. On the other hand, you had a large variety of stealth abilities to encourage you to play the game stealthily rather than as a pure combat game. You could headshot enemies with a crossbow, put them to sleep with a sleep dart, attack them with a non-lethal grenade, choke them out from behind, re-wire a Tesla coil to fry them when they walk by, etc. In Deathloop, guns are overpowered and there are few other options. The shotgun on Normal mode is a one-hit kill, and unlike the pistol in Dishonored, there is plenty of ammo to be found even for a bad shot like me. In this regard the game is far too easy; on the other hand, gunfights tend to devolve into the game spamming mooks with laserguns, so combat feels too hard (but not too challenging). The traps and special weapons from Dishonored are either completely gone or locked behind the game's stupid gear system.
Stealth in this game just sucks. Many stealth games have enemies who zig-zag between being dumb as dirt and clairvoyant, but Deathloop has the worst example of this I've ever seen. Shooting a gun or setting off a loud noise won't lure enemies to your location; however, if one of them is alerted, he will magically summon all of his buddies to your location through clairvoyance. None of these buddies will be able to walk through a doorway, so if you survive the onslaught of ten guys with laserguns and retreat far enough you can shoot them all like fish in a barrel. Light and dark don't make a difference in this game, different surfaces don't make varying degrees of noise, and whether or not a bad guy notices you is, as best I can figure it, a matter of pure luck. It's insane to me that games like Thief and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory had better stealth games despite being around 20 years older than Deathloop.
Combat sucks too. The gunplay and movement are clearly "inspired" by Far Cry, but just like Far Cry 6, Deathloop has a healing system that screws with the battle system. In both Far Cry 3/4 and Dishonored, you are able to heal yourself mid-battle; in Far Cry 3/4 you have unlimited heals, while in Dishonored healing is tied to potions that you can collect on the map and use at any time. Deathloop, you are limited to healing items that are strewn around the landscape, as if this was Duke Nukem 3D. It doesn't work for the kind of game that wants to split the middle between stealth and action. Letting you regenerate health in some way allows you to use hit-and-run tactics on enemies. Combat encounters last longer; you can take more risks because you know a single botched encounter isn't guaranteed to wipe you out. Dishonored probably struck the best balance of all because it gave you regenerating health tied to a finite resource--it encouraged aggressive combat without removing the risk-taking, and it gave you a reason to explore the map without obligating you to know exactly where each pickup was. In Deathloop, combat encounters are frustrating because your only way of healing is running back to the last healing machine or batch of potions. This discourages taking risk and trying new strategies in combat, and also adds another level of backtracking to a game that already has too much backtracking.
The enemies are the worst I've encountered in any game. Every enemy is just the same guy wearing differently colored clothes and carrying either a knife or a gun. Dishonored had plenty of good ol' gun/knife guys, but it also had interesting enemies such as the Tall Boys and the Music Box guys who could block you from using magic. You would think that a game that was the spiritual sequel to Dishonored would up the ante with enemies, but instead the game has less enemy variety than many NES games.
The enemy behavior is as bad as the enemy variety. Enemies having two states: "walking around aimlessly" or "running toward you while magically summoning all their buddies." Doom (1993) has better enemy AI. Enemy pathfinding is terrible, and you can pretty much lose anyone tailing you by walking into a different room. Occasionally Julianna will spawn into a level to hunt you down and kill you, which sounds cool and menacing until she gets stuck on a rooftop. Level Geometry 1, Julianna 0. The enemy animations are the absolute worst I've ever seen. I am not bothered by video game-y animations, but the animations in Deathloop go beyond just looking weird. Enemies suddenly start to move at 1920s silent-film speeds, or just slide around instead of walking, Redfall-style. Sometimes enemy NPCs will just randomly "whoosh" to a place where the game decides they need to be; on multiple occasions I witnessed enemies dodge bullets with superhuman speed like the agents in the Matrix. The whole experience was so janky that, like Far Cry 6, I was never sure if what I was witnessing was a feature or a bug. It was incredibly frustrating, however--buggy animations are unforgivable in a first-person shooter games where being able to accurately aim at the enemies is an important part of the game. The worst part is that this is totally avoidable. I was watching one of my buddies play Spec Ops: The Line recently, and noticed that none of the enemy NPCs had these weird, jerky animations, and you only had the occasional soldier who would just crouch down behind cover and do nothing. Similarly enemies in Dishonored didn't suddenly start flying to where the game needed to be. Why is a 2021 game objectively inferior to a 2012 game?

Breaking the Loop

I wanted to like this game, but it gradually became a repetitive slog. All my desire to find out what happened vanished, and when I realized that I was not having fun I quit the game. Life is too short to play a bad game.
I will repeat--life is too short to play a bad game. Unless you are being paid to play a bad game in some capacity, just don't. If you think you won't like the game, then don't play it. Just let it go. You'll forget about it in a week. I see tons of people online wasting their time and making themselves miserable by forcing themselves to get through games that they won't enjoy, and for what reason? Fake internet points? Just play a different game. You'll be a lot happier.
I am glad that I have GamePass to help me dodge some of these bullets. Ghostwire: Tokyo, Generation Zero, Deathloop, Sword and Fairy, The Outer Worlds: I feel all I do on GamePass is download lackluster games from the last 5 years and then abandon them after they reveal their inner emptiness. Sheesh.

Narrative: 3.5 - Gameplay: 4.5 - Visuals: 4 - Soundtrack: 3 - Time: 4
Stars: 4

Played this one for two reasons: one, because it was on the "leaving soon" section of PS Plus; two, I wanted to check all the fuzz around it. For the unaware: IGN gave it a 10, and there was some backlash saying it wasn't a 5-star game at all. Agreed with the latter.

However, I was kind of surprised. It was a slow start, with loads of handholding from the very beginning... Then, nothing! Figure it out inside the Deathloop. That's when - as a matter of fact - it got me. Planning your loop, and exploring both for loot and clues was genuinely fun.

I thought the midloop moniker was overblown until I actually played it. Mid is a perfectly apt description - both the gameplay & story are only "ok"

The two dealbreakers for me though:
UI & Menu system - Genuinely atrocious, and was 100% designed for consoles in mind
Game is in a weird state between being non-linear, and also linear. You have some options to take in pathing, but not many, and the final cycle can only be completed a certain specific way.

Deathloop is a good game at some point even great. The problem is that this game follows in the footsteps of the Dishonored games and most importantly Prey Mooncrash.

This is because Deathloop feels shallow next to its predecessors. While Arkanes earlier games have tons of varity in the ways you tackle every unique location. Deathloop takes place in the same four areas with two options to get through them; sneak or kill everyone. It sadly looses the whole lethal or not and creative thinking of its predecessors.
Finally the whole timeloop concept is half baked and is way better executed in Prey: Mooncrash.

But its not all bad! Deathloop is very pretty and has that Arkane style. Its a beautiful sounding and looking world. The voice acting is great and the characters fun and interesting. Especially Colt and Julianna. Gunplay is snappy and perfectly passable and the powers are fun!

Deathloop sadly never reaches the heights of its predecessors but is overall a fun time, sometimes i just wish there where more to the game.

It’s hard to say what this game really does outright WRONG, it has a lot going for it which is likely a testament to how great the Dishonored franchise is, but so much just feels off. Basically every character is unlikable and only speaks to be quirky, gunplay is okay but underwhelming and a big chunk of the areas feel lifeless and boring. Thankfully it does retain some great Dishonored-type positives such as massive variety in routes to objectives and interactive objects that affect enemies (eg. shooting a gumball dispenser spills them out, which can trip enemies).
Overall though I just can’t shake the feeling of how ‘corporate’ Deathloop feels. It’s hard to explain what I mean by that, but so much of this game feels like it is forcing itself into pleasing a particular demographic, which ironically is probably what makes them turn the other way. The game has some great bones, but it’s the meat that is the problem.

I think this game appeals to my taste better than dishonored ever could, honestly. Quick writing, removal of the honestly very minimal d1 chaos system and a gameplay loop that ENCOURAGES creative play rather than punishes it. This game has so many flaws but I can't being myself to hold them against it when the writing is so fun and the gunplay (in an ARKANE GAME?) is so satisfying. I do wish some of the writing was less hidden, shift and melee less of a dominant playstyle and generally the AI can be a bit weak. And while the first two flaws are genuinely frustrating, the weak AI is more a double edged sword to allow for creativity. I'm rambling just go play this game. Instant classic.

The first trip to every location is spectacular. Levels are lovingly crafted, full of alternative routes, emerging opportunities, and hidden lore. Arkane at their very best.

Unfortunately the game does have Loop in the name. You play through the same levels repeatedly, looking for new opportunities and optimizing your approach. With every loop, the sense of discovery fades, until it becomes all about execution. And that part of Deathloop is just not all that great. Going through the motion once you ve learnt everything there is to learn about an area gets old really quickly, DL runs out of pulver long before the end.

This was a really rather fun game with a high focus on gameplay and story. Obviously from the name, it is a loop of activities you can do, but each loop you learn something new that you can accomplish the next time around. Dying isn’t that big of a deal, as you just start from the beginning of the day again, and you can accomplish things in any order you’d like until you decide to beat the game. That has a specific order you must do things, or it won’t be possible. There are a few things that I know I missed, but wasn’t quite sure how to accomplish, but they weren’t integral to the story, so I am not feeling like I missed anything. I am confused on why this game felt like it was getting a lot of flack on release. If it’s technical issues, I suppose the only thing that really stuck out to me, as occasionally the menu wouldn’t load, but I think this was a multiplayer issue. If this did happen, and you were on a map, you’d have to close out the game. . . which if you exit the game while on a map, then you lose all progress. This happened to me after I killed a boss enemy and was heading to leave the level, which pissed me off. But not enough to dislike this game, in fact, I think this was one of the more fun games I’ve played this year.