Deathloop, somehow; is mindnumbingly complex and incredibly simple at the same time. It has this elevator pitch that's so easy to rattle off;
"You're a guy and you're stuck in a time loop and you've gotta kill 8 targets before midnight to break it! So you keep doing the loop over and over again, learning information about your targets and upgrading gear as you go so that you can do it all in one run to finish the game!"
It's exactly the kinda thing that's really easy to describe but so much more complicated to execute through game design to the point where Deathloop is somewhat bloated with tutorials, menus, keywords, mechanics and all sorts of various explanations. Deathloop's biggest flaw is how it doles out information - which is to say too much, too fast. For a game with such a complex narrative and so much focus put on picking up clues and gaining dirt on your targets, it can be incredibly taxing to retain all the information the game wants you to because every time you read a document or listen to an audiotape, you get main character Colt remarking on it out loud and a little notification in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen giving you a brief summary of what you've just learned. So sometimes you have an audio tape playing, Colt talking AND a notification popping up on-screen, that's too much information to take in at one time, Deathloop! This stuff is supposedly crucial, and I can't multitask!!
And this flaw is emblematic of Deathloop's design as a whole in my opinion. Its core concept requires so many moving parts to work as a game that there is a lot to take in, and this is to the game's benefit and detriment. On one hand as I say, it's very overbearing with how much it tells you and wants you to understand at a time and how it delivers said information. At the same time, its mechanical complexities offer all the freedom of choice in how you go about your mission that you've come to expect from an Arkane game. The level design is simply incredible in this game, I'd argue even better than the very best of Dishonored; which is high praise in my book. The verticality of the levels, all the nooks and crannies to sneak in to and out of the various strongholds, the remarkable art direction that lends such distinctive and colourful, paradisiacal 60's flair to every street you roam and every room you creep through is just INCREDIBLE. Even having played these same 4 levels in essence tons of times over I'm not tired of them, they're so dense and detailed and I'm constantly finding new things - and the minor changes they undergo during different times of the day only accentuates this.
It's such a paradoxical game at times. So sophisticated in its presentation but often clunky in its execution. For a game with such suave, Bond-esque undertones, the enemies in this game sure are fucking moronic sandbags! Running mindlessly directly into your line of fire when alerted and following you straight down hallways in which you can very easily place traps. Doesn't help that they're the only one enemy type in the entire game, meaning that even your unique "Visionary" targets who need to be killed to break the loop fight exactly the same way that any random-ass NPC does. (A couple of them have "Slabs", which are basically the game's superpowers, but they really don't end up changing much when you're dealing with them.)
This of course comes with one exception, Julianna - who can invade your mission at any point to try and hunt you down and kill you as either a player-controlled online enemy or an AI-piloted pursuer. You can turn online invasions from other players using Julianna off, but never the AI Julianna. The first few times this happens, it's novel and very cool - adding genuine tension and a fun cat-and-mouse dynamic to the levels that are otherwise generally pretty breezy. But the novelty wears out after a while in my opinion and it just becomes pretty tiresome, impeding on your progress when you just wanna get something done. It's especially annoying when you're going for targets like Frank or Aleksis who basically require stealth, so every time you're deep into the strongly stealth-incentivised sections of their missions, you're just praying Julianna doesn't randomly decide to show up and fuck the whole thing up for you and force you to reset the whole thing. Julianna showed up multiple times during my attempts to go unnoticed at Aleksis's party and my only options were to either stand and fight her there and then and blow my cover and instantly have to restart, or flee the area (again, undetected, which is pretty hard as it is) and hope she follows me and fight her elsewhere. If she doesn't, then I'm gonna be waiting for a while! Seems like a pretty big oversight in design in my opinion, and a pretty unsophisticated one at that.
Still, at its core, Deathloop is an Arkane game; with all the satisfying stealth, gunplay and multiple tailored approaches you've come to expect from that. I think despite having superior level design to Dishonored, its core gameplay falls slightly short of it because it doesn't react to the player's choices in the same way it did. The only incentive to be stealthy in Deathloop is that it's safer, but doing an entire mission and killing a Visionary without even being detected once didn't even result in a PS5 trophy for me, which was pretty disappointing. A far cry from Dishonored's "high-chaos", "low-chaos" system that saw levels physically change depending on your body count in the previous one. (I also really miss the bodies mechanic, I get why it doesn't exist in Deathloop because of the game's fiction but damn do I miss just dropping bodies off of rooftops.)
Then however, what Deathloop has over Dishonored is significantly more enjoyable and interesting story and characters. Colt and Julianna in particular have a great dynamic (even if their "relationship" ends up pretty weird by the end of the game) and while your Visionary targets are one-note and shallow; that's the point. They're pretentious assholes who are still fleshed out beautifully by the minicom messages in which you can see them interacting with eachother. Some of my favourite moments in this game are just hearing the Visionaries complain about one another and watching them bicker, you can often get a real sense of who these people are before you even meet them through the game's various breadcrumb trails, and I think that's really impressive.
I compare Deathloop to Dishonored a lot because fundamentally they're very similar - right down to having pretty much the exact same "Blink" ability. I think Dishonored is slightly better as a game if you're looking purely at gameplay - but then Deathloop's level design still trumps it, as do its story and characters. Its art direction and world are fucking stunning, on a comparable level to Dunwall in my opinion. I think the games overall are very similar in terms of quality for different reasons. I don't think Deathloop is quite the masterpiece critics seem to think it is, I think it's a good game with some flaws, and that's where it ends for me.
"You're a guy and you're stuck in a time loop and you've gotta kill 8 targets before midnight to break it! So you keep doing the loop over and over again, learning information about your targets and upgrading gear as you go so that you can do it all in one run to finish the game!"
It's exactly the kinda thing that's really easy to describe but so much more complicated to execute through game design to the point where Deathloop is somewhat bloated with tutorials, menus, keywords, mechanics and all sorts of various explanations. Deathloop's biggest flaw is how it doles out information - which is to say too much, too fast. For a game with such a complex narrative and so much focus put on picking up clues and gaining dirt on your targets, it can be incredibly taxing to retain all the information the game wants you to because every time you read a document or listen to an audiotape, you get main character Colt remarking on it out loud and a little notification in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen giving you a brief summary of what you've just learned. So sometimes you have an audio tape playing, Colt talking AND a notification popping up on-screen, that's too much information to take in at one time, Deathloop! This stuff is supposedly crucial, and I can't multitask!!
And this flaw is emblematic of Deathloop's design as a whole in my opinion. Its core concept requires so many moving parts to work as a game that there is a lot to take in, and this is to the game's benefit and detriment. On one hand as I say, it's very overbearing with how much it tells you and wants you to understand at a time and how it delivers said information. At the same time, its mechanical complexities offer all the freedom of choice in how you go about your mission that you've come to expect from an Arkane game. The level design is simply incredible in this game, I'd argue even better than the very best of Dishonored; which is high praise in my book. The verticality of the levels, all the nooks and crannies to sneak in to and out of the various strongholds, the remarkable art direction that lends such distinctive and colourful, paradisiacal 60's flair to every street you roam and every room you creep through is just INCREDIBLE. Even having played these same 4 levels in essence tons of times over I'm not tired of them, they're so dense and detailed and I'm constantly finding new things - and the minor changes they undergo during different times of the day only accentuates this.
It's such a paradoxical game at times. So sophisticated in its presentation but often clunky in its execution. For a game with such suave, Bond-esque undertones, the enemies in this game sure are fucking moronic sandbags! Running mindlessly directly into your line of fire when alerted and following you straight down hallways in which you can very easily place traps. Doesn't help that they're the only one enemy type in the entire game, meaning that even your unique "Visionary" targets who need to be killed to break the loop fight exactly the same way that any random-ass NPC does. (A couple of them have "Slabs", which are basically the game's superpowers, but they really don't end up changing much when you're dealing with them.)
This of course comes with one exception, Julianna - who can invade your mission at any point to try and hunt you down and kill you as either a player-controlled online enemy or an AI-piloted pursuer. You can turn online invasions from other players using Julianna off, but never the AI Julianna. The first few times this happens, it's novel and very cool - adding genuine tension and a fun cat-and-mouse dynamic to the levels that are otherwise generally pretty breezy. But the novelty wears out after a while in my opinion and it just becomes pretty tiresome, impeding on your progress when you just wanna get something done. It's especially annoying when you're going for targets like Frank or Aleksis who basically require stealth, so every time you're deep into the strongly stealth-incentivised sections of their missions, you're just praying Julianna doesn't randomly decide to show up and fuck the whole thing up for you and force you to reset the whole thing. Julianna showed up multiple times during my attempts to go unnoticed at Aleksis's party and my only options were to either stand and fight her there and then and blow my cover and instantly have to restart, or flee the area (again, undetected, which is pretty hard as it is) and hope she follows me and fight her elsewhere. If she doesn't, then I'm gonna be waiting for a while! Seems like a pretty big oversight in design in my opinion, and a pretty unsophisticated one at that.
Still, at its core, Deathloop is an Arkane game; with all the satisfying stealth, gunplay and multiple tailored approaches you've come to expect from that. I think despite having superior level design to Dishonored, its core gameplay falls slightly short of it because it doesn't react to the player's choices in the same way it did. The only incentive to be stealthy in Deathloop is that it's safer, but doing an entire mission and killing a Visionary without even being detected once didn't even result in a PS5 trophy for me, which was pretty disappointing. A far cry from Dishonored's "high-chaos", "low-chaos" system that saw levels physically change depending on your body count in the previous one. (I also really miss the bodies mechanic, I get why it doesn't exist in Deathloop because of the game's fiction but damn do I miss just dropping bodies off of rooftops.)
Then however, what Deathloop has over Dishonored is significantly more enjoyable and interesting story and characters. Colt and Julianna in particular have a great dynamic (even if their "relationship" ends up pretty weird by the end of the game) and while your Visionary targets are one-note and shallow; that's the point. They're pretentious assholes who are still fleshed out beautifully by the minicom messages in which you can see them interacting with eachother. Some of my favourite moments in this game are just hearing the Visionaries complain about one another and watching them bicker, you can often get a real sense of who these people are before you even meet them through the game's various breadcrumb trails, and I think that's really impressive.
I compare Deathloop to Dishonored a lot because fundamentally they're very similar - right down to having pretty much the exact same "Blink" ability. I think Dishonored is slightly better as a game if you're looking purely at gameplay - but then Deathloop's level design still trumps it, as do its story and characters. Its art direction and world are fucking stunning, on a comparable level to Dunwall in my opinion. I think the games overall are very similar in terms of quality for different reasons. I don't think Deathloop is quite the masterpiece critics seem to think it is, I think it's a good game with some flaws, and that's where it ends for me.