Let’s just get this out in the open – if you know me, you probably know that Arkane Studios is my favorite game studio in the world. Their previous titles since joining Bethesda (Dishonored, Dishonored 2, Death of the Outsider and Prey) are all 10/10s to me. So yes, you could say that I was excited about Deathloop. So, how is this first person shooter immersive sim?
Deathloop is an interesting game because it is truly innovative, but it doesn’t really present anything that Arkane Studios hasn’t done before. The stealth and magic from dishonored, the weaponry from Prey, the roguelite time loop mechanic from Mooncrash, and even the invasion mechanic from Arkane’s canceled game, The Crossing. But all packaged together it genuinely offers something no other studio could have pulled off.
While there are obvious inspirations from The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, it’s not a good descriptor of what the game is about. Our protagonist, Colt, wakes up on the beach of a hedonistic island paradise called Black Reef. With no memories and no weapons, his only information comes from over the radio with a woman named Julianna, with whom Colt shares a mysterious past. You learn that there are 8 visionaries on the island, including Juliana herself, which are basically assassination targets.
However, they all have schedules and are never really in the same place at once. Your job is get them all together so you can kill all 8 of them in one run before the clock strikes midnight. It really does take some time to understand exactly what’s happening, but once you hit the loop that grants you infusions, it all comes together.
You start on the loadout screen, where you can view your clues, documents, weapons, upgrades, spells and objective webs. I really love how the game presents the leads you’ve got – you can choose to follow any of them by clicking on them and tracking the waypoints and info. If you want to play this a little more hands off like a real detective, there’s a screen that simply shows a list of facts that you’ve learned about each of the four districts at each of the four times of day .
Once you know where you’re going to start, you select which of the four zones you’ll be visiting in the morning. Once in that zone, you have an infinite amount of time to explore, gather clues, assassinate any visionaries, and track down arsenal upgrades. You can use residuum, a resource you collect by killing visionaries, to “infuse” weapons and spells so you can gradually build your arsenal. And then it’s off to kill some idiots - That is, if Julianna doesn’t show up.
Probably the most ingenious part of Deathloop, the glue that holds it together, is the invasion mechanic. At any time while you are playing the campaign as Colt, you can be invaded by another human player who is controlling Julianna. She invades your game, equipped with a much better arsenal of spells and guns than you (at least at the start), and if she’s able to kill you three times your run ends and must restart the next day. However, if you’re able to kill her, you can pick up whatever spells and weapons she drops and get extra lives for the duration of that zone.
When she invades your game, the doors to escape the zone lock and must be unlocked by hacking a satellite across the map. You can also use the so called hackamajig to hack turrets to aid you and spotlights to ignore you, as well as machines to cause distractions and doors to open. All these factors usually force a confrontation between Colt and Julianna, and one of them won’t walk out of that zone alive.
The invasion stuff mostly works the way that Arkane intended – as colt, I had three or four firefights where I was on a perfect run for my objective and Julianna threw a wrench into my plans. I was hunched over, sweat pooling on my brow, and a few of those times my run ended there when she stabbed me in the back or shot me through the skull. As Julianna, however, I never had much luck. I was not very good at invading and only tried it a half dozen times. But when Julianna invaded my game, I felt that same sensation of being backed into a corner and having to use every last tool at my finger tips that I missed from Prey. Which brings me to my first problem with Deathloop.
Outside of the few times Julianna had me cornered, I did not feel the need to be resourceful. The main thing I love about the Dishonored games, and the reason I’ve played the series for over 300 hours collectively, is that there are a hundred ways to approach each situation and each are equally viable. In Deathloop, while you have some room to experiment, you largely don’t feel a push to. The game doesn’t reward continuous experimentation; rather, it rewards finding your playstyle and mastering it and using it for the rest of the game. Which makes it no different than any other action game on the market.
Dishonored and Prey are built around that core tenet of immersive sims, giving your options upon options, so many that you may feel it impossible to choose what to try. Deathloop restricts you to only having two spells and three weapons equipped at a time, and it’s very much built for that. Colt is already a god – the purposefully terrible AI is literally just cannon fodder as you blast your way to the visionaries and sneak around new locations to gather clues about the island and its inhabitants. The kind of trick shots you see people pulling off in Dishonored after 3 dozen tries, you will execute every 5 minutes just by playing Deathloop. In that way, it is absolutely the most accessible of Arkane’s games. I am not surprised it is the most popular of them. Players master the mechanics after two hours and start pulling off crazy impressive tricks, and it’s only when Julianna interrupts that there’s a challenge anymore. Without her, I think this game would have actually fallen quite flat.
The spells in the game are called slabs. I tried all of them out at least once, but found Shift, which is just Blink from Dishonored, and Nexus, which is Domino from Dishonored, to be the only viable pair. And those two powers alone worked to get me through every single situation I came upon over my 18 hour playtime. The game never pushed me to innovate or challenged me to try anything new. Early on I established my arsenal of a shotgun, a nail gun, and a sniper rifle and never once needed a different gun than those 3. The nail gun is silent, so it was used for stealthing sections. Combat was easy to take care of with the shot gun. The sniper rifle was mostly there as a backup if Julianna showed her sneering face.
Each of the visionaries has a pretty distinct personality, and each is equipped with a different power – invisibility, blink, supercharging, etc. Killing that visionary will net you a ton of residuum and a new power or upgrade for an existing one. I really enjoyed interacting with the visionaries and learning more about them and their relationships with one another through voice recordings, notes, emails and calls. It’s all pretty crazy how it comes together so well, and I do remember the eureka moment of inspiration where I pulled out a notepad and scribbled down my idea for how to kill all of them in one run. It was the feeling I’d been searching for through out the game and had been continually denied – the kind of thing I feel every time I overcome a section of a map in Dishonored.
I don’t want to knock this game, because it has so many good qualities I haven’t even covered. The music is phenomenal. The sound mixing is great. The two lead voice actors, Jason E Kelley as Colt and Ozioma Akagha as Julianna, turn in what are easily two of the best performances of the year. They’re constantly doing this unhinged flirting over the radio while also trying to kill each other, and it makes the whole concept feel so much more stimulating. Speaking to Julianna about how she dreams every night of ripping your face off and wearing it as a hat, and then seeing her appear, controlled by a real person, to do it – that’s awesome.
I also have to shout out the art design on Deathloop. The style is quite similar to the art-deco from Prey mixed with the steampunk from Dishonored, all run through this swingin’ 60s filter and topped with a dose of Andy Warhol. It’s perfect. The vibes are exactly what they are intended to be.
Another issue I’ve heard echoed by my friends is that the ending is dissatisfying. The real issue is that there is not an ending. And it’s intentional, it’s by design, but I think it totally falls flat. It left kind of a bad taste in my mouth, but I don’t want it to totally tarnish what I thought were a great 18 hours before that.
Although Deathloop didn’t give me quite what I wanted from an Arkane Studios game, it’s still pretty fantastic. It has some of the best feeling gun play since Destiny 2, it’s exhilarating action, thorough and rewarding detective work, and an excellent intro to the world of immersive sims. But it didn’t evoke the same need in me to be resourceful, the same need to try every single iteration of combining powers and gadgets over and over until something worked the way I wanted. I didn’t get the satisfaction of carefully planning a heist and seeing things go exactly the way I wanted, because they always went the way I wanted no matter what I did. Deathloop is a great game, but it does not hold a candle to the masterpieces that are the Dishonored series and Prey before it. All that being said, I think it’s one of the most enjoyable and accessible games that can give you something totally different from the AAA fodder you’re used to.
I recommend Deathloop for all players. I do really think it’d be hard to not find something you love about this title. And hey , if this is the game that gets more people to play Dishonored, so be it. I’m looking forward now even more to how Arkane innovates on their past work in Redfall next year.
Deathloop is an interesting game because it is truly innovative, but it doesn’t really present anything that Arkane Studios hasn’t done before. The stealth and magic from dishonored, the weaponry from Prey, the roguelite time loop mechanic from Mooncrash, and even the invasion mechanic from Arkane’s canceled game, The Crossing. But all packaged together it genuinely offers something no other studio could have pulled off.
While there are obvious inspirations from The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, it’s not a good descriptor of what the game is about. Our protagonist, Colt, wakes up on the beach of a hedonistic island paradise called Black Reef. With no memories and no weapons, his only information comes from over the radio with a woman named Julianna, with whom Colt shares a mysterious past. You learn that there are 8 visionaries on the island, including Juliana herself, which are basically assassination targets.
However, they all have schedules and are never really in the same place at once. Your job is get them all together so you can kill all 8 of them in one run before the clock strikes midnight. It really does take some time to understand exactly what’s happening, but once you hit the loop that grants you infusions, it all comes together.
You start on the loadout screen, where you can view your clues, documents, weapons, upgrades, spells and objective webs. I really love how the game presents the leads you’ve got – you can choose to follow any of them by clicking on them and tracking the waypoints and info. If you want to play this a little more hands off like a real detective, there’s a screen that simply shows a list of facts that you’ve learned about each of the four districts at each of the four times of day .
Once you know where you’re going to start, you select which of the four zones you’ll be visiting in the morning. Once in that zone, you have an infinite amount of time to explore, gather clues, assassinate any visionaries, and track down arsenal upgrades. You can use residuum, a resource you collect by killing visionaries, to “infuse” weapons and spells so you can gradually build your arsenal. And then it’s off to kill some idiots - That is, if Julianna doesn’t show up.
Probably the most ingenious part of Deathloop, the glue that holds it together, is the invasion mechanic. At any time while you are playing the campaign as Colt, you can be invaded by another human player who is controlling Julianna. She invades your game, equipped with a much better arsenal of spells and guns than you (at least at the start), and if she’s able to kill you three times your run ends and must restart the next day. However, if you’re able to kill her, you can pick up whatever spells and weapons she drops and get extra lives for the duration of that zone.
When she invades your game, the doors to escape the zone lock and must be unlocked by hacking a satellite across the map. You can also use the so called hackamajig to hack turrets to aid you and spotlights to ignore you, as well as machines to cause distractions and doors to open. All these factors usually force a confrontation between Colt and Julianna, and one of them won’t walk out of that zone alive.
The invasion stuff mostly works the way that Arkane intended – as colt, I had three or four firefights where I was on a perfect run for my objective and Julianna threw a wrench into my plans. I was hunched over, sweat pooling on my brow, and a few of those times my run ended there when she stabbed me in the back or shot me through the skull. As Julianna, however, I never had much luck. I was not very good at invading and only tried it a half dozen times. But when Julianna invaded my game, I felt that same sensation of being backed into a corner and having to use every last tool at my finger tips that I missed from Prey. Which brings me to my first problem with Deathloop.
Outside of the few times Julianna had me cornered, I did not feel the need to be resourceful. The main thing I love about the Dishonored games, and the reason I’ve played the series for over 300 hours collectively, is that there are a hundred ways to approach each situation and each are equally viable. In Deathloop, while you have some room to experiment, you largely don’t feel a push to. The game doesn’t reward continuous experimentation; rather, it rewards finding your playstyle and mastering it and using it for the rest of the game. Which makes it no different than any other action game on the market.
Dishonored and Prey are built around that core tenet of immersive sims, giving your options upon options, so many that you may feel it impossible to choose what to try. Deathloop restricts you to only having two spells and three weapons equipped at a time, and it’s very much built for that. Colt is already a god – the purposefully terrible AI is literally just cannon fodder as you blast your way to the visionaries and sneak around new locations to gather clues about the island and its inhabitants. The kind of trick shots you see people pulling off in Dishonored after 3 dozen tries, you will execute every 5 minutes just by playing Deathloop. In that way, it is absolutely the most accessible of Arkane’s games. I am not surprised it is the most popular of them. Players master the mechanics after two hours and start pulling off crazy impressive tricks, and it’s only when Julianna interrupts that there’s a challenge anymore. Without her, I think this game would have actually fallen quite flat.
The spells in the game are called slabs. I tried all of them out at least once, but found Shift, which is just Blink from Dishonored, and Nexus, which is Domino from Dishonored, to be the only viable pair. And those two powers alone worked to get me through every single situation I came upon over my 18 hour playtime. The game never pushed me to innovate or challenged me to try anything new. Early on I established my arsenal of a shotgun, a nail gun, and a sniper rifle and never once needed a different gun than those 3. The nail gun is silent, so it was used for stealthing sections. Combat was easy to take care of with the shot gun. The sniper rifle was mostly there as a backup if Julianna showed her sneering face.
Each of the visionaries has a pretty distinct personality, and each is equipped with a different power – invisibility, blink, supercharging, etc. Killing that visionary will net you a ton of residuum and a new power or upgrade for an existing one. I really enjoyed interacting with the visionaries and learning more about them and their relationships with one another through voice recordings, notes, emails and calls. It’s all pretty crazy how it comes together so well, and I do remember the eureka moment of inspiration where I pulled out a notepad and scribbled down my idea for how to kill all of them in one run. It was the feeling I’d been searching for through out the game and had been continually denied – the kind of thing I feel every time I overcome a section of a map in Dishonored.
I don’t want to knock this game, because it has so many good qualities I haven’t even covered. The music is phenomenal. The sound mixing is great. The two lead voice actors, Jason E Kelley as Colt and Ozioma Akagha as Julianna, turn in what are easily two of the best performances of the year. They’re constantly doing this unhinged flirting over the radio while also trying to kill each other, and it makes the whole concept feel so much more stimulating. Speaking to Julianna about how she dreams every night of ripping your face off and wearing it as a hat, and then seeing her appear, controlled by a real person, to do it – that’s awesome.
I also have to shout out the art design on Deathloop. The style is quite similar to the art-deco from Prey mixed with the steampunk from Dishonored, all run through this swingin’ 60s filter and topped with a dose of Andy Warhol. It’s perfect. The vibes are exactly what they are intended to be.
Another issue I’ve heard echoed by my friends is that the ending is dissatisfying. The real issue is that there is not an ending. And it’s intentional, it’s by design, but I think it totally falls flat. It left kind of a bad taste in my mouth, but I don’t want it to totally tarnish what I thought were a great 18 hours before that.
Although Deathloop didn’t give me quite what I wanted from an Arkane Studios game, it’s still pretty fantastic. It has some of the best feeling gun play since Destiny 2, it’s exhilarating action, thorough and rewarding detective work, and an excellent intro to the world of immersive sims. But it didn’t evoke the same need in me to be resourceful, the same need to try every single iteration of combining powers and gadgets over and over until something worked the way I wanted. I didn’t get the satisfaction of carefully planning a heist and seeing things go exactly the way I wanted, because they always went the way I wanted no matter what I did. Deathloop is a great game, but it does not hold a candle to the masterpieces that are the Dishonored series and Prey before it. All that being said, I think it’s one of the most enjoyable and accessible games that can give you something totally different from the AAA fodder you’re used to.
I recommend Deathloop for all players. I do really think it’d be hard to not find something you love about this title. And hey , if this is the game that gets more people to play Dishonored, so be it. I’m looking forward now even more to how Arkane innovates on their past work in Redfall next year.