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.
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.