2.5/5 ★ – PigParty's review of DEATHLOOP.

Playtime: 21 hours Beaten: Abandoned I made it to the point where I knew exactly what to do in the final loop to beat the game but I couldn't care enough to go through an entire loop and pull it off. Deathloop is one of the most miserable experiences I've had in a game. Deathloop starts out incredible. The intrigue of waking up in a time loop with no memories and uncovering the world and characters around you is a wonderful feeling. Learning early on that progression is locked behind knowledge is reminiscent of one of the greatest feats in video games - Outer Wilds. Unfortunately Deathloop massively fails to pull off this premise. The world and the game early on portray an exciting notion of freedom but you learn very quickly that this is all an illusion. Deathloop is one of the most on rails video games I've ever played. That realization completely ruined my experience and diminished my drive to keep playing. Deathloop is the definition of skin deep. There is nothing past the first layer in the game - in fact, arguably there's less. The story takes a backseat and I stopped caring around the 8 hour mark. The story never advances when you gather more information. The information is simply used to uncover how and in what order to kill the visionaries. There's no world building or plot progression whatsoever - not in any meaningful sense at least. Very quickly your character receives overpowered weapons and the aura of caution that drives the gameplay in the first 5 hours is completely wiped away. I went from carefully plotting out how to get from one area to the next without triggering an alarm to shot-gunning everyone in the face, thinking only of the eternalists as a nuisance. It's so frustrating that Arkane worked their magic to make incredible level design with tons of different ways to go about moving through the maps, just to give you a shotgun that makes eternalists explode. The game feels broken due to some of the very intentional mechanics the game relies on. None of the eternalists or visionaries react from one day to the next in the way I would expect. In fact, it seems like everyone's living the same day over and over again rather than repeating days differently. I would have loved to come across new conversations from eternalists that helped build the world but didn't progress the plot. This just doesn't happen. The game is so bare bones outside of its core mechanics. The characters are extremely fun, well written, and well voice acted. Unfortunately they become grating from one loop to the next as most of the interactions are short quips at the very start of the level. Again, it's another facet of the game that feels very bare bones and not well implemented. I had a blast with Deathloop in the first ~5 hours and slowly my enjoyment faded away until I was actually having a miserable time. At that point I wanted to complete the game because I had already put in so much time. But I got to the point where I was dreading playing Deathloop and so at 21 hours in, just before completing the final loop, I decided that was it. I couldn't care less what's revealed in the story because the world-building is nonexistent and didn't even try to keep my engaged after the first few hours. Looking back now, though, what pisses me off the most is how on-rails this game is while it gives off the illusion of player choice. There's so many parts of this game that feel good but the game as a whole fails miserably at coming together into one coherent and enjoyable package.