3.5/5 ★ – Rukey's review of DEATHLOOP.

Deathloop is a game that was made in response to a complaint I never had. Plenty of people did, apparently: “when I play Dishonored I always want to do it perfectly stealthily and have to abuse quickloads.” Arguably the issue is with marketing, where Dishonored was always presented as a game about sneakin’ and stabbin’, and only on actually playing it (and playing WITH it) would you discover that you could also launch enemies into the air with a flick of your wrist and have them eaten by rats once they landed. You weren’t a thief - you were a chaos mage with an embarrassment of ways to dismember and dispatch your enemies. For Dishonored isn’t a stealth game and nor are its sequels - they are immersive sims. The whole point of these games is to give you options. The tools to run riot and engage in messy, supernaturally augmented battles with towns full of weirdos were all already there. It was never the case that the studio didn’t bring the toys - the players didn’t want to play. Now I don’t personally care one whit what a level ending screen says and how many ticks and crosses I get. I just want to immerse in the game’s systems and become the rat dad —or rat princess as the case may be. Apparently a lot of gamers do care though and needed their hands holding to find the fun. Here is Deathloop with the hand holding. Deathloop is an attempt to recreate all the fun things you could already do in the Dishonored games in a package that more obviously, even loudly encourages you to actually, well, do them. At times going so far as to suspend large white letters in front of your path that say things like, “maybe just kill everyone.” The possibility space is clearly not enough - the mandated mayhem space is required. There is a considerable toybox available. You have versions of Blink, Domino, Windblast and Shadow Walk as well as other supernatural abilities, a surprisingly thin selection of gadgets (just a hacking tool and grenades) and the guns. Ah, the guns. The guns bang. You get a lot of guns, they all feel awesome to use and are the most creative, fun addition in my opinion. That’s mainly because of the huge number of modifications available, from special versions of the weapons dropped by Visionaries to the mods Colt can bolt onto his arsenal. You might loot a rapid firing shotgun that also slows enemies after they’re hit, modify it with trinkets that increase its rate of fire and a quick reload and now you have an unstoppable Visionary-dispatching machine. There’s a Desert Eagle style handgun that fires poison gas bullets, which you might combine with a personal mod for Colt to be healed by poison gas, giving you a good reason to get in at point blank range. The gunplay is easily up there with the new Wolfenstein games or Doom, also polished Bethesda shooters, but with a healthy dash of Arkane weirdness and innovation to the hand cannons you can hoard. With the load-outs you can equip from this box of tricks plus a colourful world and a light-hearted tone, and the enemies literally looking like mannequins to sponge up bullets, that would be more than enough to entice me to wade in guns blazing and arcane powers crackling. Based on how Colt plays as a character, as an avatar, a roaring success. However, there is a further wrinkle to the formula here, a spin on the immersive sim so far only ever seen in indies like Eldritch - this is a timeloop game. In addition to pulling you away from stealthy play, the design of Deathloop also robs you of the quick-load, an apparent crutch for many players. I enjoy playing Dishonored games on hard without quick loading, and most of the time I’m not too concerned about stealth. I’ve explored every power, gadget, every nook and cranny of those maps, no powers runs, speedruns, I love it. If I muck up, I roll with it, since that’s when the anarchic collision of systems begins for real, not to mention the fun. If I get killed though, I like the fact I F5’d a few minutes ago. I would have less fun if I had to restart the level altogether. Perhaps it is unfair to keep comparing this to Dishonored but Deathloop invites that exact comparison, in its adaptation of gameplay and design elements as well as the marketing. So maybe for people who quickloaded through Arkane’s other games this feels new, but to me it’s the same thing I’ve been doing all along but I have to repeat 45 minutes of progress if I lose all my lives. When you have a busy life and get 90-120 minutes of gaming time a night if you’re lucky, the feeling of wasting any of that time frankly stings. This is different to say, Hades where every minute with the game is an explosion of colour and coolness and if you die you get more opportunities to chat up some thirsty Greek gods. Here you just have to wind forward to the time of day when you got killed and walk back to where you were, re-doing everything. That isn’t that interesting to me. I like my progress to be meaningful. I didn’t find that I was uncovering new and quicker ways to traverse the maps either, as they are less complex than in past games. And if I was dying I felt more inclined to be stealthy rather than less as they apparently intended. At the start of the game especially you’re very squishy, and running through late day areas (where enemies are tougher) guns blazing starts looking less appealing if you have to repeat stuff you’ve already done. Additionally, I felt discouraged from experimentation - if I tried to double-Shift across a ravine to find an alternative entryway that’s one less life for when I take on the visionary, and I may as well restart the level. Because I don’t have that F5, I stick to what I know works. So I played this more conservatively than any of the studio’s other works because experimentation often came with a cost and ultimately a time tax. The other major area where the game falls down for me is in any dialogue, characterisation or story content outside of its two amazing leads. Colt and Julianna are brilliantly written and performed - everyone else stinks. It seems the folks at Arkane, who always come across as nothing less than lovely, are far too nice to know how extortionate, hyper wealthy sociopaths should talk and interact. The visionary characters here are so cartoony and one-note as to be totally unbelievable and often intensely aggravating. It’s like Suicide Squad 2016 if Jared Leto was allowed to play everyone. Granted, it is a difficult balance. You need to create characters who, to the consumer of the media they appear in, are understood to be obnoxious, without making the experience of encountering them in the media itself grating. The thing is one of the diegetic songs in the game does more heavy lifting in this regard than all the dialogue and smug notes left around. The song Ode to Somewhere, recorded for Charlie by Ramblin’ Frank and heard in Fristad Rock, tells you more about Charlie and his relationship with Fia than any of the dialogue (Frank, Charlie and Fia being three of the visionaries, by the way). You listen to this and you discover Charlie is a nauseating little man more in love with the idea of his own feelings for Fia than with who she is as a person. Every line in the song is about him, and ultimately the sentiment is just cloying and grasping. But the music itself and the singing is so beautiful you almost get taken by it the first time round. That’s how you do it! That’s expert characterisation. It’s clever, it tells you so much, it is enjoyable rather than irritating and I wish the writing beats had been more like this. So two of the big things this game is about - unfettered experimentation and its eight core villains - fall a bit short for me. There are other places the game seems to be arguing with itself over what it wants to be - like at the manor, where a full frontal assault is rewarded with waves of identical enemies that seem to be spawning from somewhere, disincentivising breaking stealth. Like Fristad, which is covered in mines, so that charging in often gets you killed before the enemies even know you’re there. These things push me towards being ginger about how I proceed, frustratingly so as the stealth is now rudimentary and enemies are alerted en masse rather than individually (partially due to an AI feature where each enemy belongs to a particular “zone” that functions as a group, and partially due to a post release patch where the developers responded to complaints about dumb AI by seemingly ramming the awareness slider to maximum). The mandated mayhem space isn’t quite working here - and at one point those floating white letters say “maybe don’t go loud”, so maybe whatever version of Colt scrawled these into the ether had his own misgivings about going all guns all the time. Also where are the accessibility options? There was no text resizing at launch, and there is no difficulty tuning. Arkane had very good modular difficulty tuning in Dishonored 2, since then Sony has knocked it out of the park with accessibility in TLOU2, and although both are involved here there is only one difficulty setting and no accessibility options. This I find to be a very strange decision, or perhaps it’s just a symptom of running out of time. So I have a lot of issues with this game, and will regret the rating I give it whatever it is. 7/10 doesn’t seem high enough for what this can be at its height, the amount of fun you CAN have rampaging around, through and over these still ingeniously designed wireframes, or leads that will rightfully appear in best character ever lists for years to come. 8/10 seems too generous for the amount of frustration and mixed messaging I experienced with this. Leaner, more explosive, often a thrill ride, but still feels like a first draft. If they work on this formula more and either drop the roguelite aspirations or find a way to use them without wasting the player’s time, this could lead to a sequel that would stand among the studio’s best. If you’re an Arkane head you should definitely play it of course, but just be aware of these caveats.