I broke the loop last night e.g. completed the single player portion of Deathloop.
I enjoyed it a lot. It’s basically all the best ideas from Dishonored repackage as a slick and entertaining loop shooter. A lot of it is very familiar if you’ve played Arkane’s other games, the multiple ways to play, the backstabbing, even blink makes a grand appearance and is still the most entertaining way to traverse an environment.
The major idea of Dishonored returns as well in that you need to assassinate a bunch of people in order to achieve some goal. In that game it was to right a wrong and restore the rightful monarch to the throne, here it’s to break the loop and somehow get out of this nightmare.
With these hitman style games there is always a big incentive to go back and replay levels, to try different methods of killing its denizens. The clever thing they’ve done here is to make that a central part of the gameplay. Each day you wake up groundhog style on a beach and experience everything again. This gives ample time explore the areas and practice murdering the other visionaries, high level targets the killing of which destabilises the loop, eventually bringing its downfall.
The day progresses in four times (morning, noon, afternoon and evening) and advancing the day reshapes the world and also moves the visionaries around. They will only be a certain places at certain times of day and figuring out the best order to kill them is a part of the game. This is made pretty easy by the Visionary Leads screen, which keeps track of the eight characters and has a set of clues you can walk through for each one to get them into the right place at the right time.
Each time you kill a visionary you gain their slab, basically their magic power, which lets you upgrade your own abilities. Also as the game goes on you get the power to “infuse” items, which lets you keep them from loop to loop. This is the primary way that the game ramps up your abilities. It’s a pretty flexible system and gives you a lot of control, way more than say Returnal which is much more random in terms of what guns and powers you get each iteration. This lets you hone your own arsenal and pretty soon you’ll have a nice collection of decent weapons and abilities to make the game a lot easier. Deathloop is no where near the sort of challenge that Returnal is serving out and it’s better for it (as much as I loved that game).
One of the best things about Deathloop is that while you start as a confused and weak guy waking up on a beach by the end you are a ruthless killing machine methodically moving through the world deliberately knocking over the dominoes to bring about its downfall. This progression works brilliantly and is one of the main reasons it such an enjoyable game. By the time you get to the end you have mastered the world and your abilities to the extent that the final loop has essentially no challenge, but getting to that point brings a feeling of real satisfaction.
There are only four levels but each one has a version of each time of day, meaning there are sort of sixteen if you squint. There’s enough variation here to keep things interesting but by the end I was starting to find it a bit samey. Like Dishonored there’s a ton of secrets but the loopy nature of things means you’re not compelled to search every nook and cranny as you know you will have plenty of time to discover things later.
Also as you unlock improved skills moving through the world gets easier. One complaint is that as blink shift is sooo powerful you sort of always need to take it, the game is just so much easier and more enjoyable with it. I feel it should come as standard in your arsenal, rather than taking up one of your two precious power slots. I felt this limited possible creativity with your powers as along with blink shift you could only take one other, which I thought was a bit stingy. It would have been nice to have more opportunity to experiment and play around.
The game does give you permanent a slab in reprise, which basically gives you two free lives in each zone. This is essential really as it’s pretty easy to kill yourself accidentally (fall off a cliff, hoisted by your own grenade etc) so having a few get out of jail frees makes things a lot more enjoyable. It also encourages experimentation and also can be used tactically in that you can suicide a visionary knowing you will respawn anyway without loss.
Anyway, I’ve typed way more than I planned. It was a very good game and definitely highly recommended. I do hope that it does well as Arkane really are one of the best studios out there and they really deserve a big hit.