Deathloop

 

I picked up Deathloop only knowing barely much about it, basically just the front cover. It wasnt until a few hours into the game that I even realized its by the same devs as Dishonoured. So, I really didn't have any expectations going into the game at all.

The game starts up quickly, without any difficulty selection, or much of a lengthy intro. You do get presented with two game modes: Break the Loop (the main story) , and Protect the Loop , which is locked until after you finish the story. Turns out this is basically just an online PVP mode. Upon getting into the campaign, within the first 60 seconds you're already playing, which is great, no waiting around for big expositions. You wake up on the beach, having total amnesia not even knowing your name or where you are. This is the core component of the games narrative. The game isn't really cutscene driven, moreso its just heavy, constant dialogue chatting through your ear via radio. Juliana, the mysterious person taunting you through the radio, is your adversary that apparently keeps killing you over and over. The games name, "Deathloop"  is constantly reminded to the player, and is taken literally.

Deathloop is a First person shooter, but also with the typical modern day RPG-lite mechanics and 'loot'. You have loadouts, perks, attachments, and theres even different tiers of weapons and powers which indicate their effectiveness, this is whats told to you during the introductions of the game. The game progresses slowly at first, having a lengthy sort of tutorial section before it lets you off on your own. You get taken on a few short missions around the games different locations, introducing you to the enemies, which look like these humanoid things wearing masks or unemotional faces, having weird colors, and generally looking a bit like delusions or something, in a way the enemies are kind of cool looking, but also feeds back into that comic book style that almost reminds me of Fortnight vibe. Here the game also introduces you to the stealth mechanics. Since the game is by this Dishonoured devs, its obvious that they want to encourage stealth, there are messages warning you not to be loud, "maybe not here", to go different routes, etc. Well, I don't really like stealth games. So I didn't play this game like a stealth game. I played it like an FPS.  There are messages constantly written all over the walls or floating in the environment, almost like a schizophrenic hallucination, giving you clues and more details. You get a machete melee weapon, that is quite effective in taking down enemies in just 2 slashes, the second slash does an animation which kills them. You get introduced to the basic combat, a standard modern FPS gameplay with ironsights, hit markers, enemy markers for how spotted you are, alarms can go off, machine gun turrets which can spot you, and sensors around town which also set off alarms and lock doors. You get this hacking device that you can hold in your left hand to disable turrets, alarms, open doors, etc. You can also dual wield in your left hand, but I never used it as I felt it was too clunky because the controls are not that great in this game, there are too many actions and it can be cumbersome and awkward to fumble around with everything on the spot. This became much of an issue throughout the whole game, fighting with the controls and doing actions I didn't mean to do (I played with a controller, maybe you can blame me for that, but I would imagine thats how most people experienced this game.) After a short prologue where you run through a tunnel and find a password to unlock a door, the game opens up with all these menu's that you navigate through after each "day". At first this was a lot to take in, and felt needlessly bloated, but I reserved judgement and just tried to slowly wrap my head around it.


And it doesnt take long to see what kind of tone and narrative this game is going for. It's a sort of whimsical, cartoonish, campy, in your face obnoxious narrative that just seems like its trying to push an agenda. Like this Juliana characters whole motivation for existing in the game is like the developers pushing some political idea like "See guys? Women can be badass and individuals too, they're strong and individualistic, they don't take no shit from men! Look how much shes dominating Cole, look how shes totally in control! Women are strong and awesome!"  I have absolutely nothing against strong female characters, or anything like that. But here it just felt forced, and token. Like its not like this because its an actual great narrative, but because it serves some moral or political agenda. And besides that, just the whole tone of the presentation is not one that I really vibe with. At times the whole thing gave me Fortnight or Borderlands vibes... It's that same sort of overly stylized, almost childish, comic book quirky thing going on, and the writing is , dare I say "Peak redditor" ..take that how you will.


Basically after each outing, you come back to these mission lobby screen where you can select your loadout, and select which of the 4 games locations to visit next. You have "Visionary leads" page, which it turns out is the main missions page. Then you have "Arsenal leads" page which is side-content to unlock new weapons and gear, which I never really paid attention to because you end up doing a bunch of these accidentally anyway. Now, the thing is some of the 'objectives' are only available at certain times in the day, Morning, Noon, Afternoon, Evening. This is controlled with a little button on the left side of the screen, if you want. So if a mission says it starts at Noon, you better set the dial to Noon or else if you enter the location you wont be able to progress the mission and you'll just be wasting your time.
Unfortunately the game does a poor job staying coherent with many of these small details, much in part of the general interface and mission tracking system being an incoherent mess, as well as many of its mechanics. Quite often I would find myself trying to track a mission, enter a location, and there being multiple 'main objectives' in the list, but really only the top one progresses the campaign, and the others are like temporary things you can do to farm equipment and even if you successfully do it and, for example, kill the person you are tracking, the mission will just reset anyway and you wont gain any progress. This is because, in true to the games name, everytime a 'day' ends (so after one loop of Morning, Noon, Afternoon, evening)  you get taken back to the Morning, and lose all your equipment. Progress is saved, in the mandatory main plotline, but the optional things just get reset for the most part. This was very confusing to figure out for maybe the first half of the game I was very frustrated and feeling like I was most of the time running around making no progress or having no damn clue what to do. I would be losing all my equipment after every so often, running around being surrounded by enemies without much of a chance to do anything, and kinda clueless how to progress.

Eventually I wrapped my head around the games "Infusion" mechanic, which believe it or not is like, once again, a Dark Souls inspired thing. It's basically souls, and at the end of every day you lose all your souls. And if you die you lose your 'souls' and drop a 'bloodstain' and you can go pick it back up to get your souls back. (I Actually forget what the name for it in this game was, but its blatantly just ripping off Souls mechanics.) This is further proven by the insipidly stupid Invasion system. Not only does the game try to cash in , and appeal to the Souls trend at the time with the bloodstains and Souls system, it also has real PVP invasions that can randomly happen. Enemy players can play as Juliana, and randomly invade other players worlds to hunt them down and ruin their fun. Now, you get an option to just disable this feature. And at first I thought "You know what, I'm not gonna disable it, lets just see what they were going for here." Yeah, didn't take long for me to change my mind. I would be trying to go about the missions, complete my objectives, and I'd get 75% through a mission, then all of a sudden some pro PVP guy with crazy gear would show up in my world, lock the escape, and randomly pop around a corner and shit all over me , ruining 30 mins of progress. After this happened a few times, I just disabled the whole invasion mechanic. Like, why wouldn't I? It works in Souls games, it doesn't work here. Whats the point? For the thrill? I don't care, I just want to progress the game. It's a stupid system and only seems like they put it in to again, cash in on some trend. "Hey guys, you know that famous game thats doing really well? Guess what, we have those mechanics too! You'll love it!"


Eventually the game opens up a bit, and reveals that there are 8 'visionaries' that must be killed in order to finish the game. The dedicated screen for this, Visionaries Tracking, is like a bunch of detective files where you can choose which of the 8 main files to track at any time. Now, it doesn't really seem like theres any sort of intended progression route or structure. You just pick one of them at any time, like the game is almost absent of any pacing, I didn't really like it and found it confusing and annoying. At first I think you only have access to 5 of the Visionary case files, but as it progresses you unlck the last 3. The game started off to look like it was maybe promising, the FPS mechanics are there, OK it has all sorts of loot systems and attachments, perks, stuff to collect, it has this quirky Loop mechanic with the days and time shifting, it has this almost open-world sandbox mission structure...but the illusion of a possibly fun game was quickly shattered the more I played. The missions just suck, and most of the time spent feels like you're doing next to nothing, the feeling of progress is just terrible in this game. Many missions consist of just spawning into some location, running past the generic open world enemies to some building, going inside a building and looking for a piece of paper, or a computer, or some radio which gives you a line of dialogue and then thats it, Mission complete. Go to the exit to progress the next quest. After you exit each location, it gives you a summary screen of what you've accomplished. And the confusing part is most of the time it will just say shit like "Just wasting time"  , even though you've progressed a main plot point. It makes it seem like you're not doing anything productive, even though you are. The game is so confusing with shitty presentation like this, its frustrating cause I wasn't sure if I was doing anything right, but eventually I understood what was required of me, its just stupid the whole presentation and UI of the game is such an incoherent mess.

So back to the missions, I pick one Visionary (main quest) to focus on, and go to the places it tells me, pass the time until the right objective opens up, and go in. The game gives you this double jump ability at the start, which is extremely broken and OP. You just double jump past the entire map, past all the enemies, it almost trivializes combat. I realized this a few hours into the game, but before that it was pretty fucking annoying trying to navigate past the random trash open world sandbox mobs to get to the objective. Once I realized I can just double jump past most of them, I was making more steady progress. So most of the time you just go in, double jump past everyone, go to some house and grab a piece of paper which progresses the main quest because you unlock some password, code, you find some plot point or whatever, have to exit,  then have to go back in for the next mission. It doesnt help that the game has tons of loading screens in between, the pacing of this game is just annoying. Way too many loading screens and bloated interfaces.

The way death works here is that you essentially get 3 lives. When you die, you leave a 'bloodstain' on the groudn to go back to collect your souls, and you spawn nearby. If you die 3 times, the entire day resets, you wake back up on the beach, lose all your guns that havn't been locked in with Imbuing, and you can also frequently lose lots of progress including entire missions you've already completed. Thats right, there are some missions in the game that you can complete, and if you die 3 times, well the time in the world goes back to such a state to where the mission hasn't been completed. This was really, really fucking annoying at times. It's not so much that I hate the death penalty, its that theres so many loading screens and downtime in between, and having to re-do things I've already completed is just the straw that broke the camels back here.

So, the aim of the game is to kill each of the 8 visionaries, but many of them I completled without barely noticing how. Like for instance, one guy you just go into some field and place down a radio, and suddenly the visionary is complete? Like it gives you these shitty, cheap looking comic book slideshow cutscenes of you completing the mission. I barely noticed I was at the end of some of them. Another one, Frank, you do some shit with his fireworks by interacting with some computer, and then you get another one of these cheap little comic book cutscenes. Ok? For main bosses, many of them are disappointing and barely noticeable. For others, you do get to break into their bases, fight through hordes of enemies, and actually face to face battle with them. These can be exciting, you get into these boss battles and once you kill them, they explode into all sorts of loot, special high tier colored weapons, perks, trinkets, abilities, etc.

Though, many of the visionary missions are just shitty. Like there is this one mission that you stick your arm into some device which disables your 3 lives. Now you only have one life. You have to do this whole mission and facility with 1 life. Now, this wasnt even obvious at the time, and I would die once, and then wonder why the fuck I was waking back up on the beach with the day over cutscene. Game did a terrible job explaining its self what was happening here. This place is some big casino type complex full of turrets that gun you down in a moments notice. As I said before, the controls can be cumbersome and shitty. You have to use this hacking device in your left hand to disable the turrets, but its weird how it works. You have to kind of "lock on" to the turret, then you can keep hacking behind cover. Frequently I would try to hack the turret but the controls would screw me up and it would start gunning me down, me thinking I had successfully hacked it. Or I would be far away on the other side of the map, and the turret would start shooting me anyway. More shitty missions include forced stealth sections. Now these were just downright awful. Many, many failed attempts, loading screen after loading screen, moving the clock forwards each time. Takes like 5 minutes to even get back to the stealth section, and then if you crawl in one wrong spot, move to one of the 99 out of 100 wrong places its just instant failure. Terrible. Massive time waste. Don't give me forced stealth missions ,or if you do, make them not so fucking annoying and tedious. These included this terrible mission about some mansion party where you have to somehow know to crawl into the basement and turn off some beer supply, then assassinate the guy, or you have to do this insanely stupid shit upstairs with a music box machine. I couldn't figure any of it out. I had to Google it after wasting too much time failing over and over. Just shite. Theres another terrible forced stealth mission later on in the game at some nuclear facility place. If you get spotted, you get like 60 seconds before the entire island blowns up with a nuke and it resets the entire day, just one life here as well. Any progress or missions youve done when this happens on that day get reset as well. This was extremely frustrating. Like punching couch in anger stuff. Eventually I realized you can just speedrun to the nuke and disable it by cutting the wires properly ,but yeah I had to Google it as well. Not wasting any more time on this shitty game.

Like the missions are just not good. Like I keep saying, most of the time all youre doing is entering some open sandbox map, double jumping past all the openworld trash mobs, running into some building to find a fucking piece of paper just to be told to exit and start again for the next objective. Its so tedious. One of these missions didn't even give me an objective marker. It was just like "Go to Fristad and explore the shore"  What? I just walked around this god damn map for like 1 hour finding nothing. Theres a tiny little photograph in the menu showing two people standing by the shore, I couldn't understand what the hell it wanted me to do. Well I had to Googl this too, the game is just a massive time waste of annoying, shitty objectives. Well it turns out in the tiny photograph, you can just barely see an airplane in the water. In the photo, it just looks like a rock, because its so tiny. So it tries to give you a hint to find some airplane in the water by a shore. Well I didn't , or couldn't notice, and I looked it up. You just have to find some bunker by the shore to go pickup some note to progress the mission. Just more time wasting bullshit. One of the missions is in this like toxic plant where the bottom floor has this green gas that you cant touch. I would sometimes fall into this pit accidentally, fumbling with the controls, trying to get to the boss.


Theres this other main Visionary mission called "Space Invader" where you go invade some like big arcade base and get to the top only to find a super computer that talks to you. He wants some talking head doll thing, so I just double jump through the open world, collect it nearby, run back and give it to him. Visionary complete. Ok then? this one wasnt anything amazing, kind of just a typical FPS mission. It was OK.

The games audio is mostly obnoxiously bad. There is almost nonstop, annoying chatter going on in your ear from all sorts of radios, often times multiple at once. It gives me Borderlands vibes frequently , which is not good. Sometimes you'll be listening to the Juliana talking in your ear, then some optional voice memo, and then also some other person, and then also all the NPC's on the street yelling. Its a clusterfuck. The music is also nonstop blaring this shitty 1960s like Austin Powers whimsical spy music, its just dreadful, and is nonstop. Its a cacophony of obnoxious bullshit.

The guns in the game, the combat? The guns are mostly not that fun. You have this single shot rifle that basically one hits any enemy in the game, I used that the whole time. You also have SMG machine gun, shotguns, multiple different pistols, this big clunky machine gun, and this other smaller machine gun. Well, the entire game I basically just used this single shot rifle, and for the beginning of the game I used these pistols but the recoil was shit and they were not very good. Once I got a blue tier single shot rifle, and also killed a Visionary which had this crazy good purple SMG that "Replenishes life when shooting enemies" thats all I used for the rest of the game. The guns are very mediocre looking and feeling. The attachments system isnt that thrilling either. Just stuff like less recoil, more zoom, more accuracy.. I barely cared. Just faster reload on the single shot was all I needed. Frequently I would use the machete instead of guns, because of the instant takedown ability. The problem is, you are left vulnerable when getting into the takedown animation, so this became frustrating after awhile and I stopped bothering. But in the beginning of the game it was quite effective. The combat wasnt the hard part of the game, as I said, you can just double jump past everything that isn't mandatory anyway, the hard part was trying to figure out what the hell the game requires of you most of the time.


At the start of the game things are pretty damn hard. Your health barely regenerates, maybe like 20% and slowly. Though, not long into the game, maybe 30% or 40% through, I realized the Imbue system and how the items work, and I got perks to massively increase my health regen, maximum health ,decrease my damage taken, that sort of stuff. Once I got this stuff I could actually float around through combat and make my way through the missions without as much trouble, but at the start yeah if you don't look out for upgrades like this its a real pain in the ass. Theres no skill tree or level ups or anything, so all your power comes from these character perks, weapon upgrades, and these things called "Slabs" which give you special unique magical abilities, like the ability to teleport (Very similar to Blink from Dishonoured)  Sadly,  I unlocked this teleport ability early into the game, before understanding how Imbue works, and I died and lost it for basically the rest of the entire playthrough. I'm sure I could of done some optional mission to get it again, but I didn't care enough. And the few other times I had access to these slabs and picked them up, I didnt have enough Souls (what the fuck were they called in this game?)  to Imbue it and keep it, slabs cost 15k to imbue and I just never had enough and lost most of them. But they werent interesting anyway. Stuff like picking up and throwing enemies, or buffing yourself to be "tougher" . I hardly used them at all.

Towards the end of the game theres this mission to go to this power plant and redirect power to different locations around the game. You have to go down in some basement kill a bunch of enemies and put batteries in this generator to power the redirection process. The game does such a shitty job representing the objectives to you that I had to re-do this entire process 3 different times. There are 4 power switches, and after you turn on two generators you have enough power to turn one on. Then the objective marker updates to "Exit" , telling you you're done and can move on. Well, technically, you shouldnt move on. Because if you do now, youre just going to have to come back later once you complete the next objective and need to come back to change the power again. Really you should turn on all the generators now, and turn on all the switches to save yourself the headache of re-doing the entire process multiple times. Well, the game doesnt make this clear. And I annoyingly, painstakingly had to do this stupid generator section 3 or 4 different times. Just tedious, annoying bullshit. Oh yeah, and the battery used to power the generatorcan be randomly exploded too, which was super annoying , forcing you to waste more time going around finding different batteries for it.

The end of the game is super anti-climactic, too. You get in some rocket ship, fly to Juliana, and just walk up and have a chat with her and can choose one of two (?) endings. No epic final boss fight, no big enemy section, no battle at all. The entire game shes shit talking in your ear and is built up to be this formidable foe, yet you dont even get any sort of epic finale. What the fuck? They thought the shitty PVP invasion system was enough to suffice? So lackluster. I guess the big finale was the last mission "Ending it" where you have to kill 7 visionaries in one day, in 3 separate mission loading screen instances. Well thankfully this wasnt hard, but I did fail multiple times because of again, vague stupid objectives. One of the visionaries, Frank again, you have to interact with his computer and select the right option to sabotage his fireworks. I incorrectly picked the wrong option two times (because I fucking forgot which one, or didn't even realize you had to choose the right one) The first time, the computer exploded, so I thought an enemy did it, so I reloaded. The second time, I picked the wrong option. Well both times I picked the wrong option. Finally after I got it right the third time , the rest of the last 7 visionaries mission was easy enough. Just stupid, tedious stuff like this makes the game a chore. The last 'checkpoint'  a bunch of visionaries show up in that aforementioned Mansion, thankfully its not stealth this time. This mansion section is built up to be this big epic invasion assassinate thing. But really all you have to do is stand outside and bait every single NPC outdoors, they just run outside after you. And you can safely camp in a corner, set up multiple turrets, and mow them all down without much threat in like 2 minutes. So thats what I did, took out the few remiaining visionaries, got acess to this Unique yellow colored laser gun thing that  I didn't even get a chance to use because the game ended shortly after. Just very, very disappointing missions all around.

The narrative of the whole game is incoherent gibberish. Time travel interdimensionality schizophrenic nonsense. I lost interest in caring about the plot not long into the game, to be honest. It just all seemed like drivel.

I thought Deathloop would be better than it is. I thought it would just be an enjoyable generic FPS game, but sadly this game tries its hardest to not be generic and thats probably what makes it so shit for me. If this had just a standard formula of progressing mission to mission , without any psuedo-open world gimmicks, without any of this pace-less Visionary shit, I might of liked it more. The pacing of the game is just terrible, the whole thing feels tedious, the UI's and downtime is super annoying, the death mechanics making you sometimes lose progress is infuriating, the "loot" is largely uninteresting and feels shoehorned rather than a genuinely interesting gameplay decision, the tone of the game is just lame, the graphics are not too amazing, its a typical modern game using a modern engine, I mean the lighting, shaders, shadows and stuff are decent enough, but the artstyles and visuals, environments, towns, are not much to look at. Sadly its not even an average game, I flatout just did not like this game and the entire time I was either frowning, annoyed, mad, or disappointed. The only really enjoyment I had out of this was laughing at the stupid dialogue, cringy characters, and maybe some of the combat was momentarily here and there somewhat enjoyable, sniping guys across the map with that one shot rifle, double jumping around, but yeah its few and far between moments of enjoyment from me with this game.

4/10