Deathloop has arrived to rave reviews and GOTY contender status, and I got my hands on it for the first time yesterday, along with everyone else, now that it’s on sale.
While I am generally not into roguelike loop systems where progress and gear is lost on death, Deathloop has still managed to hook me, and has a Hades-like “build yourself up” system that allows you to retain certain builds and loadouts as you progress, and learn the ins and outs of every map so you constantly feel like you’re making progress, even if you die.
Arkane is heavily channeling Dishonored here, with the added complexity of the time loop and gear management, albeit perhaps in a more stripped down version with fewer powers and weapons. The addition of an “invasion” mechanic by other players or the AI as Julianne is rather brilliant, and terrifying, and adds a new dimension to gameplay to keep things fresh, which I wasn’t expecting.
I spent the better part of yesterday mapping out my assassination plans for eight different core members of the island as I try to break…whatever is going on with this wacky time loop. I’m still not clear on the overall plot here, who I am and why I “betrayed” the island, but perhaps that will get more clear as I make my way to the end.
I do think Deathloop deserves the praise it’s getting, yet I do fall short of offering it the sort of perfect 10 scores I’ve seen from major outlets. And that’s really due to one aspect in particular that I just can’t shake.
These enemies just…don’t seem that smart?
What I’ve found with Deathloop is that running around with your machete out is enough to clear probably 95% of the maps at any given time. The way enemies react, or rather don’t react, to your kills make it really easy to fly around whacking people, not raising any alarms because apparently outside of gunfire, no one appears to hear anything out of a ten foot radius or so. I feel highly discouraged from using any actual guns 90% of the time as that will usually draw the entire map down on you. But simply sprinting around with the machete you start with seems like the answer to almost every problem in the game. The enemy AI simply does not seem smart enough to not get wrecked by the starter weapon for the full duration of the game. And if you are spotted? You can ditch pretty much any enemy tail in about five seconds of teleporting away from a zone.
The only time the game has really posed a significant challenge outside of the boss battles themselves is the final “night party” mission where there are just so many enemies that you can’t machete your way to victory. This one mission feels harder than everything that came before it combined, and has caused me the most trouble so far. But even then, at one point I nexus-linked an entire floor of enemies, macheted one, and then killed pretty much the entire room as a result. That was enjoyable.
So, if I had one complaint, that would be it so far. But it’s not that major in the grand scheme of things, and Deathloop is still plenty fun when you’re slicing and dicing with your overpowered machete. I just wish a more diverse range of tactics felt viable, and I also don’t love that you only get two superpower skills, and it feels like one of them always should be the blink teleport, or else traversal is exponentially harder.
Overall, I highly recommend Deathloop so far if you liked Arkane’s past games, or just enjoy “puzzle combat” in general. I’m going to go hunt down some more intel and build up my slabs some more as we speak.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series, and The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook.
