You’ve just been brutally murdered. You wake up on a beach of black sand and volcanic rock, yesterday’s hangover like a grindstone on your skull. The whole dying thing was a liꩲttle traumatic, too. Welcome to Deathloop.
You’re not sure how you got here or where here is, and there are words hanging in the air - ethereal words, written on the landscape and nudging you inland towards a rusty submachine gun next to a bunker entrance. You instinctively grab it, slam a clip in, pull back the slide, and shoot some nearby targets. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:It feels good - snappy and precise.
You’ve been here before.
After heading down into the bunker, you find what appears to be your base of operations. ꦛAmong the whit𒉰eboards and half-repaired electronics, there’s a hacking tool that doubles as a radio - it’s called the Hackamajig. A voice greets you over the static, a woman called Julianna. There’s familiarity in her tone, but there’s also something else: contempt, impatience, maybe a slither of fondness? It’s complicated.
You hack the lock and find another door in the next room - this one can’t be hacked, but there’s a keypad next to it. “You know the code,” the words silently scream at you. “YOU KNOW THE CODE.” You don’t know the code, but you’ve played games like this before - Deus Ex, Dishonored, Prey - and they love references. “0451” doesn’t get you in, but it does get you something. Lucki🔯ly, t𒉰here’s another path that leads out to a cliffside.
There’s a man pissing here. You make your way towards him as Julianna’s voice rings out over the loudspeaker. She’s telling everyone to kill Colt - that’s y🦋ou, by the way. That’s your name. It’s all coming back. There’s a machete on the table and it feels good in your hands.
You’ve definitely been here before.
You creep up on the man, the man called “Pisser”, before plunging your blade into his spine. Pisser falls to the floor and vanishes out of existence, leaving behind a🌟 black shadow where his body once was. There are four more guards between you and your objective - a hilltop mansion - and none of them are, in fact, called Pisser. You focus on them to reveal more about their equipment, marking them on your HUD so you can track their movements through walls.
Yeah, you have been here before.
You slide down the hill like a mountain lion, stopping next to a rock, and use thꦯe hacking tool to mess with a phone box, drawing one of the guards away from their frieꦿnds before stabbing them in the neck.
Now there are only three left, and you know what that means: gun time. Pop, pop, pop - the movements come naturally. Three heads, three bullets. T🎀hey’ve barely dropped to the floor by the time you’re walking through the mansion door. The code for the bunker is waiting inside. I won’t spoil what happens next, but I will say this: you die. It’s called Deathloop, what did you expect?
You wake up on a beach of black sand and volcanic rock, yesterday’s hangover like a grindstone on your skull. The whole dying thing was a little traumatic, too. You understand how you got here - you died - and you know where here is now: you’re on the island of Blackreef. This time you do know the code, so you gra♔b the gun, squeeze off a few rounds, grab the Hackamajig, chat to Julianna, and press the digits on the keypad. This is the core... well, loop, at the heart of Deathloop: make progress,ܫ find new information, die, and wake up on the beach with a new destination or plan in mind.
From here, you choose from four locations at four different times of the day: morning, noon, afternoon, and evening. Each of the districts slightly changes depending on your actions and what time you visit. If someone is set to attend a party in one district and you kill them in another earlier on, obviously they can’t attend the party on account of being, you know, dead. But since this is a time loop, they’ll be back again tomorrow. To them, it’s the same day - they’re unaware of the loop - but you retain your knowled💯ge and obtain an increasingly deadly arsenal of guns and superpowers as you progress.
The only way to break the loop is to kill eight targets - called Visionaries - in a single day. It might sound like you need a real-life conspiracy theor🙈ist’s whiteboard to do this - remembering eight schedules and how to influence those schedules to line your targe♔ts up for a perfect run - but that’s not the case. Deathloop is much more guided than you might be expecting.
There’s a tab in the menu called Leads, and you can tick these on at any time to guide you towards an objective. It can be something like figuring out the identity of a target at a masquerade party or finding a way to dismantle a machine so a character heads to a different place during the night, all while also tackling a wide range of side objectives - cerebral puzzles, agility tests, little story vignettes, and more.𓃲 There are even some Leads to follow that, once completed, are triggered automatically between loops, so you don’t have to repeat them each time. Door codes are also tracked by the game.
Keep following the Leads and you’re eventually served up the solution - the Golden Loop. Once it’s locked in, you just have to pull it off. It took me around 14 hours to reach this point and one attempt to kill all eight targets in a day. However, this was during the preview stage where it was single-player only, and there’s one th♔ing that could have changed my experience drastically - Julianna. The online mode has been live for a week now and I can’t put it down.
Julianna is one of the game’s central mysteries - who is she, what does she want, and why does she seem to enjoy repeatedly killing Colt? She’s brilliant, and so is Colt. Their chem🌺istry is electric, their casting choices are perfect, and the dialogue is sharper than a Dorito through the roof of your mouth. Hell, even the side characters are great. There’s plenty of intrigue in the story to pull you along, and even 💦though the conclusion won’t blow you away, every single NPC bark and overheard conversation oozes with personality.
While you might enjoy 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Colt and Julianna’s banter, you have to remember that she’s a Visionary, too. What makes her interesting mechanically is she can appear in your game at almost any point. During the preview stage, she was controlled by AI. You can play it this way,🎉 too, if you like. Deathloop comes into its own, however, when you let other players invade your game as Julianna.
Picture the scene - you’ve killed almost♎ all of your targets and you just have one section to go. I’ll keep it vague, but imagine you have your final kill lined up, you’ve crept past dozens of enemies to get here - a perfect infiltration - and an angelic choir rings out, signaling that Julianna has arrived. She could be anywhere. She could be anyone.
Julianna completely alters how you approach levels. She makes you play more cautiously, for a start. And because each of these levels has its own set of compounds - usually multiple of them, with buildings opening up and closing down depending on what time of the day you visit - it feels different every time. If you head to the Updaam district at the right time, you’ll find an Among Us-styl🎶e LARP game in progress. One of your targets might be here, but so might Julianna.
You’re hunting while being hunted, surrounded by NPCs as a human player tracks you down. Get spotted by the AI and they’ll alert Julianna to your location. Since Deathloop doesn’t have a manual save system, you have to live with every blunder, which leads to pant-wetting stealth moments followed by intense chase sequences when you’re spotted. You’re using your powers to teleport through windows, before sliding down corridors with your shotgun and bl♍asting out kneecaps, throwing yourself out of a window on the other side🎃, and escaping down the street. Will the other player give chase or will they spring a trap near your target?
In another district, you’ll find Dr. Wenjie Evans, one of the Visionaries. She’s performing experiments that allow her to manipulate the time stream to create copies of things. There are multiple Wenjies to kill. If you’ve been invaded by Julianna, one of these Wenjies could actually be her in disguise. You see, Julianna can use a power𒁃 called Masquerade to take on the appearance of 🃏any NPC in the game - she takes their appearance and they take Julianna’s. You might think you’re creeping up on a Julianna player, but they’re actually disguised as the Wenjie that’s about to drop from the ceiling and murder the crap out of you.
When playing as Julianna and invading other people’s games, you only have a single life. You have to kill Colt three times to win. It isn’t easy, but it’s satisfying when you pull it off. You have to be smart, you have to use guerilla tactics to get in, do damage, and get out. You can drop from the rafters and snap his neck from above, or creep up behind him and shove your machete through his back. You can alter the level's hazards by moving turrets and mines around, messing with people's expectations. You can even boot Colt off a cliff. The evil thrill of it all never gets old. You can’t play multiplayer like this anywhere else.
It works so well because you feel like you know the rules when it comes to dealing with AI. You kno﷽w they won’t look up at certain angles, and you know their range of vision is limited. They also won’t spin around as you approach them from behind.ꦛ When any NPC could actually be another player, it’s terrifying. None of the usual stealth game rules apply. During one invasion, I spent about ten minutes cowering on a roof as Colt, listening to Julianna’s footsteps as she hunted me below. When I finally built up the courage to go after her, she’d set a trap, causing a room of poisonous gas to explode. Thank god I was shitting my pants in the rafters at the time.
The only thing that occasionally drags Deathloop down is when you're paired with someone who has a bad connection. After about 40 invasions, this happened only twice, but it ruined the experience when it did. In a game like this, you need precision control when darting between rooftops or hiding on precarious beams. Any kind of rubber banding completely messes up the movement and you end up taking damage by falling or bumbling into Colt because you just got yanked backward off your perch. Thankfully, it's rare, and the good massively outweighs the bad here.
To balance out the fact that Julianna has every NPC on the map helping her, you only have to kill Julianna once to remove her from the board, and you can hoover up all her upgrades and replenish your extra lives once she’s dead. If she🦋 does manage to beat♒ you, the loop resets and you’re back at the start of the day. You still have all your knowledge and whatever parts of the arsenal you’ve retained through a currency system, but it’s the end of whatever you were just trying to do.
You’re 💖back on the beach of black sand and volcanic rock. Dying might have been traumatic, but you can’t even be mad about it. You got outplayed. It’s a thrilling marria🌺ge of systems that will either excite you or put you off playing completely. I’m in the former camp.
It might feel like you have, but you haven’t been here before.
Deathloop feels like your first bite of a cheesecake after being stranded on a desert island and living off seaweed for six months. In a sea of shotgun-spread triple-A games ♔that are all too familiar, Deathloop is a precision 50.𝔍 cal bullet of originality right through your eye socket.
It’s as if Arkane made a Dishonored game where a guns-blazing approach is as viable as being a ghost - oh, and it’s endlessly replayable. Even when the credits roll, it feels like you’ve barely seen what Deathloop has to offer. Whether you’re playing as Colt and fighting off player invasions or invading other players’ games as Julianna, each confrontation is unique. I can’t wait to see the pl꧑ayers inevitably build their own etiquette, their own rules of engagement for what constitutes an honourable duel between Colt and Julianna.
One of the things that made the battle royale genre boom was the novelty of it - peo🦄ple wanted something different from the usual gun-on-gun combat popularised by games like Call of Duty. You can do well in PUBG even if you lack the twitch skills to outgun other players. You can get to the end of the game with cunning, guile, or hiding in a toilet with your shotgun trained on the door. There’s a thrill to that, too - in those quiet periods where nothing is happening. In those moments, the game exists in your head. All you see is the door, all you hear are distant gunshots and footsteps until they eventual꧒ly close in and the tension ramps up. Deathloop captures that same tension and ramps it up even further.
I can count on one hand how many multiplayer games incorporate stealth, but there should be more - it taps into the same place as an intense horror game like Alien Isolation, but the predator that’s hunting you here is far more cunning than any AI could ever be. Marry that to some of the best level design, art direction, narrative design, and audio work in the business, 🌳and you have what makes Deathloop so special. 🍌This is Arkane Studios at the top of its game, from the grindhouse Kubrick art style to the looping, winding level design that makes you go “oh fuck” every time you find a new route towards a target.
You can see flashes of Arkane’s backlog here. I’ll never tire of booting enemi🍨es from high places with a kick that’s straight out of Dark Messiah. The Blink-style teleport from Dishonored ensures every level has vertical stealth and action opportunities. Hell, there’s even a flash of Arkane’s unreleased multiplayer project, The Crossing, in Julianna’s invasions. Everything the studio has ever learned is here and polished to perfection.
When you play and write about games for a living, there’s a tendenc🅰y to move on to the next thing as soon as the credits roll. With Deathloop, I’m back on the beach of black sand and volcanic rock, cocking my pistol in preparation for my next run-in with Julianna.
Sure, I have bee🐠n here before, and the bullet♑ is the same, but the kill is always new.
Score: 5/5
Version tested: PS5. A review copy was provided by Bethesda.
