The shooting didn't feel quite right. Only the sniper rifle felt right to use but obviously that limits the play style. The most effective was just to snipe as much as possible and then sneak around and stab dudes. It never felt like I had much choice even though it was presented as a "open" game. It felt a little broken.
The actual loop of the game was fine but really it is how most games work. You had a few lives and when those are done you start over. You can keep some stuff but usually not everything. The real kicker though was that it was kind of buggy. One too many hard crashes. The last one happened just after a difficult battle and lost all progress on that level. Pretty frustrating. I was maybe half-way through the game but didn't feel any desire to continue. May pick it up later but probably not on xbox series x or until they do a lot of patching.

Phenomenal game. Not perfect, but one of the most fun experiences I've had with a game in a while. The concept is utilized incredibly well, timeloops should be utilized in games more. The freedom it gives you is probably my favorite part, you can approach the game practically any way you want and do any mission in any order. And it all flows so well, with some of the best shooter mechanics I've experienced in gaming.

Really want to check out some more of what Arcane has done now. Loved this game to pieces.

Copied from Steam review:

When I first learned about this game, I was immediately interested. "Outer Wilds" was my favorite game of 2019, and proved how effective, fun, and rewarding the "information-centered time loop" genre can be. I've been craving for another dip into those waters, and while "Deathloop" definitely did a great job working within it's core gameplay "loop", it was a tad too hand-holdy for my taste. Also, the abrupt and lackluster ending left an emptiness that soured the experience quite a bit upon completion. Yet even with that sour taste, "Deathloop" was still an incredibly enjoyable experience through and through.

In the roughly 15 hours it took me to finish the game, this was my experience:

First 2 hours: "This is intriguing, but confusing. Not completely sure if it's for me, though I'll stick with it."

3rd hour: "Jeez, I'm starting to get exhausted. However, I'd feel bad if I stopped now. Let me push just a little further."

4th-6th hour: "Okay, I'm starting to get this. Everything's still pretty disorganized in my head but I see what I gotta do."

7th hour: "Okay! Things are clicking and everything's becoming digestible. Now the fun truly begins."

8th-14th hour: "YES! I dig this. It's all coming together. I've mastered the combat and know each level's layouts; things are feeling good. I see the end in sight and I'm not gonna stop till I get there."

Final hour: "Man! What a rush!! I figured it all out, and here we are. The final piece! And....... mmm. That's it? Really??"


I do recommend this game as the sum of its parts are fantastic! The art direction, voice acting, characters, and hands-on gameplay mechanics are all superb. But as a time-loop puzzle at its core, the constant waypoint following disincentives any true problem-solving, and the ending doesn't serve the world or our actions justice. The journey, though incredibly easy, is fun, but none of it feels meaningful by the end. However, I wouldn't let that stop you from giving this game a shot. If you can work past the clutter that is the first few hours, you'll find a highly enjoyable and unique game that I'm sure you'll have a fun time with. Personally I just wish there was a little more depth to the story before the credits rolled. The build up is incredible, yet not having the proper payoff makes the mystery lose much of its weight.

TL; DR
Fun game and cool world to play in! Though the lack of true problem solving makes this feel more like a sub-linear fps than an "Outer Wilds" like experience. If you can go in without those expectations you'll find a highly enjoyable game worthy of all its critical praise; even with its disappointing ending.

I played this on an RTX 3080 and Ryzen 9 3950x. With a few performance support settings turned on, I still often encountered heavy frame drops upon initially loading in to levels which made the game unplayable (would go away after about a minute of waiting though). I also experienced 3 crashes for random and unknown reasons and a few immersion-breaking (but not game-breaking) bugs. However, the rest of the game ran near-flawlessly. I know many reviews are talking about performance issues though so make sure you keep an eye out to what works with your system.

He disfrutado de esta propuesta de Arkane, más cuando he aprendido a jugarla. Una vez que he empleado tiempo en conocer los mapas, he conseguido las diferentes habilidades y algunas de sus modificaciones, he logrado buenas armas y he profundizado más allá del nivel mata mata, la experiencia de partida invita a continuar avanzando en el bucle hasta el momento de romperlo. Y a diferencia de otros juegos de acción en primera persona, cuando lo he terminado no lo he desinstalado. Todavía hay cosas que quiero probar, algún objeto que conseguir...

Deathloop was in Humble Monthly somewhere in 2022. I was really excited to play this, installed it, started it and eventually it came to the point where it dropped to below 30 FPS.

This year, I decided to give it another chance, used a guide for optimal settings by Digital Foundry and yay it worked ...

I had a lot of fun for two days. I killed Wenjie, tried out a lot of different plans to approach to my target, killed one or two Juliannas and more.

... but not for long.

On the third day of my playthrough I once again started the game excited for more. I picked my loadout, went into the game world and ... frames dropped. "Maybe I should update my GPU drivers", I thought, updated them and rebooted my PC. Nothing changed. I tried out more settings, triedevery fix I've found online and ... nothing. After about an hour I gave up. The frustration was too high.

Deathloop is a great game and I would love to play more, but in its current technical state, I have to wait until they release a proper fix for the performace issues.

It may not be as great or polished as Arkane's other outings, but Deathloop is still a great game I really enjoyed playing. Being able to use the powers to their full extent in bloodthirsty murder sprees was a nice change of pace from Dishonored, and each of the voice actors do a great job bringing their characters to life. Infiltrating each of the four areas and completing tasks while also being able to seek out the optional secrets was fun, along with the PvP invasions against Juliannas (although they do get a bit old by the time you're on your final loop).
I feel bad for anyone who played this game pre-Goldenloop update, since the ending improvement is huge - the fact that they shipped out the original ending and didn't make it feel "complete" until a year later sucks.

Premisa bastante interesante y bien ejecutada. Música muy buena y actores de voz también(en inglés). Nivel de dificultad equilibrado. En pc rendimiento bastante malo, cosa que empeora la experiencia de juego pero sin llegar a destruirla. Gameplay bastante entretenido y mecánicas pulidas, con algunas como la de juntar enemigos que son muy satisfactorias. En un inicio un exceso de tutoriales pero que quizás son necesarios para entender el "complejo" sistema de bucles. La recompensa por explorar generalmente no es instantánea (como podría ser un arma, una mejora, una historia guapa...), sino que es algún tipo de pista o inicio de una misión en la que debes ir a algún otro puesto en otro momento del día, lo que en mi caso fomentó ir directo a los puntos indicados. Armas variadas y satisfactorias de disparar. La IA bastante mejorable pero no terrible. Las invasiones de Julianna bastante divertidas e interesantes, aunque no me parece algo en lo que yo vaya a invertir muchas horas. Duración adecuada. Por lo general un juego divertido y original que aporta unas cuantas horas de diversión y no llega a cansar.

Played on PS5
Playtime: 15 Hours
Play Status: Beaten
Completion Date: September 28, 2022
No Spoilers

Tech Demo in Hiding
Deathloop, what a journey. Shown in every single Playstation Showcase, State of Play and any conference playstation did basically. But during it's release, it was actually an Xbox game because Microsoft owned Bethesda at that point. One of the 2 Xbox games that came to PlayStation. Deathloop and there is also Ghostwire: Tokyo.

But that's not it, Deathloop also got great reviews and it got 2 game awards. Best Game Direction and Best Art Direction. Game Direction had It Takes Two as a big competitor while Art Direction had Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. But Deathloop won both those awards, it passed both those games in those categories.

Oh, and I hated it. I fully believe and support the thinking that this game is actually bad. It's not horrible, thanks to some well thought things but it's definitely below average.

The story of Deathloop, is not good. The starting point is simple. We are in an island, and a company called AEON created a time loop here to live forever. One day is looped forever. We are playing a character named Colt. We wake up in a beach, someone or something talks to us in our head. Not actually talks, but shows us words on air.

We want to break the loop, because that's what we do. And in order to do that, we need to kill 7 visionaries + another one called Juliana. But here is the twist, just like Colt, she remembers the events that happens in every loop too and her job is to find and kill us before we are able to break the loop.

The story itself is fine but the presentation is horrible. There are basically 8 main missions in the game without including prologue and epilogue. 1 mission to kill each visionary. Sort of. All the backstory on Colt and this island is basically given to you in just one of these missions.

You can tackle these missions in any order you want but it was the last mission I tackled so my story progression went like basic premise in the beginning, nothing in the middle, everything in the end. It can change depending on when you choose to play this mission of course but still, 90% of the plot being given in one mission is not good design.

The ending of the game starts out strong. It feels like everything finally comes together. But the epilogue is too short and the ending doesn't finish the story in a complete way. It sort of feels like a season finale, but there is also not much way to continue the story from this ending, it's not good. I saw the extended ending by the way in game, then went and watched the original ending.

I don't think there is much difference. Both of them are horrible. Characters, so there are 2 important characters. Colt and Juliana. Both of their voice acting is great. Congrats to the actor and the actress. But their characters, they are not good.

Colt is your typical soldier man. He doesn't have much depth. He has actually but you don't get to feel anything because of the presentation issues I mentioned while Juliana is a very interesting character but the game doesn't spend time on her.

Damn it, ok. We are going into gameplay and we need to talk about the loop. I will do my best to explain it. The game has 4 levels and 4 times of day. Morning, noon, afternoon and evening.

You start with morning, you have an HQ(main menu) and in here, you can select one of the 4 levels to visit during that time of day. You should look at your quest log, see which quests have steps to be completed in morning and in what level. By looking at that, you select your level, you go and do your objective and then you need to exit the level using one of the multiple exits in each level.

Entering and exiting a level will move the time. If you started with morning, after entering and exiting a level, you will come to noon. If you die though, you start the day again from morning.

You can also pass the time in the HQ. If there are no steps of any missions in the morning time, you can pass the time to noon and select a level again. Levels are medium in their length. They are open spaces though and there are lots to find like audio logs, collectibles etc. if you like those things.

That's basically it. You need to complete every single mission step by step. In terms of the mission design, this game is not open. It's not a hitman game. Not at all. You need to follow the mission steps one by one, you can change which mission you are tracking but that's it. There is no freedom in the objectives you do.

There is however freedom in how you approach them. Let's get into combat and stealth. Combat is hard because there are so many enemies and it gets boring quickly because there is not much weapon variety here. But the weapons that are included are a blast to use. Feeling of the weapons is definitely one of my favourite aspects of the game.

Stealth is much more interesting. Because you have some interesting abilities you can use. They are copied and pasted from Dishonored. There is a short range teleportation ability, being invisible for some time and my favourite, binding a few people together(mentally) so that killing one will kill all of them.

There are 5 of these abilities and they are found by killing visionaries. They are also upgradable. You need to kill the visionaries again in order to get the upgrades. But you will kill the visionaries again and again so don't worry. Abilities makes the stealth a lot easier and a lot more fun.

Before ending the gameplay talk, we need to talk about the visionary in the room. Juliana. Like I said in the story discussion, Juliana hunts you throughout the game. And she remembers what happened the previous day when the day loops. She can come to your level randomly and start hunting you.

You won't know where she is, she won't know where you are. You need to cover your back because she might come from everywhere. You have 2 lives though. So you can die 3 times in every level you enter. Juliana is actually pretty easy to defeat if she is an AI. But if you select the option to make her a real player, yes Juliana can be controlled by a real player like you, things gets much more interesting and harder.

I remember seeing "Juliana is on the hunt" text first time, my heart was pounding. I was trying to go stealthily. Not alerting anyone. Then she found and ended my game. But I was in it. I believed the system. I liked it.

A couple of hours later, I started to get very bored with her. When she appears, continuing with your mission does not make sense. She is an enemy, so your other enemies don't hurt her. She can shapeshift, she can use similar abilities you use and there is no level gap here. You might be matchmade with a Juliana who has much better weapons than you.

So when I saw that text, I just immediately headed to her spawning place. She always spawns near a satellite. If she enters your game, you can't exit the level until you go and disable that satellite. So Juliana always spawns there as well.

I saw the text, I rushed to her spawning place, fought with her, if I killed her, I continued with the mission because she can only spawn one time in every level you enter. If I did not survive, I started again of course. There might be different tactics but this was the tactic I used and it worked every time.

Speaking of Juliana, you can play with Juliana as well of course and you can infiltrate the games of other players. But there is nothing interesting in playing Juliana. You level up and you unlock better weapons or some outfits but that's basically it. If there was some story with Juliana, there would be a great incentive to play with her. But in the current state of the game, Juliana is just an extra addition.

Now, the technical stuff. Graphics are fine. I played the game in Fidelity mode and it definitely did NOT look like a PS5 game. The frame rate was solid though.

Music is great. The soundtrack of this game is a banger. I constantly go back to it and listen when I go to school. Really really good.

And now, the DualSense. Ok, here is what I think. I think, Sony made a deal with Bethesda about this game because of the DualSense. If we look at the 2 projects, Deathloop and Ghostwire, both of them were announced in the same Bethesda showcase and both of them did not get attraction.

I think Bethesda knew they would perform bad so they wanted to make it a timed exclusive. Sony approached them, they were wanting to show the power of DualSense. They knew they had something with DualSense but the other third party publishers weren't interested in using them correctly.

And Sony's exclusive games were not enough. So, these 2 companies made a deal. Deathloop and Ghostwire would both use DualSense features to it's limits and Sony would showcase them in their events so that Bethesda could sell more copies.

Deathloop's DualSense features are amazing. Haptic feedback is great. Weapons already feels well but the haptics adds even more. Adaptive Triggers also works and they are great too. This might be the best Trigger use after Astro. 3D Audio is also supported but I did not feel anything particularly interesting.

Deathloop is not good. The story is basic and could have been nice but the presentation is horrible. Characters are not used well, the loop mechanic is very repetitive and combat becomes boring too quickly because of the lack of enemy, weapon and level variety.

Juliana's addition could have been a game changer but after a few times, she just becomes a burden. I really didn't liked this, wanted to go for the platinum but bailed out in the end because I was really not liking it. I definitely, definitely do not recommend Deathloop. It's really bad.

La prima volta che ho giocato a Deathloop risale a qualche mese fa, poco dopo aver acquistato Playstation 5. Dopo aver giocato per circa un'ora, il gioco mi sembrava noioso e decisi di posticiparlo per dare la precedenza a Returnal, che mi sembrava più interessante. Tuttavia, alcune settimane fa, nel dubbio su cosa giocare, ho deciso di riprendere in mano Deathloop, anche se con un po' di noia iniziale. Ora, dopo averlo completato, posso affermare che la mia prima impressione del gioco era sostanzialmente sbagliata, viziata forse da un incipit rivedibile, poiché in realtà il gioco è ricco di varietà e personalità.

Mi piace che in Deathloop si riveda lo stile di Arkane che aveva colpito tutti con il primo Dishonored. Si tratta di un gioco veloce che mescola armi da fuoco con poteri speciali e che offre la possibilità di affrontare le fasi di gioco con un approccio stealth, e proprio grazie a ciò Deathloop riesce ad essere incredibilmente gratificante, quando finalmente si riescono a concatenare tutte le possibilità che offre nel suo combt system. Tra gli aspetti che ho apprezzato di più del gioco ci sono i Visionari, gli antagonisti del titolo. Grazie al loop temporale in cui è catturato il personaggio principale Colt, è possibile osservare le loro personalità e le loro routine, ciò permette secondo me un'ottima caratterizzazione.
L'unica pecca forse è la longevità, poiché il gioco può essere completato in una dozzina di ore, anche se devo ammettere che ci sono molti segreti da scoprire sparsi nelle mappe di gioco. In sintesi, se si supera l'incipit rivedibile, Deathloop è un gioco che merita sicuramente di essere giocato.