Deathloop hat mich durch seine coole Zeitschleifen-Mechanik und faszinierenden Charaktere, die kontinuierlich ihrer Persönlichkeiten offenbaren, in seinen Bann gezogen. Dennoch war mein Weg durch das Spiel nicht ohne Hürden. Es hat ganze drei Jahre gedauert, das Spiel zu beenden, da ich immer wieder das Interesse verlor und mich nur mit einem Walkthrough durchkämpfen konnte. Dass Gegner deine Welt angreifen können, finde ich wie bei Watch Dogs eine coole Idee.

Besonders herausfordernd war das Questmenu, das anfangs schwer zu durchschauen war und mich oft überfordert hat. Auch das Gunplay startete holprig, verbesserte sich jedoch mit der Zeit etwas. Trotz der interessanten Spielidee und der tiefen Charaktergeschichten war das Ende des Spiels eine große Enttäuschung – es fühlte sich unbefriedigend an.

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Deathloop captivated me with its cool time-loop mechanics and fascinating characters who continually reveal layers of their personalities. However, my journey through the game was not without obstacles. It took me a full three years to finish the game, as I repeatedly lost interest and had to push through with the help of a walkthrough. I think it's a cool idea that enemies can attack your world, just like in Watch Dogs.

The quest menu was particularly challenging, initially difficult to decipher and often overwhelming. The gunplay also started off rough but did improve over time. Despite the interesting game concept and deep character stories, the game's ending was a major disappointment—it felt unsatisfying.

The Good:
- Initially intriguing mystery surrounding 'the loop' and its visionaries. The opening of the game especially does a good job of drip feeding info allowing the player to piece together the puzzle
- Gameplay is serviceable
- The concept of a roguelike set in this backdrop isn't bad in theory

The bad:
- The sense of progression between loops. Ooh look I've found a purple gun - oh it does the exact same thing as the shitty gun except not jam. The 'looping' overall was repetitive, there are side missions but after doing a couple, I realised these weren't very worthwhile
- No sense of peril. The AI are braindead and the visionaries aren't a threat. There's only Julianna who is actually interesting
- The game is sparse in content. There are only 4 maps and barely any weapon variety
- The gameplay, although serviceable in terms of movement and gun-play, is basic. There's no incentive to get creative when eliminating a target when you can just run in and shoot things up just as easy
- A bit more direction would be beneficial. I don't want hand-holding but when a key story-beat can only be discovered by reading a nondescript white note which looks like every other non-interactable white note scattered around in every room in the game - we have a problem

Overall not a bad game but I found the niggles too much to persevere with and the story didn't grab me as I thought it would

The actual combat and gameplay is pretty basic, there's not really a lot that made me go "wow okay they're innovating over here." There's cool power ups but it feels like they were ripped from ideas from dishonored 3 lol.

The REAL reason I finished this game is because of how the story progresses. Instead of having a linear story, having a story that is progressed through repeated days where you can slowly unravel the secrets of each boss is actually really fun. The gunplay is alright, but this game tries to do something special with it's story and it works well.

VERY cool idea, but the execution really falls flat imo.

It basically dumps everything on you at once after you finish the introduction, and then you just play the rest of the game on the same levels and with the same weapons for like 13 hours until it ends, which gets boring REALLY fast.

The gameplay is pretty fun and smooth, but not much of an improvement from Dishonored, and definitely not enough to make up for the monotonous levels.

Deathloop is stupidly fun, like I can't believe how much of a blast I was having playing this game. Even in the first 1-2 hours (which mainly serve as a story introduction / tutorial) I was giddy with thinking of fun ways to kill people and sneak my way through these really open-ended levels. In a lot of ways, this game really asks you to meet it halfway. Deathloop literally tells you on the box that you'll be playing through the same levels over and over again in an effort to master them, but I found that to be one of this game's key components to its success. That also runs the risk of killing the story's momentum, but thanks to Deathloop's genuinely hilarious and engaging story I was also excited for another loop since new exciting things were always being revealed.

Colt and Juliana are perfectly wacky characters to be at the center of this dark 60's nightmare. Colt's immature cursing and quick witted comebacks are a fantastic counterpart to Juliana's more cold and sinister mocking. There's a tangible history between the two before you even fully uncover the mystery that the story expertly unravels for you, and I was also excited to hear more of their interactions. The graphical style is great and stylish too, although it's worth noting that this ran like trash on my PC.

The real meat of Deathloop, the gameplay, feels like a decade's worth of honing their craft by Arcane Lyon. The comparisons with Dishonored aren't unwarranted, and it feels like the psychotic murder-spreee that I always wanted to take with those powers but was deprived of. Blackreef is absolutely your playground, and experimentation is almost always rewarded. The loop (ha) of planning out a route to kill a visionary, something inevitably going wrong, and scrambling back into the tunnels after a sloppy execution feels just as fun and engaging as a perfectly executed plan, and it's part of the reason why I found it so hard to put down Deathloop. There are a few shortcomings, notably that the arsenal system of the loop and allowing you to keep weapons between runs feeling... too forgiving. I found a silenced pistol early on in my playthrough and it never left my inventory. Likewise, I found the two slabs that I liked the most and almost never switched off them, which felt like a misstep since I never wanted to experiment because it wasn't worth not having Blink. The systems themselves aren't bad in any way, but I think Deathloop would've benefitted from embracing a bit more from its rouge-lite influences.

Also worth mentioning that my online experience for this game was... awful. Invasions went about as well as they could when I was playing as Colt, and actually resulted in a really dynamic change of plans once I got the alert that Juliana was around, but playing as Juliana is just fucking miserable in 2024. Not sure if it's the bad netcode or just the high ping since the amount of players is so low now, but expect rubber banding, inconsistent hit detection, and a healthy amount of long wait times to find a match. Thankfully, Juliana's murder tendencies seemed to be only tied to cosmetic rewards for colt's side of things, but I really wish that more of the technical issues with this mode were sorted out because conceptually it's great and the few smooth matches I had were equally tense and thrilling.

As many good things as I have to say about Deathloop, I feel like it's also worth bringing up this game's weak final 2-4 hours. Deathloop's main goal involving you killing 8 visionaries in one loop feels completely insurmountable at first, but after learning Blackreef and its routines I was starting to feel confident in my ability to pull it off. I had an actual notebook where I was planning out my perfect run and I felt like a mythical heist genius, knowing exactly how to sabotage Frank's fireworks, knowing where Fia and Charlie would be and how to take them out, perfecting my route through Harriet's complex... and then once you finally have all the pieces..! The game just spells it all out for you. It felt extremely disappointing once I found out that the game was leading you towards this exact route of taking people out, and giving you objective markers and telling you where to go next didn't make me feel smart, it made me feel railroaded in a game that was remarkably good at avoiding that feeling for it's first 15 hours. That's before we get to this game's ending, in which neither option feels particularly satisfying or conclusive, which is just a shame.

I know I got a bit negative towards the end there, but I honestly did really love my time with Deathloop. I think it's final hours falling off puts a bit of a black mark on the game in my memory, but the first 75% of this game is as good as one could hope for such a crazy concept. It certainly won't click with everyone, but if you've enjoyed Arkane's earlier works and their light-imsim style of gameplay, Deathloop will probably click with you the same way it did for me.

A personal guilty pleasure of mine. The game is pretty creative in it’s conception, having to plan killing everyone at once is a cool idea. However I can’t really say how similar it is to Dishonored so to be continued on that front for now

I never understood the criticism for the dialogue and random text pop ups during missions, it never really offended me to where it hurt the gameplay.. The ending however was kinda mid, as it ends way too quickly and doesn’t really have enough time to flesh out what really is happening. Unless you absolutely explored everything, then it was a toss up.

Um dos meus amigos é um grande fã da Arkane e tem praticamente todos os jogos que fizeram (tirando o Redfall, mas mais porque é um 'exclusivo' da Xbox), de certa forma ele foi a minha introdução ao mundo dos ImSims. Eu já tinha jogado parte do Dishonored contudo o que me puxou a realmente considerar a sua potencialidade foi ele, depois também joguei parte do Prey que infelizmente não clicou para mim, não lhe faltava nada para além da minha vontade de tirar tempo para o compreender. Quando comecei o Deathloop senti aquele mesmo aborrecimento a aproximar-se, fui jogando cada vez menos ao longo do tempo e comecei a usá-lo como uma espécie de pausa entre outras coisas que estivesse a fazer, um 'palate cleanser', como os ingleses dizem. Não foi até eu decidir mudar toda a minha forma de jogar ao ir matar o Ramblin' Frank que eu me apercebi que eu sou muito, muito estúpido.

O Deathloop não é tão expansivo nas suas opções de abordar um nível como qualquer outro ImSim, ou até qualquer outro jogo da Arkane mas continua obviamente a ser 'alimentado' por esses conceitos. Eu guiei-me demasiado pelo o que jogo sugeria que eu fizesse que de certa forma me esqueci que isto é um JOGO e não um LIVRO. Eu comecei a experimentar novas rotas, novas formas de os matar, eu tinha tudo demasiado explícito e streamlined que me faltou aperceber que eu posso simplesmente divertir-me um pouco em vez de tentar correr ao encontro do final. Eu só usava o Shift e o Blink, e até esses usava de uma forma relativamente limitada, lenta e.... demasiado calculada. Não havia grande espontaneidade naquilo que fazia. O que mais recomendo ao jogar Deathloop é simplesmente não ter nenhum objetivo tracked: explorar os mapas ao teu passo e descobrir como queres fazer o que queres fazer é inteiramente melhor do que realmente seguir todas as dicas e ter a papinha feita no final, embora que o jogo realmente não é nada de outro mundo em questão de opções de chegar ao teu destino, apenas tens muitas espécies de sidequests para explorar em quase todos os cantos do mapa.

No fundo o Deathloop foi um jogo feito para quem tirava clips no Dishonored, ele foi desenhado quase com intenção de aperfeiçoares a forma como usas os poderes e não o tempo que demoras a chegar ao teu objetivo, os caminhos no Deathloop são infinitamente mais limitados do que no Dishonored ou até no Prey, o jogo subconscientemente força-te a aprender as posições dos inimigos, reações e a melhor forma de estrategizar o teu uso das Power Slabs (embora seja quase impossível não ter o Shift equipado). No fundo o Deathloop é um jogo onde o 'Boss' é o mapa inteiro, ou se quisermos ser poéticos, onde o maior inimigo é a rotina.

Sobre a história, é extremamente interessante, o twist é engraçado e a última cena tem um foreboding muito intenso, ele estabelece um ambiente pesado e inseguro e quase que capitaliza nisso até aparecer a maldita cutscene onde todos viram amigos e na verdade nem era assim tão mau. Se tirassem essa única cutscene, o final seria o melhor de sempre, não fui um grande fã do final ao estilo 'se calhar o loop foram os amigos que fizemos ao longo do caminho'. De resto é incrível, a lore é incrível e também gosto como apesar de tudo, as circunstâncias exatas do que se está a passar ainda são ligeiramente vagas, tu percebes o que se passou com o Colt, o que tudo isto implica, mas nunca te é dito, isso é muito bom.