This is not the first lööp type game.
As a fan of the video game medium for its take on art and entertainment by providing people with a unique aspect that other aspect of the arts don't, interaction, I've become greatly interested in every year's Game Awards hosted by Geoff Keighley. The celebration of gaming with industry veterans, undercelebrated legends, and exciting new premieres has captivated me each year since I started watching in 2017 (Josef Fares honestly being a the biggest impact in me tuning in each year.) This year, I made it a goal to play as many Game of the Year candidates as I could so that I could truly have the most accurate opinion possible when making my personal selections and debating the legitimacy of the year's victors. I had played each of the game's in the list except for three: Pscyhonauts 2, Deathloop, and Ratchet & Clank a Rift Apart. I played the first via Game Pass and grabbed the second during steam sale (could not play R&C due to PS5 stock,) knowing that I had previous reservations about Deathloop via trailers and peer reception. I had not played an Arkane game since Dark Messiah of Might & Magic and hadn't liked what I'd seen of Dishonored.
What you get with Deathloop is a game completely undeserving of the media attention and fanfare it gets. I think most "journalists" have confused the award "Game of the Year" with "game that had a lot of resources and assets put into making it seemed fleshed out of the year award." You have a game, less than fifteen hours in length that is extremely light on story and excessively high in frustrating gameplay mechanics and grievances that continue to mount throughout playing the game.
The highlights of Deathloop are that it, feels good to traverse around the world especially once granted the shift power. When you learn the nuances of double jumping into teleportation, it feels good doing parkour to get to targets or around the map. The unfortunate thing is that this is a necessity with how much backtracking you have to do through zones you'll repeat over and over and over again. Theoretically that doesn't seem bad in a game about looping, but the way that Arkane manages this system is extremely anti-player. The map design is also pretty good, with each zone feeling fairly fleshed out and different enough. The boss or "visionary" zones mostly stand out from one another and play to the character's personalities, the unfortunate part is that bar for a few, the characters don't actually have personalities. Music was also really good in Deathloop, I absolutely loved the jazzy-swing styled themes and motifs that played throughout the tense moments of engagements that made you feel like a spy out of a 50's show or something. The indicators of these motifs as to when combat began and ended was very well done.
Mechanically other than traversal Deathloop is rather frustrating. The AI in this game is laughably broken, and I mean legitimately broken. You can be heard and seen from miles away and breaking any speed above a crouched-walk will frighten everyone in the area and alert to a gunfight. This gets REALLY annoying especially in a game that wasn't billed around stealth. Metal Gear Solid nailed AI reaction to stealth in 1998... is it really THAT hard to do 23 years later? You get penalized for using your weapons more often then not and entry into just about every zone will quickly divulge into a gunfight. This isn't inherently bad because enemies die in a shot if you're a decent shot (except for Julianna,) but Colt also dies in a few shots. Speaking of Julianna, she is an extremely frustrating gameplay mechanic that offers absolutely nothing to the advancement of the game. She doesn't exist enough in the actual story (other than teasing Colt when he lööps) to be as randomly prevalent as she is in the game. She will often pop-up when you're already on your escape route, just making the exit strategy take even more time, or when you're in the middle of a stealth sequence which will absolutely destroy the immersion, and on some missions force a complete lööp reset. She adds so little to the game and her and Colt's banter gets annoying VERY fast. Her character arc towards the end of the game is also completely devoid of any real growth or change.
The lööping in Deathloop gets annoying extremely fast, especially when missions require you to do it. Often you'll be in the middle of a lead to take out a visionary, and you'll have several objectives within that questline to simply travel to another zone at a different time in the day, read one document, and then wait for the lööp to reset. This is a completely pointless, time-wasting, filler of a game mechanic that gets very old very fast. This is a trick you'd see out of older games that filled for time or were in the making of a longer game that has the player complete menial tasks to show growth in a larger exposition. Deathloop doesn't do that, it just makes you do boring, repeated lööp based tasks ad nauseum in order to get the player to see that "haha the game, the time, it resets!" We got that message, carving story and mechanics that are trivial solely to demonstrate this lööping idea is lazy game design. The elevator pitch of "Hey what if time reset in a game and the player had to like... solve it?" was so apparent it hurts. I credit user Mann Jager for that critique.
In all, Deathloop could be a good use of your time if your a casual gamer and can appreciate games for their simplicity in combat and story. This, as someone who treasures long lasting memories made from games and unique takes on storytelling and gameplay, did absolutely nothing for me. I do not understand why this is nominated in GOTY at the Game Awards over a much more exciting (yet mechanically flawed) game like Cyberpunk 2077. Deathloop gets my award for "A Game in the Year of 2021."
As a fan of the video game medium for its take on art and entertainment by providing people with a unique aspect that other aspect of the arts don't, interaction, I've become greatly interested in every year's Game Awards hosted by Geoff Keighley. The celebration of gaming with industry veterans, undercelebrated legends, and exciting new premieres has captivated me each year since I started watching in 2017 (Josef Fares honestly being a the biggest impact in me tuning in each year.) This year, I made it a goal to play as many Game of the Year candidates as I could so that I could truly have the most accurate opinion possible when making my personal selections and debating the legitimacy of the year's victors. I had played each of the game's in the list except for three: Pscyhonauts 2, Deathloop, and Ratchet & Clank a Rift Apart. I played the first via Game Pass and grabbed the second during steam sale (could not play R&C due to PS5 stock,) knowing that I had previous reservations about Deathloop via trailers and peer reception. I had not played an Arkane game since Dark Messiah of Might & Magic and hadn't liked what I'd seen of Dishonored.
What you get with Deathloop is a game completely undeserving of the media attention and fanfare it gets. I think most "journalists" have confused the award "Game of the Year" with "game that had a lot of resources and assets put into making it seemed fleshed out of the year award." You have a game, less than fifteen hours in length that is extremely light on story and excessively high in frustrating gameplay mechanics and grievances that continue to mount throughout playing the game.
The highlights of Deathloop are that it, feels good to traverse around the world especially once granted the shift power. When you learn the nuances of double jumping into teleportation, it feels good doing parkour to get to targets or around the map. The unfortunate thing is that this is a necessity with how much backtracking you have to do through zones you'll repeat over and over and over again. Theoretically that doesn't seem bad in a game about looping, but the way that Arkane manages this system is extremely anti-player. The map design is also pretty good, with each zone feeling fairly fleshed out and different enough. The boss or "visionary" zones mostly stand out from one another and play to the character's personalities, the unfortunate part is that bar for a few, the characters don't actually have personalities. Music was also really good in Deathloop, I absolutely loved the jazzy-swing styled themes and motifs that played throughout the tense moments of engagements that made you feel like a spy out of a 50's show or something. The indicators of these motifs as to when combat began and ended was very well done.
Mechanically other than traversal Deathloop is rather frustrating. The AI in this game is laughably broken, and I mean legitimately broken. You can be heard and seen from miles away and breaking any speed above a crouched-walk will frighten everyone in the area and alert to a gunfight. This gets REALLY annoying especially in a game that wasn't billed around stealth. Metal Gear Solid nailed AI reaction to stealth in 1998... is it really THAT hard to do 23 years later? You get penalized for using your weapons more often then not and entry into just about every zone will quickly divulge into a gunfight. This isn't inherently bad because enemies die in a shot if you're a decent shot (except for Julianna,) but Colt also dies in a few shots. Speaking of Julianna, she is an extremely frustrating gameplay mechanic that offers absolutely nothing to the advancement of the game. She doesn't exist enough in the actual story (other than teasing Colt when he lööps) to be as randomly prevalent as she is in the game. She will often pop-up when you're already on your escape route, just making the exit strategy take even more time, or when you're in the middle of a stealth sequence which will absolutely destroy the immersion, and on some missions force a complete lööp reset. She adds so little to the game and her and Colt's banter gets annoying VERY fast. Her character arc towards the end of the game is also completely devoid of any real growth or change.
The lööping in Deathloop gets annoying extremely fast, especially when missions require you to do it. Often you'll be in the middle of a lead to take out a visionary, and you'll have several objectives within that questline to simply travel to another zone at a different time in the day, read one document, and then wait for the lööp to reset. This is a completely pointless, time-wasting, filler of a game mechanic that gets very old very fast. This is a trick you'd see out of older games that filled for time or were in the making of a longer game that has the player complete menial tasks to show growth in a larger exposition. Deathloop doesn't do that, it just makes you do boring, repeated lööp based tasks ad nauseum in order to get the player to see that "haha the game, the time, it resets!" We got that message, carving story and mechanics that are trivial solely to demonstrate this lööping idea is lazy game design. The elevator pitch of "Hey what if time reset in a game and the player had to like... solve it?" was so apparent it hurts. I credit user Mann Jager for that critique.
In all, Deathloop could be a good use of your time if your a casual gamer and can appreciate games for their simplicity in combat and story. This, as someone who treasures long lasting memories made from games and unique takes on storytelling and gameplay, did absolutely nothing for me. I do not understand why this is nominated in GOTY at the Game Awards over a much more exciting (yet mechanically flawed) game like Cyberpunk 2077. Deathloop gets my award for "A Game in the Year of 2021."