Arkane has finally managed to make a version of Dishonored where open combat doesn't suck, hooray!
Deathloop is cobbled together from a lot of familiar parts. Throwing bottles, blinking, drop assassinations, a totally-not-supernatural double-jump. Anyone who has played the Dishonored games will find the tools available to the player to be very familiar, and yet playing Deathloop felt different enough from Dishonored that I was able to find it new and thrilling. Part of that is owed to the aesthetic, which is about as textbook 60s retro-future as you can get without completely drowning you in wild technicolor designs a la We Happy Few. But the other part, the more significant part, is that you are completely unable to manually save - a complete inversion from Arkane's other games.
Taken on its own the central concept of Deathloop is intriguing, as playing with time is something that I think is uniquely suited to games, where you get to be the agent of change. Arkane Lyon have already proven to be capable developers when messing with this concept, but Deathloop’s whole-hearted commitment to the idea is where I found real excitement. As you’re only given one day, you will never see anything as dramatic as the years of change from Dishonored 2’s “A Crack in the Slab”, but there are so many more locations and little details here that the end product is still satisfying.
One of the most notable changes if you’re playing this right after the Dishonored games is that this Corvo is named Colt, he has a voice, and he is absolutely not afraid to speak his mind, even if it’s dumb as shit (and it usually is). Colt being one of the few people who can remember earlier loops works fantastically as a game mechanic and as a source of comedy. Bringing it back to manually saving - the complete inability to do so incentivizes just taking risks and hoping you don’t get looped right as you’re trying to do some important shit, but the loop itself means that failure isn’t catastrophic. In fact, abusing this loop and its quirks to gather information in little bite-sized chunks makes revisiting the same levels feel much less tedious than it might sound on paper, as mastering the loop is as much a goal for Colt as it is for you as a player.
Gathering upgrades across loops doesn’t feel like a chore the way it could in Dishonored, and despite most of the powers making their original appearance in a stealth game, getting into firefights can be a lot of fun (and is viable!) - I had a build that let me create a bunch of poison clouds and then blow myself up to ignite them. Nexus - this game’s version of “Domino” - still feels pathetic and useless, but it's entirely possible that I'm too peabrained to use it effectively. There is a real sense of growth as you acquire more upgrades for your powers, and it’s exciting to tear through a level that you know like the back of your hand - up until a player-controlled Julianna tries to place landmines and snipe you in spawn. Yes, this game has an invasion mechanic, and although you can turn off player-controlled invasions (I recommend doing so) it’s still on by default, and as such is one of the game’s prominent weak points.
As you progress through the loop and listen to tens of “are they angry, enjoying this, or... both?” conversations between Julianna and Colt, these little fragmented bits of story, character quirks, and exploitable weaknesses coalesces into a real plot that has real momentum behind it. The game staggers a bit at the end - I won’t spoil anything - with the way it handles this, and it’s the other “big” drawback of this game. I suspect an ending with more playable elements would be more satisfying, but in an immersive sim every additional piece of gameplay adds tens of ways for things to break, so I don’t blame them for keeping things scripted. It’s not even really a let-down - it’s an adequate ending - it just can’t match the hype the previous 20 hours have built up. The mission preceding it (where you acquire enough information from the leads to go through the final loop) also has too much guidance, and I think that it would’ve been an excellent opportunity for the player to demonstrate their knowledge and mastery of the levels and nudge everything into place one last time. All the information is already in the journal so players who take a break from the game can still consult it for reminders, meaning there’s not really a reason for it to be so hand-holdy this far in. Again, this complaint is fairly minor and doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the game in any huge way.
Taken as an entire experience, Deathloop is one of my favorite games this year, and barring some completely bonkers release in the next few months (it’s possible) I suspect this will be my GOTY. It is so far up my alley that it’s scaling the wall at the far end: an imsim where being loud doesn’t feel like a sin, where the characters are as fun as the gameplay, and where you will never have to quicksave.
Deathloop is cobbled together from a lot of familiar parts. Throwing bottles, blinking, drop assassinations, a totally-not-supernatural double-jump. Anyone who has played the Dishonored games will find the tools available to the player to be very familiar, and yet playing Deathloop felt different enough from Dishonored that I was able to find it new and thrilling. Part of that is owed to the aesthetic, which is about as textbook 60s retro-future as you can get without completely drowning you in wild technicolor designs a la We Happy Few. But the other part, the more significant part, is that you are completely unable to manually save - a complete inversion from Arkane's other games.
Taken on its own the central concept of Deathloop is intriguing, as playing with time is something that I think is uniquely suited to games, where you get to be the agent of change. Arkane Lyon have already proven to be capable developers when messing with this concept, but Deathloop’s whole-hearted commitment to the idea is where I found real excitement. As you’re only given one day, you will never see anything as dramatic as the years of change from Dishonored 2’s “A Crack in the Slab”, but there are so many more locations and little details here that the end product is still satisfying.
One of the most notable changes if you’re playing this right after the Dishonored games is that this Corvo is named Colt, he has a voice, and he is absolutely not afraid to speak his mind, even if it’s dumb as shit (and it usually is). Colt being one of the few people who can remember earlier loops works fantastically as a game mechanic and as a source of comedy. Bringing it back to manually saving - the complete inability to do so incentivizes just taking risks and hoping you don’t get looped right as you’re trying to do some important shit, but the loop itself means that failure isn’t catastrophic. In fact, abusing this loop and its quirks to gather information in little bite-sized chunks makes revisiting the same levels feel much less tedious than it might sound on paper, as mastering the loop is as much a goal for Colt as it is for you as a player.
Gathering upgrades across loops doesn’t feel like a chore the way it could in Dishonored, and despite most of the powers making their original appearance in a stealth game, getting into firefights can be a lot of fun (and is viable!) - I had a build that let me create a bunch of poison clouds and then blow myself up to ignite them. Nexus - this game’s version of “Domino” - still feels pathetic and useless, but it's entirely possible that I'm too peabrained to use it effectively. There is a real sense of growth as you acquire more upgrades for your powers, and it’s exciting to tear through a level that you know like the back of your hand - up until a player-controlled Julianna tries to place landmines and snipe you in spawn. Yes, this game has an invasion mechanic, and although you can turn off player-controlled invasions (I recommend doing so) it’s still on by default, and as such is one of the game’s prominent weak points.
As you progress through the loop and listen to tens of “are they angry, enjoying this, or... both?” conversations between Julianna and Colt, these little fragmented bits of story, character quirks, and exploitable weaknesses coalesces into a real plot that has real momentum behind it. The game staggers a bit at the end - I won’t spoil anything - with the way it handles this, and it’s the other “big” drawback of this game. I suspect an ending with more playable elements would be more satisfying, but in an immersive sim every additional piece of gameplay adds tens of ways for things to break, so I don’t blame them for keeping things scripted. It’s not even really a let-down - it’s an adequate ending - it just can’t match the hype the previous 20 hours have built up. The mission preceding it (where you acquire enough information from the leads to go through the final loop) also has too much guidance, and I think that it would’ve been an excellent opportunity for the player to demonstrate their knowledge and mastery of the levels and nudge everything into place one last time. All the information is already in the journal so players who take a break from the game can still consult it for reminders, meaning there’s not really a reason for it to be so hand-holdy this far in. Again, this complaint is fairly minor and doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the game in any huge way.
Taken as an entire experience, Deathloop is one of my favorite games this year, and barring some completely bonkers release in the next few months (it’s possible) I suspect this will be my GOTY. It is so far up my alley that it’s scaling the wall at the far end: an imsim where being loud doesn’t feel like a sin, where the characters are as fun as the gameplay, and where you will never have to quicksave.
jobosno
2 years ago