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.
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.