Can I just start out by saying that I immediately instantly love the main character Colt in this game. He reacts the same way any of us would react wo finding themselves waking up on a beach after being killed.
"What the fuck!? Oh fuck me what the fuck just happened? Why the fuck am I on a beach!?"
It's great, and the story really gets you into the world as Colt and the assassin against him immediately connect and begin to taunt each other. It's a very good set up for the game. And that's about where the game falls off the cliff for me.
So after the first little intro sequence, you are given into a sort of tutorial/indrotuction mission type thing where Colt is just trying to get his bareings and figure out what everyone wants to kill him on sight. It's here you are bombarded with tutorials and menus that pop up and explain a bunch of shit all at once which end up being really jarring and hard to take it all in. Things like weapon loadouts, trinkets to modify your guns, trinkets that modify your abilities, documents that provide information Colt will retain from Loop to Loop. But if you outright die and have to restart the loop, all your weapons go away which makes your loadout and your trinkets worthless.
It's a bunch of layered game mechanics that immediately don't gel well with each other.
But okay we can ignore that maybe and just sneak around the world to get to where we need to go and kill who we need to kill. This is where Deathloop's main gameplay uh....loop...comes from. Deathloop wants to be Dishonored which is weird because they could have just made Dishonored 3, anyway that's beside the point, like with other Arkane games the game tells you to proceed however you want. Stealth, run and gun, sprint past everything, whatever, none of it matters play your way.....except like Prey you really can't.
Stealth doesn't work, because outside of a few little spots, the enemies are all laid out in large groups and all facing directions that make it nearly impossible to successfully sneak around to take them all out. Especially since the stealth takedown is NOT silent, so other enemies will hear and rush to your position instantly. What the game wants you to do is systematically distract and take out guards one by one, but this is very slow and the AI is really fucking stupid about it. Sometimes they'll hear a bottle you threw from 1000 feet away and other times they'll ignore a bottle thrown at their damn feet.
So in the end you fuck it up and have to run and gun anyway. There is no moral system like in Dishonored so there isn't a point to not just kill everyone and everything and not worth about it. But this is where the large groups I mentioned come in. Not only is gunfire obviously loud and will bring every enemy in the immediate area on your face, it will also call enemies from the other side of the map to come running. Meaning you will get overwhelmed pretty quickly because Colt can't carry a lot of ammo.
Additionally Colt is made out of used tissue paper because you die in about three shots. And because the AI is inconsistant either unable to shoot you at all or able to snipe you down with a shotgun from a mile away, this makes for very frustrating moments.
Basically the gameplay isn't great. While the story setup is good, the mystery is solved within twenty minutes of the game and the rest is just going through the motions it seems. So what you have is a decent setting and a good idea for a game with some of the worst execution I've seen.
Of course there are also the bugs which never make a hard game any easier. I died from drowning while in the middle of a firefight in the middle of a city alley. I don't know where the water came from, but maybe Colt just decided to swallow his own tongue.
Wait for a sale, and a few patches.
"What the fuck!? Oh fuck me what the fuck just happened? Why the fuck am I on a beach!?"
It's great, and the story really gets you into the world as Colt and the assassin against him immediately connect and begin to taunt each other. It's a very good set up for the game. And that's about where the game falls off the cliff for me.
So after the first little intro sequence, you are given into a sort of tutorial/indrotuction mission type thing where Colt is just trying to get his bareings and figure out what everyone wants to kill him on sight. It's here you are bombarded with tutorials and menus that pop up and explain a bunch of shit all at once which end up being really jarring and hard to take it all in. Things like weapon loadouts, trinkets to modify your guns, trinkets that modify your abilities, documents that provide information Colt will retain from Loop to Loop. But if you outright die and have to restart the loop, all your weapons go away which makes your loadout and your trinkets worthless.
It's a bunch of layered game mechanics that immediately don't gel well with each other.
But okay we can ignore that maybe and just sneak around the world to get to where we need to go and kill who we need to kill. This is where Deathloop's main gameplay uh....loop...comes from. Deathloop wants to be Dishonored which is weird because they could have just made Dishonored 3, anyway that's beside the point, like with other Arkane games the game tells you to proceed however you want. Stealth, run and gun, sprint past everything, whatever, none of it matters play your way.....except like Prey you really can't.
Stealth doesn't work, because outside of a few little spots, the enemies are all laid out in large groups and all facing directions that make it nearly impossible to successfully sneak around to take them all out. Especially since the stealth takedown is NOT silent, so other enemies will hear and rush to your position instantly. What the game wants you to do is systematically distract and take out guards one by one, but this is very slow and the AI is really fucking stupid about it. Sometimes they'll hear a bottle you threw from 1000 feet away and other times they'll ignore a bottle thrown at their damn feet.
So in the end you fuck it up and have to run and gun anyway. There is no moral system like in Dishonored so there isn't a point to not just kill everyone and everything and not worth about it. But this is where the large groups I mentioned come in. Not only is gunfire obviously loud and will bring every enemy in the immediate area on your face, it will also call enemies from the other side of the map to come running. Meaning you will get overwhelmed pretty quickly because Colt can't carry a lot of ammo.
Additionally Colt is made out of used tissue paper because you die in about three shots. And because the AI is inconsistant either unable to shoot you at all or able to snipe you down with a shotgun from a mile away, this makes for very frustrating moments.
Basically the gameplay isn't great. While the story setup is good, the mystery is solved within twenty minutes of the game and the rest is just going through the motions it seems. So what you have is a decent setting and a good idea for a game with some of the worst execution I've seen.
Of course there are also the bugs which never make a hard game any easier. I died from drowning while in the middle of a firefight in the middle of a city alley. I don't know where the water came from, but maybe Colt just decided to swallow his own tongue.
Wait for a sale, and a few patches.
