In my humble opinion, the best story-driven games don’t often feel like games at all. When a story-driven game - especially single-player - conjures a game world so jam-packed with personality and stylistic zeal, when it is mixed into that perfect blend of graphical fidelity, original score, smooth gameplay controls, and even story pacing, a great game can hypnotize the player with its gameplay loop. It should feel like stepping into a movie and loving every scene. That is one of many things I adored about Arkane Studio’s 2021 immersive, spy-thriller-esque run-n'-gun action game,Deathloop.
4 Reasons You Should Play Deathloop if You Did Not Like Dishonored
Dishonored was a critically acclaimed game but had sceptics. Here are 4 reasons why you should play Deathloop if you didn’t like Dishonored.
Whether it was diving through crevices and open windows and manipulating supernatural forces to cause mass hysteria as the primary protagonist, Colt, in the game’s main story mode or working against him with his enemies as his arch-rival assassin, Julianna, in the game’s competitive online two-player versus mode, Deathloop has a lot to offer by way of raw action and bombastic, unpredictable fun. The main premise involves Colt being trapped in an endless time loop on Blackreef, an island stuck replaying the same day of one raving party to the end of a reason I shan’t spoil here. Colt wants out, and to do that, he has to take out 8 key targets in charge of making sure the loop keeps running; the catch is that quite literally everyone else on the island is against this plan and will actively attack you on sight, and each time they strike you down,the day starts again from the top. You, party pooper, you.
Firstly and to its credit, Deathloop has inspired level design that sees you traversing secret laboratories burrowed into snow-capped cliffsides, blast-scarred ravines, colorfully personable city districts, and much more between four distinctive maps - with each explorable areas hosting a number of glaringly diverse ‘dungeons’ for you to tear through and shifting levels of danger and intrigue as the singular looping day progresses from morning to night.
The game gives you no shortage of telekinetic abilities and weapons with which to ensure your chaotic mission does not ever get as repetitive as the day(s?) Colt spends on Blackreef. Between all the explosives, machine and mind control powers, time manipulation, gun and ammo modifications, and trinkets that heavily affect stats and abilities, quite literally no run has to feel even remotely the same, and that is Deathloop’s main draw. The sheer plethora of customizable mayhem scratches the itch of Dishonored with fewer consequences toward the game’s world for playing with abandon.
Above all else and to little protest, this game is dripping in swagger and style, perhaps more than any other major element. The game gives you the option to play as stealthily or as obnoxiously loud as your heart desires, but in either circumstance, Colt’s (and Julianna’s) movement animations, quips, and the general layout of maps rich in vibrancy and a sort of Great Gatsby-gone-sci-fi-island-getaway appeal in tandem with the game’s high-tempo funk soundtrack produces a resplendent playground to test the limits of your abilities.
There’s a slew of unlockable outfits purely for the sake of vanity, which I adore, as it reminds me of the days when games held all the unlockable content within them before the age of DLCs. The satisfaction of having committed the time to learning the game, becoming a virtuoso at its mechanics, and razing enemies without breaking a sweat by the time I’d unlocked the final outfit for both Colt and Julianna was as satisfying a personal completionist achievement as it ever was.
Every Arkane Studios Game, Ranked
From the steampunk stealth combat of Dishonored to the mind-bending action of Deathloop, Arkane Studios have put out some great titles.
Deathloop also does an amazing job in the presentation of its narrative. Playing as Colt and waking a victim of amnesia (I know it’s a common trope, bear with me), you run around this lavish island full of eccentric people who all seem to know you very personally, yet you know none of them or why they’re very willing to put you down. For all the ensuing horrendous dying and looping, though, you gain more insight as to what your role is, who these people are, and who Colt is to himself and everyone else through Colt’s experience of them.
Characterizing both the protagonist and the antagonists in this way embeds this sense of empathetic attachment to each of Colt’s targets as you uncover their motivations, relationships with one another, and personal hopes, fears, and ambitions. One of the targets is evenheavilyimplied to be an ex-lover/close friend (a ‘they were roommates’-esque situation, I gather) of Colt’s, and that is only found out through paying attention to photos and notes found, and an in-game radio broadcast station ran by the aforementioned party alluding to it that’s only heard in one locale at a certain time of day. The game can bethatdetail-oriented.
For all of its strengths, however, Deathloop has just as many weaknesses. Often in the areas I praise, I have found Deathloop limits itself in places that seem counterintuitive to its very nature as a game. For instance, there is only one true order of eliminating the eight targets and reaching the game’s conclusion. Sure, there are technically three endings (not counting the secret ending), but those branch off at the very end,afterthat one true route is completed. For a game that was crafted around the concept of affecting outcomes through outwitting a time loop, to me, that was a very self-defeating way to usher in an endgame.
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The enemy variety is also extremely lacking, to put it bluntly. You face masked humans called Eternalists who infest the island and are there to party into oblivion. Some are melee, some have one gun, some have two guns, and all are fairly stupid and easy to put down. While this does make for a very lax playground to experiment with your abilities, it also falls short of being particularly challenging.
Once you catch your stride in this game, you are very unlikely to break it for the duration of your gaming session, as there are next to no surprises unless you count the occasional Julianna invasion of your loop. And even then, unless she’s being controlled by another player (which is another issue I’m about to get to momentarily), even she is more or less cannon fodder. This disconnect doesn’t escape the eight bosses either, unfortunately. While they each possess their respective individual unique supernatural abilities that Colt can add to his arsenal once you’ve defeated them, these prove more gimmicky than anything. Their AI isn’t much improved either, if at all. They aren’t bullet sponges (except Fia), and they aren’t capable of changing phases or any such dynamics. Their strengths lie more in who they are than what they are physically capable of, especially when pitted against a late-game, fully-powered Colt.
That leaves Julianna and the stagnant ‘Protect the Loop’ game mode where you play against Colt as Julianna on the side of Blackreef’s constituents. Slay the protagonist three times, and you win. With the assistance of the terrain, Julianna’s own slate of powers and weapons akin to, if not more powerful in some senses than Colt’s, and the entire map of enemies turned allies, this provesridiculouslyeasy a task. It’s not even necessary for you to actively hunt Colt down. Since you know he’s generally going after the map’s main boss, you can just set up traps and camp somewhere where you can see him but he can’t see you and put a bullet in him.
You’re even aided with an afterimage of where Colt was when he died, so you can get some semblance of the area where he’ll respawn, giving you time to reposition yourself and get the drop on him again. It’s a cakewalk, and it’s so unfair that it isn’t fun for either party. If I’m being honest, I only played it for so long because I still loved the gameplay enough to want to acquire all of Julianna’s outfits, which can only be unlocked by playing her game mode. Whenever I played Colt’s route in ‘Break the Loop’, I made sure I turned real player invasions off and was only ever invaded by a CPU Julianna. Even then, her appearance was more an easily swatted annoyance than anything.
If it sounds like I’m tearing the game down, that’s only because I’ve played it enough and have enough admiration for what it does right, that it frustrates me with how largely itgot some of these elements wrong. I adore Julianna as a character, and I think the idea of being able to play as her against Colt is a marvelous one, but it was poorly executed and rendered half of the entire gameplay experience inadmissible in my appraisal of the game.
I think Deathloop would have benefitted far more had the online co-op mode either focused on other Blackreef side stories or expanded on the eight main antagonists. Perhaps they could have been made playable in some sort of alternate time or location that related back to Colt’s story in some capacity or even just repurposed the maps for some type of MOBA or heist mode, Rainbow 6 Siege or Overwatch style, something that would leave players addicted, wanting to come back, and satisfyingly rewarded while also getting more content of the characters that drove the game’s lore.
Needless to say, there should have been a good handful more enemy variants as well. With how much power Colt possesses even a quarterway through the game, the regular Eternalist enemies become nothing more than idle and sometimes inconvenient set dressing. The eight targets stationed on Blackreef are canonically afforded their stations there solely for their career achievements and beingexemplary pillars of scholarship and human creativityoutside of that island paradise (though each with dark histories, tendencies or fascinations);somebodyshould own a dog or something that wants to tear you limb from limb for putting bullets in its owner. There are no animals, no robots (aside from turrets), no mutated, rabid experiments, no zombies or adjacent zombie-like creatures, nothing. I understand that Blackreef is meant to be an endless paradise, but this world is confirmed to be the same one as Dishonored, which itself throws witches, steampunk automatons, and frenzied rats at you on a mild day. There should be more enemy variants to test Colt’s mettle, full stop.
Bethesda Confirms Deathloop And Dishonored Are Connected
A piece of obvious evidence can be found in the Heritage Gun.
With the way the game wrapped up, I was sure there was to besome announcement of DLCregarding an overhaul or expansion of the game and/or the game’s endings. I couldn’t believe my eyes when the credits finished rolling and I was invited to replay the game from the beginning with no invitation to a new game plus or any sort of bonus incentive beyond resetting the game’s progression and rediscovering the exact same things uncovered in a previous playthrough. Only this time, I knew how to beat the game more quickly than Colt became aware of the world around him. As a result, players choosing to restart the game are thrown against progression locks so you don’t just run through the necessary steps on the first loop because, again, there’s onlyonetrue route to the game’s ending(s), despite all the various ways you’re able to play the game.
In my faith, I played halfway through the story again, hoping desperately to come across some new power, some new lore, a new weapon, something to make re-doing everything I had just done feel worth playing through the main story again, and there was nothing, to my chagrin. You do often find small details and side notes with more careful exploration, but there is hardly anything hefty that ties back to the primary story worth running through the entire game again if you did a regular run-through already. This alone made the game with replayability written directly into the game’s core progression and lore unreplayable for me.
I thoroughly enjoyed experiencing Deathloop for my first playthrough; however, it was only that first playthrough that held the magic, though I sorely wish that wasn’t the case. Arkane Studios put their particularly chic flair on the time loop concept that has been done to death, and, in theory, and on the surface, it was done beautifully. They just didn’t take it quite far enough, unfortunately. That said, this by no means should serve as an indicator of a fault in the quality of their games.
The Dishonored series, the spiritual predecessor from which the concept of this game spun off, is a stellar experience by all accounts. DIshonored 2 in particular, which expounded on all the elements that made the original DIshonored a phenomenal gaming experience unlike anything else of its generation by way of art direction, musical score, player agency affecting direct consequences within the game, enemy variety, combat, lore, and more. It is precisely becauseDishonored 2 was such a smashing sequelto the exceptional Dishonored 1, that I have full faith that Arkane Studies is capable of working that same magic with Deathloop if they are so inclined. So I hold out hope - and if I am the only one, then I will stand proudly alone, like a jilted lover with a boombox in the rain - that I will wake up one day to a Deathloop 2 announcement trailer and the good fortune to see a miracle repeated.
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