This is a game that seemed pretty interesting when they talked about the idea, but it had this weird issue where they wouldn’t show a lot of the gameplay, or show how the game flow was going to be. They showed their “wacky” characters, which is a weird decision considering the characters are kinda ass in this game, and tried to show it had a “wacky” atmosphere, but it kinda doesn’t… Anyways, I was interested in this one, but I was gonna wait a bit to get it.

So anyways, I got it not too long after release, played it for a couple days, finished it, and it’s time to review it… so let’s go!

Developer: Arkane Studios
Publisher: Bethesda
Release date: September 14th 2021
Platforms: PC, PS5 (PC version played)
Genre: FPS with minor stealth elements

In DeathLoop you play as Colt, a dude who has some importance as far as the Loop, a project on Blackreef where literally everyone in it is stuck in a time loop, on purpose, to live eternally. The idea seems to have been that people would remember what happened the day before and they’d just live forever with limited resources required. Colt happens to be amnesiac at the start of the game, mostly just finding out that he needs to break the loop and return the world to normal. But a woman named Julianna is basically taunting you the whole game, trying to stop you from doing it. She does seem to know about you pre-amnesia, and as you play you find out more about yourself, from other, alternate loop versions of yourself, as well as about Julianna. The goal: find a way to kill all the visionaries in one loop, causing the loop to break. The visionaries are these important characters that seem to have some important reason to be in the loop… they’re kinda not really worth mentioning though. Thankfully for Colt, the loop isn’t functioning correctly, and everyone other than him and Julianna don’t remember the previous loops, so they all think it’s the first “day” of the loop each time, which means you get to learn what people are doing and you can plan ahead.. I guess the disappointing parts of the story is that the visionaries themselves are little more than “kill this person” fodder with little to no actual personality or development (the only characters with development or depth at all are Julianna and Colt, and even that’s pretty shallow), and the ending is ass. There’s 3 endings, they all suck. The one that you think would lead to interesting answers to questions just… doesn’t.

So this is a first-person shooter where you have superpowers and there’s stealth elements. It may seem similar to some other game by this studio, but that’s just because it is. The core gameplay works much as you’d expect from hearing these words, of course. You move pretty smoothly plus the run button has a slight directional dash to it. There’s fall damage so you have to be careful. The guns tend to have a bit of a spread on their shots (not all though) but the accuracy is generally good enough. In addition to guns you also have a hackamajig, which hacks things, and slabs, which give you powers. I didn’t find too many of the slabs to be particularly useful. Shift is a short-range teleport, Nexus is broken as shit (links people to each other, so if one dies they all die… and it gets better), Aether makes you invisible which I found useful exactly once… and that’s about it, I didn’t find the other powers useful.

The stealth is pretty fucking weak, as you’d expect from the devs of Dishonored, but it’s also not the core of the game… but I will still talk about it. The AI is as bad as Dishonored. You can literally be actively shooting at an enemy AND hitting your shots AND they can be looking directly towards you, but they’ll have no idea you’re there… and sometimes they’ll just randomly see you through walls. There’s no consistency. Enemies getting killed actually don’t leave a body behind in this game, but for some reason other enemies can notice that someone died in a spot. There’s a few occasional bits that end up being pretty good, like NPCs knowing they didn’t open a door and starting to search around if they notice a door you opened. You do have some stealth tools, like Shift to swoop through a spot unseen, or Aether to literally become invisible, and nail guns to shoot silent projectiles. Sometimes enemies will notice if someone else dies so it’s not perfect, but the enemies ARE stupid, so if you kill someone that’s a foot behind someone else with a nail gun, they won’t notice unless they’re actively talking. Also there’s stealth takedowns. They’re pretty much always a bad option if there’s anyone even close. Also I guess enemies hear noises like footsteps if you’re close enough and not crouching, but it’s very selective hearing. You can explode something right outside of a building and the people in the building won’t notice. They just lack any kind of awareness… Until one person sees you clearly and suddenly everyone knows where you are exactly. I dunno, the stealth just doesn’t work well. But, like I said, you don’t really need to stealth all that much.

Combat itself is fairly simple. Most enemies, including the visionaries, are pretty weak. They all go down to a single headshot from any gun, except the visionaries take a little bit more but they’re still pretty weak (moreso if you can get them by surprise and take them out before they use their slabs). Otherwise there’s not TOO much to the combat, it’s standard FPS fare. Grenades can be good to kill large groups (though there’s is a better, stealthier option) or knock down enemies to finish them off. There’s one of the slabs that lets you do telekinetic throws, I’d rather just shoot enemies with a nail gun tbh. The one really strong option for combat is the Nexus slab, especially once you power it up. At its core it just links enemies, so if you do something to one of them it happens to all of them (such as dying)… with a power-up the link can spread if non-linked enemies get close to linked enemies, and another power-up heals you if you kill a linked person. It’s super OP. The guns are pretty standard other than the nail gun which requires charging. Shotguns, pistols, submachinegun pistols, rifles (one of which is a sniper)… there’s nothing really unique weaponry-wise. I guess one of the funner options is hacking turrets and have those shoot enemies for you.

So game flow is interesting. There’s 4 parts of the day: morning, noon, afternoon, evening. There’s 4 areas in the game. Updaam, The Complex, Fristad Rock and Karl’s Bay. The idea is that you needs to explore these areas and find notes and audio recordings and such. These will give you information about the visionaries, may it be codes to open certain doors, positions on certain days, motivations of the character, what might make a character want to go to a different place at a different time than usual… that kind of stuff. The goal: find how you can kill all 7 visionaries to unlock your rocket and end the loop. Different things can happen on later parts of the day based on things dong in earlier parts. Maybe you break something in the morning so one Visionary will meet up with another later on. Or maybe you find out where some of them might be hiding where you can kill more than one at once, or something. This does mean going through many loops, visiting different areas at different times of the day to find different clues to different things. The game does show a checkpoint to your current goal, but exploration is still important, as you can find clues not related to your current objective, as well as trinkets, or even just killing a visionary to get their slab or weapon (if you have a slab already, you get an upgrade for that slab). Of course things are different in each area based on time of day, so there’s extra exploration on certain days. Also there’s a bunch of optional stuff you can do, some leads don’t, well, lead to anything important, and sometimes it’s kinda secret-ish stuff. There’s several doors that require 3 codes that I only found 1 code for, for example. Oh, and codes are randomized for each game save, that way you can’t just look up someone else’s run to know what codes open what doors.

Before leaving for an area, you can prepare Colt’s loadout. You can equip up to 3 guns, each which can get 2 or 3 weapon trinkets. Weapon trinkets can have effects like lower recoil, piercing bullets, faster reload and such. You can equip 3 slabs (there’s one that’s equipped by default, I actually don’t know if you can remove it, it allows you to die 3 times before resetting the loop), and each slab has 2 slots for upgrades. Like I mentioned before, you get upgrades from killing visionaries again. Like, more range with Shift, or “broken mode” for Nexus. Then you have 4 slots for Character Trinkets. You’ll basically always want Double Jump equipped, you always get that one for free at the start of a day. Other things can be things like more quiet footsteps, ability to hack more things, extra health or power… pretty simple. The really important element here is infusion. When you die, you lose EVERYTHING you have. Weapons, trinkets, all gone. You get infusion points from absorbing it from objects in the environment that look glitchy, and a bunch from killed visionaries as well. You can also get some by recycling trinkets and weapons and such you don’t want. When a weapon, trinket, slab or slab upgrade is infused, you get to keep it permanently when time loops. So if you like a specific gun that has a good extra effect, you infuse it and start with it every loop after. Obviously you’ll want to infuse slabs and slab upgrades.

I haven’t tried playing as Julianna, no idea how that works. I just left the game in single-player mode, that way I could fucking pause. Playing as Colt she does very rarely pop up to kill you, you can get slabs/slab upgrades if you kill her… not much of note there. She only popped up 4 times in my playthrough (CPU-controlled). One I killed her, one she killed me, and two where I just didn’t see her at all.

I will quickly talk about PC performance. I don’t know if it’s an Arkane thing, not being good at optimizing PC versions (I had some much worse issues with Dishonored 2 back when that came out, the game was just unplayable). I should be running this easily above 144fps, but I can’t, most of the time. Sometimes I do, no problem, other times it drops to 50. I have no idea why. Turning down some settings kinda helps, but I’m not really sure which one actually have a big effect on framerate in this game, it seems like the game just drops randomly, for no reason. I thought it was water, but no. I thought it was snow, but nah… I don’t know what’s causing it. Also, if you turn off V-Sync here it adds an “FPS Limiter” option, and the highest you can put it is 120fps. I have no idea why. Usually turning off V-Sync uncaps the framerate. I hear it might be because of Arkane’s engine sucking and getting weird physics issues at higher framerates, but that just happens anyways, enemies sometimes just fly off when you kill them. I dunno, with the PC I have, no modern game should struggle at 1080p (or even 1440p), even on ultra settings (I’d have to go down a bit at higher res, of course).

Overall

DeathLoop was kinda fun. The concept that it’s basically a big puzzle game where you need to find the solution to killing the 7 visionaries and launch the rocket is really cool, and some of it is actually executed pretty okay. The game does like pointing you exactly at where to go to find what you need next, but there’s still some puzzling out you need to do on your own, and there’s some optional stuff. Sure you’ll know who to kill when, but you still have to figure out how to do it (and there’s some steps that don’t have a checkpoint), so knowing the solution isn’t a free win. The game IS pretty easy, but it’s also pretty easy to fuck up.

I feel a lot of the powers are kinda pointless. I never found a good use for anything other than Shift and Nexus (which is OP as fuck), and one part where using Aether was useful. Other than powers I like how customizable your loadout is, but I don’t quite know how meaningful some of these trinkets really are, I just used the ones that looked good to me.

Also the story is pretty meh. The marketing touted all these visionaries as deep interesting characters, but they’re little more than background noise, only Julianna and Colt are of any importance, and even they lack depth (and the little depth we’re given is kinda… there but not built upon in any meaningful way). The ending is really… nothing.

Overall… once it gets a price drop or two, I’d recommend this game. It’s not bad at all.