 One of my earliest videos was about how Arkane's Prey Moon Crash was not just a great game, but the total perfection of the Arkane game's formula. Because I love Moon Crash so much, I was obviously extremely pumped to learn that Deathloop seemed to be based around the basic design philosophy that made Moon Crash so special. And after thoroughly finishing Deathloop, I'm left with a tricky review to write. When I say I thoroughly finished the game, I mean that I didn't just blaze through the campaign. I played each level all the way out until there was nothing left to do or find beyond a few chests and the final code of a puzzle featuring 3 people and a hookah. I got all the weapons, all the upgrades for every power, and got to the point that on my final run through the loop, I finished every assassination in less than 3 minutes. So I feel pretty comfortable talking about what the game totally succeeds at, as well as the things that missed the mark a bit, and then the things that just don't work all that well at all. In aggregate, Deathloop is yet another excellent game from Arkane, but it also stands as a bit of a missed opportunity to be their first true, total masterpiece. Because for every single thing this game does amazingly well, and there's a bunch of that. There's another thing that kinda negates it, Deathloop, after the logo. Arkane Magic. If there's one thing I really like about Arkane games, it's that they're always kinda divisive. Every one of their releases from Ark's Fatalis on have had some people absolutely love them while others just don't get what all the fuss is about. This was especially true with Dishonored 2 and Prey. The only other game I can think of that gets a similar response is the Hitman series. They're games that very much defy categorization and therefore people come into the games with wildly different expectations. Even the genre they fall into, Immersive Sim, isn't really a genre at all, beyond meaning, oh, this game is sort of like the old thief or system shot games. Hitman isn't really a stealth game, it's definitely not an action game, it's kinda a puzzle game, sort of. And this goes for something like Prey or Dishonored as well. Does Prey a first person shooter? Is it a stealth action game? What's Dishonored? You can beat Dishonored without ever once using stealth and you can beat Dishonored without alerting any enemy throughout the whole campaign. You can kill everything or you can kill barely anything at all. These games are defined by the fact that they're annoying as hell to define and therefore pretty hard to adequately explain in a 1000 word article or blog post. There is one through line in Arcane games and it's that they manage to feel like an open-ended sandbox, while also being games that are highly reliant on complicated interlocking systems. They're games that are all about how fun it is to carefully plan a series of steps to make it feel like you've solved a puzzle, while also being games all about this. I love that. Just like I did with Prey, I'm gonna have several pretty big criticisms of Deathloop as a game. But my criticism is mainly that Deathloop isn't the total masterpiece it could have been and instead it ends up being another very good Arcane game. Arcane makes the only stealth games I love because they manage to be stealth games that don't rely entirely on sitting in a corner waiting for a guard to turn around. I did play Deathloop mainly as a stealth game. You might have played it as a shooter. Either way, I think most of my criticisms will stand. This is a pretty complex game so let's start with the most important stuff. Game play. Let's start by saying that Deathloop is indeed a very unique game, but it's not a totally different genre from Arcane's previous titles. Early in the tutorial section, I came to the first combination lock and did what any good immersive sim player would do. I entered 0451 and then smiled when it failed and I got an achievement called Old Habits Die Hard. I thought that achievement might be a little hint that Deathloop wouldn't really be a typical Arcane style immersive sim that maybe this was the developer telling me I was going to be surprised by what came next. For better and for worse, that is not the case. This is an Arcane game through and through. Deathloop is a game in which you're free to complete objectives in multiple ways. This means combat or stealth or using clever level design and powers to totally avoid both. This is the foundation of every good immersive sim from Deus Ex to Deathloop. One of the complaints people had with Prey was that the actual shooting didn't feel all that great, but that is not the case in Deathloop, which is the first Arcane game that can credibly be described as an FPS game. Now for the most part I didn't play it as an FPS, but when stealth fails and the shooting starts, Deathloop is a surprisingly good feeling shooter. With movement, powers, a double jump and the classic dishonored slide, you have a game that shows Arcane could probably make a pretty good pure FPS if they wanted to, and it bodes well for this Borgland type thing they're working on with Redfall. Still, it is important to go in knowing that Deathloop is not a full-on shooter. It's basically a stealth game in which you can ignore stealth totally if you want and go in guns blazing. Movement feels as good as it does in any Arcane game and the core of the gameplay is navigating the levels, figuring out how to most efficiently solve some problems and then get out. The powers on offer are pretty much the same ones you're used to from Dishonored 1 & 2, with one new one thrown in to accommodate people who want to run through this game as a shooter. Mechanically, it's pretty much Dishonored with modern guns, which is where one of the game's serious problems arises. Because stealth is very powerful and shooting is very powerful, the game's at risk of being way too easy. Arcane tried to balance this both by having ammo being very limited and by making enemies do a ton of damage to you in an open firefight. But then they unbalanced that by giving you several lives per level. I didn't finish Deathloop without dying once, but I did finish it without ever failing a level. I never used up all of my lives and never failed to successfully finish my mission and get out of the level with my loot. I'll come right out and say this, Deathloop is way too easy. It's so easy it's kind of a crippling flaw in the game and one that Mooncrash didn't suffer from because that game consistently ramped up the difficulty with a contamination mechanic. There is no such system running in the background in Deathloop and there's no real change in each level from day to day. Now, there is definitely something satisfying about becoming so familiar with the level that you can tear through every enemy and multiple objectives in less than five minutes. But once you've done that a couple of times, you start to feel like there's no real challenge to overcome anymore and the game starts to kind of bog down a bit. This is a perfect example of why I have always and will always insist that all games need to have difficulty settings. All of them. Imagine if Doom Eternal only came with the easiest difficulty. That would be a disaster, man. Enemies in Deathloop already do a ton of damage and nobody likes bullet sponge enemies and shooters but there are obvious ways to implement difficulty options in this game. A hardest difficulty could have had serious consequences for raising the alarm. A hardest difficulty should make enemies more easily alerted, make them search for you longer and more effectively and call in more reinforcements. If I had a choice, I would probably have tripled the amount of enemies in each level over time to make it more difficult. Ideally, I'd have liked the game to start the same but ramp up difficulty as I progressed. Deathloop is broken into very specific quest chains so there are obvious places to trigger more difficulty. The only reason I can think of for why this isn't the case is that the entire narrative hinges on looping the exact same day but that's simply not a good enough reason to hinder the actual mechanics on offer. That real issue with difficulty doesn't mean the game's boring, however. Arcane makes some of the best levels in games and while Deathloops aren't as good as Prey or Dishonored, they're still some of the best in the industry. Arcane games have always had a relatively small number of levels but makes up for that with them being extremely dense. You can go through one of Deathloops' levels 8 times and find new things every single time because while there are only 4 levels, they all change depending on what time of day it is. Entirely different areas open up depending on when you explore them and buildings and doors are only available at specific times. It's these careful changes that manage to keep Deathloop totally engaging despite the game being too easy and the levels themselves actually being kinda small. It takes many hours before you feel like you know everything about a level and that is a testament to Arcane's attention to detail and the care and craft they put into the small changes they make to each level at each time of day. Another one of the game's big successes is its progression. It's well-paced and interesting and is a really fun little metagame running in the background. Weapons are pretty varied and interesting with clearer pros and cons and they can be upgraded with different perks or different runes that you slot into them to change how they handle. The powers which are called slabs here are also able to be upgraded by acquiring them over and over. So each time you kill a boss, he'll drop the power again in the form of an upgrade that will change how it works. In case you haven't played it, I won't spoil what they are but they're very cool and it makes killing a boss over and over feel like it's useful. My only real complaint with the powers actually is that you can only equip two at a time. They're already kinda balanced by a recharging mana system so what this means is that even though all of the powers are extremely cool, you will likely end up only using the same two for most of the game. I don't think it would have hurt things to use the dishonored system here and let us use four at a time. It's already extremely easy so what could it have hurt? Hell, if you had each player have all four, you could have drastically increased enemy count, safe in the knowledge that every player had both stealth and combat powers on them at all times. Either way, it's a testament to just how damn good arcane is at making killing things fun that the game is so engaging despite being way too easy. Games being too easy is generally a deadly sin for me but Deathloop feels so good that it's more of a missed opportunity than a crushing flaw. Okay, let's get to the thing that's most interesting to both praise and criticize. The basic structure of the game and its objectives. Moon Crash was a pretty complex game. In order to win, the player had to save every person in one run without dying with the difficulty ramping up as each run progressed. Just like Deathloop, this means making a ton of runs to figure out what order you needed to evacuate your people in. Unlike Deathloop, that game was far more random. Certain areas would be locked off or full of dangerous enemies or on fire which would force players to need to constantly adapt and change their plans on the fly. You couldn't figure the game out because the game was basically changing around you. You could go in with a general plan but not a detailed list of what you needed to do. Deathloop initially looked even more complicated because in Moon Crash you had to evacuate five survivors whereas in Deathloop you need to kill eight targets and only four levels by doing objectives that allow you to force NPCs to move to specific locations so they can all be killed at the same time. When I first heard about this game I was worried it would be too complicated to figure this stuff out and I find myself wondering if the original idea for this game was for it to be much more open ended and difficult. The entire idea makes the game seem like there's going to be a real puzzle aspect to it but for better or worse, this simply isn't the case. Later because when you really think about it, the game would probably be too frustrating with little or no guidance but worse because in the final product you figure out how to get the targets to group up mainly by following waypoints directly to the things you need to do. Now I understand Arcane must have thought you run the risk of frustrating your average player if you don't give them enough direction. The solution they arrived at putting very clear waypoints and the literal checklist that tells you exactly where to go at what time might have been correct, I don't know. And the game is really fun and a joy to play but there's just this nagging feeling in my mind where I wish I had actually been forced to figure some things out for myself and this is where difficulty comes in again. I have to believe that a difficulty setting that adjusted how totally directed the player is would have vastly improved things here. A hard mode that gave players zero waypoints or hints and then maybe a sliding scale that allowed players who were having trouble to get as much or as little direction as they wanted. I'm sure this is a difficult system to implement but a system that required you to earn hints by say spying on NPCs or reading lore entries. Just some way to play through the game so that it felt like I figured out what to do rather than me just following a list. Deathloop is at its very best when you feel like you figured out something clever like all arcane games and it has several moments like that but all of those moments tend to be outside the main story quest. Everything mission critical is handed directly to you. Deathloop has one final solution to the game. As far as I can tell there was only one way to kill all 8 targets in a run whereas in Moon Crash you had a certain amount of room to adapt. What this boils down to is Deathloop might have been a bit too ambitious for its own good. Clearly in something like this there was going to need to be some hand holding but I just cannot help but wish there had been quite a bit less or maybe even a lot less. Story. Arcane's games all have incredibly interesting worlds with extremely cool premises but they often fail to really tie it all together into a great cohesive story. I think Prey probably gets closest to a great story because its final ending is actually pretty satisfying and the world and lore ends up being really well explained through a mountain of text and audio logs as well as NPCs you get to directly interact with. Deathloop has perhaps the best starting point for a story yet and is filled with very interesting characters but the final story ends up feeling almost half finished. You spend the game trying to piece together what's going on and slowly unravel the mystery of the time loop. Unfortunately the game never really answers any of these questions. Why does Cole want to break the loop? I don't know. It's not explained. It's not even really asked to be honest with you. As I played I found myself asking cool questions that I hoped the story would answer like are these people even technically alive? If you're living the exact same day over and over for eternity can you be said to be functionally alive at all? I say no and I was waiting for the game to really dig into that but it doesn't. I was waiting for the game to explain how Colt and the others lost their memory but it's only addressed to be hand waved away as being the result of getting bored. There's simply less lore and world building here than there is in Prey or Dishonored. Everything that's in the game is excellent, absolutely excellent, but there's just not quite enough of it. A great place to take the story would have been to have things change every day. If we reset time in our world every day do you think you would behave the same way each time? I don't think we would. I think there's an inherent amount of randomness and chaos in the world and we would find that resetting time would produce slightly different results every single time we ran it back. If the game had done that it would have opened up a way to change the difficulty up and keep players guessing as well as had some interesting philosophical questions to ask. But in the end Deathloop's story and world is really just a cool idea that isn't explored fully. Prey's audio logs tended to be really really great stuff. They were full of love stories, tragedies, and the political and social dynamics of the universe of the game. Deathloop really doesn't offer that kind of granular detail. Everything feels a bit too light hearted, a bit too jokey. There are a few powerful emotional moments, but they're very rare and the world building just doesn't feel finished. I have no idea what Colt's old world is like. Where is he from? What kind of country did he live in? What was it called? What's the nature of their society? The end of the game implies that this game takes place within the dishonored universe, but unlike those games which do a spectacular job setting you down in the world, Deathloop never gets beyond the very basic surface details. Again, what's here is very good. It's just a shame that you're left wanting more. Okay, it's important to reiterate that I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Deathloop. It's one of the best games of 2021 pretty easily. And it fits nicely into Arkane's library of titles. It is an incredibly ambitious game that tries something different by trying to take the best of dishonored and blend it with the best of Prey Moon Crash, while improving the moments in moment combat far beyond anything they've done before. One of the most impressive things about the game is that it feels smaller and smaller as you go. When you first start playing, it feels quite big and sprawling and complicated, but as you chase down each waypoint and quest and complete the assassinations, everything condenses down and simplifies. I think this is probably exactly what they wanted the game to feel like and they succeeded. The best thing about Arkane is that every one of their games is totally unique in the industry. There are no other games like Dishonored. There's nothing like it. There's nothing else like Prey at all. The only other games even remotely related are things like Deus Ex or Hitman. And those titles are so different that they're barely related at all beyond the very basic aspects of the immersive sim genre. Deathloop is another great Arkane game, but the fact that it's so very close to being something truly spectacular ended up leaving me feeling ever so slightly disappointed. The game's world building and story just aren't fleshed out enough and that's a shame man, especially considering Prey and Dishonored are amongst the very best games at world building and text and audio logs. And the game is simply too easy period. I can't help but think that the original plan was that the difficulty would come not from the stealth and the combat, but rather from the complexity of the puzzle like objectives and quests. I got a suspicion that at some point they realized it was simply too difficult to figure things out on your own without giving the player very clear directions and waypoints and they simplified the puzzle aspect of the game. But then they never figured out a way to go back and make it more challenging to complete things from a gameplay perspective. When you add it all up, you've got a game that's basically par for Arkane. It does some things like gunplay and movement better and some things like difficulty story and world building worse. It's a very good game. It's just not the best game it could have been. I have every reason to hope the next big single player game they release will be. I still don't think we've gotten the best game Arkane can make. But we now know that even their small misses will still be pretty damn good. Alright, I'll either do a video about how massively disappointing I thought Keena Bridge of Spirits is or maybe a video about why Borderlands the pre-sequel is way fucking worse than I recalled or maybe something I haven't even thought of yet. Alright, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.