Deathloop

amazon Deathloop reviews

Anyone who has played through a game of Arkane Studios, from the epic like Dishonored 1 and Dishonored 2, brain-twisting like Prey, or even monstrous like Arx Fatalis, will find Deathloop very familiar.

But that familiarity is just the tip of the iceberg of a strange, unique, and downright daring experience that the Arkane Lyon team has crafted, which is sure to wow every fan of the “ImSim” (Immersive Simulation) genre. In general and Arkane, in particular, are surprising because of both its advantages and disadvantages.

Although Deathloop is simpler than Prey and Dishonored, it is still a very complex game, so the Arkane Lyon team made a meticulous tutorial.

The game begins with our main character – Colt Vahn, being stabbed to death by a girl dressed too luxuriously to be such a cold-blooded assassin. She ruthlessly killed Colt, and BOOM – Colt suddenly woke up on the beach.

Arkane Lyon takes players through a tutorial that the writer considers the best for an AAA game in recent years.

All the complex mechanics of the game, such as climbing, character upgrading, the versatile Hackamajig, weapons, infusion, and power, are presented meticulously to the player.

Not only that, the dialogue between the classy assassin girl named Julianna and our friend Colt is also very funny, sharp, and full of grace throughout the opening and instructions.

Each game’s mechanism is spread before the player’s eyes, skillfully integrating the plot context in a natural, fluent, and extremely crazy way with Colts. Another dimension coming to advise our Colt, then violently taken down by Julianna, the first 2 hours of Deathloop were gripping, crazy, and downright top-notch!

That makes the writer, even though he is familiar with Arkane’s trademark mechanisms and formulas, not bored at all and even more eager to immerse himself in the story!

But the madness of the first two hours certainly won’t prepare you for the rest of the game.

If talking about the gameplay of Deathloop, there will be a lot of bright spots!

As Colt Vahn, the player, Julianna, and all the Blackreef residents are trapped in a seemingly endless time loop!

If you die, you’ll wake up right on that shore! If you survive the night, you’ll wake up on that shore too! Just in the morning, everything will start all over again, including the memories of most of the Blackreef residents, except for Colt, Julianna, and a few other interesting characters. If you’re a fan of movies like Groundhog Day or Palm Spring, you’re probably familiar with this motif or theme!

And our friend Colt, even though he doesn’t remember anything, now has a mission – to take down all eight so-called Visionaries, who are behind the mysterious power that has turned the island into evil existentialist dreams for Colt and Julianna.

Blackreef Island is divided into four locations, Karl’s Bay, Updaam, The Complex, and Fristad Rock. The day of the time loop will be divided into four periods: early morning, noon, afternoon, and evening. When the player goes out to explore one of the four locations mentioned above, time will move forward, and everything will start again after the evening – the player will end the time loop and game if they defeat all 8 Visionaries in a single time loop.

Between each outing, questing, and returning, Colt will have a break between the two timelines of the day so he can “infuse” with a resource called “residuum” spawning scattered throughout the game for the player to collect. The player will be rewarded with a huge amount of Residuum if they defeat a Visionaries, keeping the equipment he collected during that expedition.

Items that have been “infused” will appear in the player’s equipment cabinet in the next loops – that is, the more you play, the more you will find genuine, powerful weapons to connect with subsequent iterations; completing the task is easier.

That is evident in the way the gameplay of Deathloop is designed! Passive skills that work a bit like the Bone Charm in the Dishonored version will be scattered throughout the environment, as well as randomly dropped from enemy corpses. The search for these upgrades itself is not difficult because they will drop a lot, making it difficult for you to pick up!

Active skills familiar to players of Dishonored or other Arkane games such as flash, stealth, wire, and toss enemies in the air will be collected when the player defeats a corresponding Visionaries, for example. For example, Wenjie will drop the Nexus – tethered ability, Charlie will drop the Shift – speeding ability – and upgrades for these skills will randomly appear the next time you defeat these Visionaries.

Understanding how these skills work and combining them makes Deathloop’s gameplay varied, smooth, and incredibly fun!

Players can combine epic speed with double jumps, flash, bounce to turn Colt into a true whirlwind, tossing every enemy in his way most crazily and funnily possible, or a combination of flash, stealth, “walk softly, speak softly” to glide through the entire game screen without anyone knowing, or balance between the two and “hidden, flashed.” Still, every time “showed up,” the enemy will simultaneously fall to the ground with the skill set invisibility.

In addition to Colt’s skills, he can also make the most of the environment to work; slaughtering those poor Eternalists is even more fun! Kick them off the cliff, lure them to the substation. Even though it’s not as crazy and explosive as Dishonored, the combination of these skills with Deathloop’s insane gun lineup makes it all the more fun. !

Simple weapons like silenced pistols, shotguns, submachine guns are simple with different rarity and skill sets, to crazy weapons like a two-handed shotgun. Arms can be joined together to create a longer and more accurate version or a submachine gun that can fire and reload simultaneously, a shotgun that can transform to fire a single bullet with deadly range and accuracy!

Wolfenstein: Youngblood may have been a flop, but this experience certainly allowed the Arkane team to hone and learn how to design the shooting mechanics, as every gun in Deathloop has a great weight. Shooting them feels so good, and combining such crazy guns makes fighting in Deathloop feel so awesome!

However, no matter how much you fight, not playing stealth in an Arkane game is a huge mistake!

Every place on Blackreef Island has its own “theme,” Updaam is a place to live, Karl’s Bay is a place to hang out…. So the design of each location’s environment clearly shows that players who are observant or familiar with Arkane’s superior level architecture design will find their way!

When you enter a multi-story building, you will immediately think of finding the stairs! If you want to break into a closed science facility, you’ll find a ventilation hole or maintenance room. You find a transformer or power source; you know there’s some weird machine waiting for you ahead. The main door locked? Find the window. On the ground, too little cover and too many enemies?

The universal key for every type of electronic device on Blackreef, players will use it to unlock, disable, or capture enemy machine gun turrets, sensors, and radios, preventing them from receiving reinforcements. While Colt will be so cool in the future that you can pass the level without using this Hackamajig, but playing with it for your play will also lead to very interesting interactions taste!

Every brand of Arkane’s meticulous, detailed environmental design is showcased on Blackreef, making exploration, discovery, and stealth play just as much fun as fighting madness!

It’s fun to overdo it, so sometimes Julianna will randomly appear, block Colt’s escape route and hunt him down! Another player or machine can control Julianna, depending on the player’s choice.

But surely, every time she appears, Julianna will make our friend Colt stop and play more carefully because Julianna is stronger, faster, and more powerful than any enemy on the map; if she happens – Colt will pay the price!

With that said, Colt can only appear in one location at a single time, and with 8 (7) Visionaries scattered throughout Blackreef at different times of the day, how is that possible to take down? All? No matter how powerful Colt is, he can’t clone!

Then the brightest part of Deathloop shows how players interact, engrossed in the story, to piece together a giant puzzle.

Egor was invited to Aleksis’s party in the evening, why didn’t he go? Frank is never in the same place as anyone. How do you get rid of him before the evening is over? These questions appear continuously every time the player finds something new.

The game guides players through the daily activities of the Visionaries in a fluent, natural way, encouraging players to be flexible and sensitive to the environment so as not to miss any data. Once the data is collected, Colt and the player will piece it together, becoming an increasingly clear picture of the most logical path to take down all 8 Visionaries in a single day.

This narrative style makes players deeply immersed in Blackreef, when every branch, blade of grass, and house can carry “lost” data to make Colt solve this problem more easily. Players will be immersed in a world inspired by the culture of the 60s in the West to solve a puzzle that every time a piece is inserted, often a new blank appears.

And even in the process of finding pieces and putting them together, Deathloop is very subtle in inserting the main story of Colt, Julianna, and Blackreef himself.

Sometimes players will feel that there are too many questions and too few answers, and they are even more motivated to find the answers to them!

While the storyline may be more monotonous than Dishonored or Prey when it’s fully presented, there’s no denying that the storytelling is truly genius!

This narrative’s spontaneity, fluency, subtlety, and inventiveness highlight the Arkane team’s concerns about late capitalist society, consumerism, and the nihilistic and mundane visions of the times and human life, all wrapped up behind a dirty, corrupt but stylish and creative world.

Half of Deathloop, when you open the game, will be Julianna’s play called “Protect the Loop,” – where the player will transform into Julianna and “invade” another player’s screen.

That is Deathloop’s multiplayer, and while it’s not mandatory, it isn’t good, frankly!

If you play Julianna, you will sometimes run around aimlessly because you won’t understand what Colt is doing there! Protect the weak? Are not! Maybe that Colt guy prepares another event and runs back to the exit after completing them, making the experience boring and highly inhibiting!

Gunfights between you and other players can be fun, but because the server quality is so poor. If the other Julianna doesn’t have a flash on her, she will teleport everywhere and even stab you in the back when she’s dancing in front of you!

Even more, inhibited when Colt’s “cool” costumes were locked after this lousy multiplayer! Many interesting weapons will help you in the process of transforming into Colt!

Not to mention, the game’s AI is very bad; their vision is quite inconsistent because even if you stand right in front of them, they will do like…. can’t see you, or carelessly rush to your death in a gunfight with Colt.

The last significant limitation of Deathloop is the game’s respawned mechanism.

The game will let the player respawn after dying twice, i.e., the player must die until the third time the loop is reset. That is not only frustrating for other Julianna players because they will almost certainly fail a lot! But this mechanism also significantly reduces the game’s difficulty, as Colt gradually becomes too strong, and the enemies are still too stupid!

where can you get a Deathloop online

DEATHLOOP Standard Edition – PlayStation 5: Buy it now

Deathloop with Steel Poster (Exclusive to Amazon.co.UK) (PS5): Buy it now

Deathloop Deluxe – PlayStation 5: Buy it now