I don’t think I’ve ever been as disappointed in a game as I was with Deathloop. Its lack of commitment to its core ideas and its distrust in its players made me question what the developers were thinking. To be clear, I don’t think Deathloop is an unplayable mess. The basic stealth and action can be a little fun when you just want to turn off your brain and assassinate some targets. But Deathloop could have been so much more. As a massive fan of Arkane’s previous work, such as Dishonored and Prey, I was shocked how restrictive and uninspiring the game is.

The hook of Deathloop is that you are trapped in a 24-hour loop on a lawless island controlled by egotistical maniacs. You have to assassinate the 8 architects of the loop in a single day to escape the loop. You have to learn their habits, their schedules, their secrets, and utilize your knowledge to dispose of all the targets in a single loop. When I heard about this game, I imagined a fully explorable world, maybe separated into zones, in which time flowed continuously. Figuring out how to quickly maneuver between areas and learning when and where your targets were vulnerable would require experimentation and mastery. Instead, Deathloop is split up into 4 discrete time periods across 4 zones. 

I understand that the choice to have fully separated time periods was probably one made for simplicity. It’s a lot easier to design levels around the static timeframes of morning, noon, afternoon, and evening, then having to have time continuously flow as the levels evolve throughout the day. It’s just far less interesting and immersive than it could be. That being said, the implementation of having just 4 discrete times could still work, but Deathloop is overly restrictive in its design.

Learning the ins-and-outs of each level at each time of day is still a promising concept. At first, each target appears in a single area at a single time, making it impossible to kill more than four in a single loop. You have to explore and delve for information that can be used to influence your targets to appear in the same place at the same time. Given the nature of Arkane’s experience with immersive sims, a genre known for freedom of choice and simulated systems, it’s shocking that Deathloop only has two ways to dispose of each target. There’s the initial time and location for each target, and the correct time and location that you can trick them into going to so you can kill multiple targets simultaneously. There is not a wealth of options or methods to employ, just a single correct strategy. It’s massively disappointing to stifle the player’s creativity, and it’s made even worse with how blatantly Deathloop holds the player’s hand through the whole process.

The first couple hours of the game are a form of tutorial hell. You are completely on rails, given no freedom and are constantly bombarded with text pop-ups and overly wordy tutorials for even the most basic of systems. This is just a taste of what Deathloop has in store. The game relies on text documents and audio logs to reveal information, which is fine, but it also beats you over the head to make sure you didn’t miss anything. Anytime something important is revealed a text pop-up summarizes it, the main character comments on it, a cutscene plays after the mission explaining in detail what to do next, the quest log drills it into your head, and of course the game provides objective markers pinpointing your next goal. The developers did not trust players to make deductions on their own, which is infuriating.

Deathloop had the potential to be a solid knowledge-based game. You progress through the same loop over and over, gaining knowledge to access new areas and influence the future. I would love this. But it doesn’t let the player learn things, experiment, and make deductions organically. Even when it is obvious what to do, Deathloop leads you by the nose and says “GO HERE NOW”. It’s obnoxious. 

The structure of Deathloop is a major missed opportunity, and the gameplay doesn’t make up for it. The game encourages you to play stealthily if you want, but to feel free to go in guns blazing. One common gripe about Dishonored was that it heavily disincentivized combat as any form of lethality would give you the “bad” ending. The unfortunate consequence of punishing lethality was that half of the game’s mechanics wouldn’t be utilized by many players, and tons of players (myself included) would reload saves anytime they were spotted. I appreciate that combat was encouraged, but it has gone too far in the other direction as stealth feels unnecessary. 

There’s virtually no reason to play stealthily. Positioning yourself in a corridor or on top of a building and going guns blazing is quicker, safer, and more entertaining. There’s no shortage of ammunition or health packs, so resource scarcity isn’t a reason to avoid combat. Even if you do die, you have 3 lives per zone so it never feels risky to engage in combat. Enemies don’t have particularly good AI, so they often just funnel into you as you pick them off. The audio and visual feedback from weapons isn’t great, but it can be dumb-fun to just annihilate enemies with overpowered weapons and powers. It gets old quickly though as there is only a single enemy type and 4 maps, at some point you’ve done the same exact fight dozens of times and just want to get through it quickly. The only time that gameplay felt appropriately tense was during the PVP invasions.

One of the more interesting aspects of Deathloop is how on select levels another player can load into your game as Julianna, your nemesis. They proceed to hunt you down and attempt to stop you from accomplishing your objective. This can be fun, as the key to success is to get the jump on the other player. Straight up shootouts aren’t common as there are so many avenues to sneak up on the other player. The person who is playing the campaign has the advantage because they have 3 lives, but Julianna has her own advantage in that the enemy goons are on her side. This actually made me play stealthily, as getting spotted by enemies would reveal me to the real threat: Julianna. 

While I mostly enjoyed the invasions, there are a few points of contention. Sometimes I just want to progress towards my goal, especially towards the end of the game. These fights could be drawn out and take a while before you felt safe to go for an objective. I had multiple instances where I loaded into a level, Julianna invades, I sneak around the map, accomplish multiple objectives, get into multiple battles with normal enemies, turn off her antenna so I can escape, and leave the level without ever seeing the other player. The maps are huge with lots of nooks and crannies, and I feel like players just sit in a corner and hope their opponent walks past them unknowingly for an easy kill. I wish there was some sort of neutral objective that both players would desperately want to obtain so that they would have some reason to come out of hiding. My last issue with these invasions is less concrete: was the game simplified as a result of the inclusion of Julianna?

I’ve made it clear that the structure of the game felt like a simplified version of a better idea. But everything in the game follows that pattern. There’s only one enemy variety, stealth isn’t super complex, the powers aren’t super interesting, and the objectives are very straightforward. Moreover, while the levels do have some branching paths and alternative routes, they are never near as complex or interesting as the levels from Dishonored 2. I can’t help but wonder if Arkane held back on a lot of more interesting ideas as they would have conflicted with PVP invasions. Which would be a shame if that were the case.

Another aspect of Deathloop that feels off is its progression system. As you progress through loops, you collect weapons, trinkets, and slabs that you can infuse. Infusion lets you keep gear permanently, and anything that isn’t infused disappears when the loop resets. I think this is ok, but I personally got some powerful weapons very early on and didn’t feel the need to care after that point. The slabs are the most interesting aspect as they are unique powers that can be upgraded with additional effects. All other loot is tiered, so a rare shotgun is more powerful than a basic one. Tiered loot doesn’t work in Deathloop because it forces the player to spend a ton of time in menus sorting through crap and deciding what to infuse and what to scrap.

For a high-profile game that came out a couple years ago, I was shocked how many game-breaking issues I encountered. The game crashed on me a couple times, and there were also times that I got stuck in a menu and it wouldn’t close. And once the “X” button on my PS5 slowly stopped doing anything, forcing me to restart the game. This is all unacceptable on its own, but it’s particularly bad because it happened in the middle of exploring which then required me to replay the entire level. This altered my habits because I felt discouraged from exploring or spending a long time in levels as the threat of a crash was always looming.

The story of the game is fairly nonsensical. The main character, Colt, wakes up not remembering anything. He learns from floating text and other versions of himself that he should break the loop. It’s a neat idea that a colony of criminals and psychos have isolated themselves from the world by looping through the same day over and over. But why do only Colt and Julianna remember anything from the previous day? It’s a glaring plot contrivance. And it’s never properly explained why Colt came here in the first place, or why he betrays the other “visionaries” to break the loop. Maybe I missed something, but not much of anything is explained. 

So, you may be thinking if there is anything about Deathloop that I did enjoy. For one, the art direction is definitely stylish. As previously mentioned, I do think that the game can be some mindless fun. It’s fun to go on a rampage and tear through enemies with the best weapons and slabs. It’s fun to methodically pick off enemies with headshots from my silenced gun. It’s fun to kick unsuspecting enemies off the side of cliffs. It’s fun to blast through the maps once you get familiar with them, and more so once you master them. And it’s fun when you eliminate Julianna after a particularly well-fought battle. But these aspects just get old rather quickly, and I was frustrated with how much potential was left on the table.

Deathloop isn’t a smart game. It wastes the fantastic idea of a looping assassination mystery by oversimplifying at every step. This could have been an innovative structural achievement, but instead it’s just a generic stealth-action game. It doesn’t give the players the freedom to indulge in some creative problem solving, and it doesn’t even trust its players to figure out the most basic of mysteries on their own. The middling gameplay doesn’t do much to save the game from its letdowns. It is for these reasons that I give Deathloop a 5/10. A single word summary of my time with Deathloop: disappointing.