Deathloop is released on September 14th – a new game from the authors of Dishonored and Prey. From the very first demonstration, many wondered how eminent developers specializing in immersive simulations would be able to pull out a concept with a time loop at the base. Now we can confidently say that the experiment failed. However, it did not become a complete failure either. Read more in the Cybersport.ru review.
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Very bad hangover
This landscape you will see over and over again
Colt wakes up after a tumultuous binge on the shore of an island with complete amnesia. About who he is and what he does on Black Reef, he is reminded every now and then by the inscriptions that appear around them, which are seen not only by the player, but also by the hero himself. With a bonus on the walkie-talkie found by Colt, Julianna regularly contacts him, shedding even more light on events.
Quite quickly, Colt finds out that he is stuck in a time loop: the same day repeats over and over again, not allowing him to leave the island or somehow change his life. The only way to break this loop is to kill eight ideologues, including Julianne, the head of the Black Reef security. The task as a whole is clear, it remains only to guess how to kill everyone in one day and not die in the process. However, death is not terrible – just think, you have to start all over again.
Planning insanity
Screenshot from Deathloop
For the first few hours, Deathloop is truly intriguing: the player is constantly confronted with incomprehensible things like strange glowing objects, mysterious mechanisms and closed doors with no obvious way to open them. Julianne, who now and then communicates with Colt on the radio, often only confuses, and does not help. Over time, the girl begins to openly interfere with Colt at all, although she hints that she is something more than just an enemy.
The first turns of the loop are the time of frank experiments and probing the soil. Here “Reprise” seems especially useful – an item that allows you to die three times for a card before the loop restarts. Colt has not yet managed to acquire a serious arsenal or useful skills, and all he can rely on is his own mind and found weapons that can either be picked up from the bodies of enemies or found in the levels. We are not talking about the murder of ideologues yet: for a start, it would be good to just find them, and only then figure out how and when to deal with them.
Speaking of “when”, it is important to note the primacy of time on Black Reef. Despite the time loop, life on the island continues to take its course. You have to visit different areas, focusing on the information received, and accordingly plan your time. Four districts and four times of day (morning, before noon, afternoon and night) add up to 16 maps, some of which can change quite globally. Some pieces of the map are blocked, others, on the contrary, are added, plus the locals have an unusual idea of fun and can simply break in the morning what the player needs in the afternoon. You have to take this into account when paving your way.
Fortunately or not, the game quite clearly takes the player by the handle and carefully guides them along the intended trajectory. All important clues are reflected in a separate menu, and it is enough to highlight the one of interest, and a hint will immediately appear in the menu where and when to move. At least, this is how the main quest works: for the side quest, you often have to sweat, trying to reveal all the secrets laid down by the developers.
A box full of toys
Jokes for “friends” available
Deathloop in the first hours never ceases to delight with a proprietary study from Arkane. The world reacts great to the player’s actions, each goal can be reached in several ways, and enemies can be eliminated with a fair amount of originality. Of course, you can rely on quiet cannons and kill everyone one by one, or simply cut in close combat with a machete, or even run out into the crowd with a machine gun at the ready. But here, unlike the same Dishonored, experimenting is not only fun, but also not punishable. Finally, the studio has released a game in which you can turn around and look for all new ways of self-harm, without fear of getting a bad ending – the game in plain text will again and again call to deal with everyone you meet.
There is an extensive arsenal for self-harm: Colt has many different guns available, ranging from a construction nail gun to a hybrid device that can be either two pistols or a mini-machine gun. True, more and more variations of the same trunks will be found, but in different gradations of rarity. Everything is according to the canons of looter shooters: the gray ones are the most useless and can wedge when shooting, the blue ones are better and work flawlessly, the purple ones differ in appearance and additional bonuses like an increase in accuracy or a built-in silencer, and yellow ones are one-of-a-kind specimens that have no analogues. The latter, of course, are extremely few. It’s nice to shoot at the same time: the guns feel very different, allowing you to independently choose your own passing style.
Of course, experiments with the environment are involved. The machines with chewing gum standing around can be used in battle: it is enough to break one, and balls will roll under the feet of enemies, on which it is easy to fall and become useless for a while. The turrets placed against the Colt can be hacked and turned against enemies, and even better placed. Or you can pull the power supply out of the turret and throw it at the enemy – he will be struck by a fatal electric shock. And these are just some of the chips, it seems like a crime to disclose everything: it is better to independently understand the subtleties and nuances, of which there are really a lot here.
At the same time, exploring the island is really interesting: yes, the first few races are quite linear, and the game insists that for now it is better not to be distracted by anything, but soon the user gets complete freedom of movement and all the means for convenient navigation. The curious player will be rewarded: overheard conversations can lead to interesting caches, and attempts to get to an unobvious point on the map usually turn into a new side quest or another secret – there are a lot of them on Black Reef.
The moment everything goes awry
When something like this is displayed after the immersive level, you want to grind your teeth in frustration
And everything seems to be in place: the combat is interesting, the skills familiar from Dishonored (seriously – even teleportation and the ability to link enemies on the spot), you can finally use it in full, the variability is at a height … but the game does not add up.
The first thing that starts to be very unsettling is the menu between levels. You expect some kind of integrity and logical structure from the immersive simulator, but here, after completing the task, the Colt hides in the tunnels, and the player finds himself in a separate menu. It says everything that the hero managed to learn during the next race, and gives the opportunity to customize skills and weapons for the next mission – of course, if they are available. To say that it breaks the atmosphere is to say nothing.
However, you can even get used to it, and after a while the problem of perception fades into the background. Still, with the right layout on one level, you can spend more than an hour doing several tasks at once. This is where the second problem comes in – rehearsal. Sooner or later (but rather sooner) the backbone of the map will be studied in all details: the location of opponents and their dialogues, the order of actions, traps and other trifles are set aside, and the fun “sandbox” turns into an automatic routine process, which is far from pleasing as in the beginning. Lack of integrity is easy to put up with, but monotony is much more difficult.
The biggest problem is that the user simply does not have the opportunity to go through the game in his own way: the loop puzzle has only one solution, which, when all the conditions are met (that is, when passing through the necessary plot markers), is simply issued on a silver platter – get it and sign. There is no option in order to try to guess on your own and find the optimal path: the game has no alternative to give a solution upon reaching a certain amount of collected information.
The last race, linear and studied to the holes, with a high degree of probability will be as automatic as possible: the player already remembers the optimal path with all the actions and positions of opponents by heart and, in the spirit of speedrunners, simply runs forward, pressing the right buttons at the right timings. To be honest, we are not talking about a sense of satisfaction here: you did not solve the riddle yourself, and the path to victory was worked out long before there was an urgent need to follow it along the intended route. The fact is that, before getting the “final” path, the player manages to perform the necessary actions several times separately, often more than once.
Second wind
The first meeting with Julianne takes place even before the player is allowed online
The only way to somehow have fun in such conditions is no longer the experiments that the game relies on in the first half, but Julianne – the very eighth ideologist who now and then arranges a hunt for Colt, trying to prevent him from breaking the loop. And if the first automatic invasion, led by AI, is unlikely to cause anything other than boredom, then from the second onwards, real fun begins – of course, provided that the network mode remains open.
The fact is that any player in Deathloop can take Julianne’s place and invade another gamer’s passage with an attempt to prevent him. On the side of the “live” Julianna, at the same time, the very knowledge about the local routine, which is most likely already embedded in the head of the “Colt”, which means that it is possible to calculate his actions as simply as usual with the placed dummies.
This approach to multiplayer gives rise to many extremely interesting situations that are remembered almost more than the rest of the game. It is unlikely that you will be able to meet two identical Juliannes: someone will rely on traps and try to interfere with the approaches to the exit, someone will fully use the knowledge of the map and will wait at the target, and the third will run straight to Colt fully armed. The most memorable incident in my playthrough was Julianne, who managed to stab me twice from the back – relying on the knowledge of the map, I simply relaxed and posed myself at intervals of several minutes. Yes, I did not complete the task and set off for a new round, but I cannot say that I was somehow upset: by that time the actions were almost automatic, and the presence of a skilled player added the necessary share of chaos to what was happening.
A hole the size of a loop
The plot is often presented through drawn cut-scenes.
And now to the saddest thing – the scenario of the game. Time-loop plots are most often conceptual “things in themselves” and require a comprehensive study from the inside. Deathloop is no exception – with the only difference that many players never get answers to their questions. After completing almost all the side missions and collecting some obscene amount of documents, I was never able to find out why Colt decided to break the loop at all. Then there will be plot spoilers – do not reveal the hidden text if you are planning an independent passage and are interested in revealing the secrets of Black Reef.
In the course of the plot, Colt learns that he is on the island for the second time: once he managed to escape, but for some reason returned. Presumably, for his wife, who was also on Black Reef – only the game does not say anything about the fate of the wife. And there is also some kind of spy organization on the island that is trying to achieve something, but who it really is is also a mystery. The loop was supposed to work differently, without erasing the memory of the inhabitants over and over again (except for Colt and Julianna, which also has a plot explanation), but what went wrong with the experiment is a mystery.
Finally, in the course of the plot, you can find other versions of Colt, and the game clearly hints that they are opposed to the player – and this does not translate into anything. Literally: other Colts just give a couple of leads and disappear into the air, like “a god from the car.” On such pianos in the bushes, in general, half of the plot is held: neither Colt’s detailed motivation, nor written explanations about the ideologists should be expected. The game, as if mockingly, will repeatedly report that some of the latter got to the Reef almost by accident – but for some reason they are extremely important. Why? Who knows.
The funniest thing here is that in the finale you can choose … not to break the loop. And Colt’s motivation for such a drastic change is explained in exactly the same way as in his attempts to break the noose – that is, in no way.
Somehow after the game everything is felt
Here I would also like to go through the secondary. Deathloop is trying to tell a story about an unfulfilled utopia that the player must break with his own hands – something similar was already in the original BioShock, where Rapture was destroyed by residents – it would seem clever and creative people. In this regard, the inhabitants of Black Reef went the same way: every day you can see how the island falls into decay, recovering the next morning. And even the design of ordinary opponents is somewhat reminiscent of splicers: the locals also wear pretentious outfits and masks that hide their faces, which, alas, makes them as memorable as possible. The highest point of the lack of individuality is a party of one of the ideologists, where all guests wear exactly the same wolf masks.
A decadent BioShock vibe is superimposed on the game design and mechanics of Dishonored, all of which, like a mockery, are repeated over and over again in Deathloop itself. “Did I mention what madness is?”
Temporary difficulties
Here the game refused to leave the menu, hanging the game tightly
Cherry on the cake – numerous bugs in the game. More than once, Deathloop, for some reason, mixed several menus together, preventing, for example, returning to the gameplay after viewing the available tips. Or freezes when loading the next map. Or, which is really cool, I partially loaded the map, although I was just trying to adjust the weapon attachment before entering the location. Some of the bugs described are very easy to reproduce, and why they were not fixed is a big mystery. I would like to believe that the first day patch will cope with most of the problems, but so far nothing is known about it.
And a little more about the technical side. I got my hands on a PS5 version that can work in several graphic modes. Traditionally, there is an emphasis on performance (4K and 60 FPS) and quality (30 FPS and ray tracing with dynamic resolution), and the latter … mercilessly slows down on a seemingly new console for which the game is exclusive. With ray tracing, the frame rate in some moments drops to some indecent values, the picture “breaks” as if there is no vertical synchronization, and the beginning of each day on the shore resembles a slide show. Nextgen in all its glory.
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