Game review: Deathloop (2021)
What's up, you vile virgins? I felt like talking about a game that dropped very recently, one that you've probably seen advertised a shit ton if you watch any of the gaming trade show events. (Seriously, besides maybe cyberpunk I think this was the most shown game at any gaming industry show.) It's called Deathloop. The game was made by Arkane Studios, who you would probably know from their past games like Dishonored/Dishonroed 2, Prey and Wolfenstein Youngblood. I've personally enjoyed most of their previous work, it's never been my absolute favorite stuff where I jerk off in front of a mirror over it. But, their track record has been mostly very solid. So, I was going into the game expecting it to be a pretty good game overall.
Now, for the most part, it was a pretty enjoyable game. But, any publication or gaming journalist giving this a 10/10 is straight up sliding PCP into their rectum.
I'm gonna start off with the major issue in this game before I get into the good parts of it. That issue being the AI of the game. The AI is honestly absolute dog ass, especially for a AAA tier game like this one. It honestly might be one of the worst I've seen in a game over the past 4 or 5 years at least. Literally all the AI does once it is alerted to your presence is that they stand still like their legs have been turned to stone all of a sudden, and fire at you without moving. Usually in a big cluster like they've been possessed by Dirty Mike and the boys and are about to have an orgy inside of a prius. They will rarely take cover behind a wall or crate, honestly, I would say it's probably maybe 10-15 percent of the time it feels like. You can just throw out a grenade at them as well and they'll respond to it showing they know it is there, but instead of moving they just realize at the last moment that they have crippling depression and accept death.
Their awareness itself is also just god awful. Often times you can just be standing 7 or 8 feet in front of one and it will either not notice you or take an astounding amount of time to realize that you're there. Almost like the devs decided to model the AI's intelligence after a T-rex from Jurassic Park. You could practically make a dash through an entire level going right by the AI throughout and probably never alert a single one of them to your presence, just because they're so shit at actually detecting a living being. Even if you were to have a saxophone blaring while you walked by and you began giving all the enemies a reach around while you scooted by, they'd still not notice you. The AI is just abysmal in every sense of the word.
The only actual difficulty you'll find with the enemies that spawn in the game is if they overwhelm you with sheer numbers, if you run into a big enough crowd you may actually have to do some minor tactical moves like shooting from cover or strafing in and out from behind a wall. You know, real insane shit that only CS GO pros could accomplish. Their firearms do tend to a lot of damage when this happens, so you'll probably die at least a couple of times when you run into these kinds of situations. Although, almost all of your deaths will be your own doing via a mistake. You might slide off the edge of the map on accident, or blow yourself up on accident. Hell, you might even die from accidently butt chugging some poison gas. Either way, 99 percent of the time your deaths in the game stem from you fucking up. I feel like by now you should have a good idea of how bad the AI is, since it's only slightly a step up from something like Colonial Marines.
My only other issue I'd like to touch upon with the game is the PC release is absolutely a dumpster fire currently. I'm playing it via PS5, so I can't really comment a shit ton on how bad it is. But, I've seen reports of the game hard crashing players computers several times while they attempt to run through it. There's also been performance issues with low frame rates and stuttering happening as well. I believe there is a hot patch on the way to fix most of these issues, but, I'm not entirely sure when that is coming out. So, you may want to want to grab a copy until it's been optimized a bit better. So, now lets move onto the rest of the game.
The core gameplay of the game is very, very reminiscent of Dishonored. Which wasn't very shocking, considering the game comes from the same studio. I don't love Dishonored's style of gameplay, but, I also don't hate it. So, I felt pretty alright with the gameplay mechanics in the game. It does differ in that you're using firearms throughout the game though, which was more of my style. There isn't a very large pool of guns to choose from, but, there is the addition of trinkets in the game which you can add onto your guns to give them a special bonus. Which allows you to somewhat approach the combat in your own style, since you're able to pick and choose how you want to use your guns. Most of the guns are pretty fun to play around with, but, there's nothing too crazy or whacky to fuck around with here.
Your choice of gameplay style is limited to two ways just like with dishonored. You can either go full scrotum to mouth and blast everything moving in front of you, or you can cosplay being a cat burglar and try a stealthy run. There are items in the game that grant you superhuman abilities like being able to go invisible and other neat powers like that. So, stealth is always an option if you want to do it. Again, especially because the AI is so shit that you can literally probably just power walk past the majority of them without actually having to try and pretend that you're Tom Clancy. Another mechanic in the game is the deathlooping that occurs in the game. There are set times in the game where you get looped back in time and it changes the narrative and characters involved in the gameplay. It also resets your gear giving it a semi roguelike feeling, although you can use a special material to preserve your gear for the next loop if you're really vibing your loadout.
Surprisingly, there's also a multiplayer mechanic to the game which I wasn't really expecting when I picked it up. If you've ever played Dark Souls before, you'll be familiar with the invasion mechanic where another player will invade your world and you engage in some PVP with them. And, this game actually has that same mechanic should you turn it on. Another player will invade your world as one of the main antagonist of the game and you'll duke it out while also dealing with the various other enemies in the world. This could be a very fun/cool mechanic when it's fully fleshed out and fixed. But, I ended up turning it off shortly after I gave it a few tries because it doesn't function well right now. It can take a hella long time to actually find a match, and even when you do it can be very, very laggy. It's also pretty much just a game of who sees who first, because there's a meta with what gun to use for it and whoever shoots first is pretty much guaranteed to be the winner. So, cool mechanic/feature, but needs a lot of work.
Beyond all the gameplay, the narrative and writing of the game is pretty decently done. Sometimes some of the story and dialogue feels a bit weak, but it holds a good pace and feels interesting/fun for almost all of the game. The voice acting is actually super well done as well, and I feel like that's a big part of why the story is actually engaging and compelling to listen to and experience. Every voice actor in the game did a great job with their voice lines and make their respective characters feel interesting and unique from one another, and I couldn't really find any of them that I thought were bad. The story obviously deals with time travel, which is always a bit goofy narrative wise. But, I thought this game handled it fairly well and never had me rolling my eyes over it or feeling like they overthought it too hard.
So, overall I think this game is pretty fun to jam on, albeit very flawed. The invasion mechanic could be a lot of fun if fixed, though I do enjoy PVP so I'm biased. The core gameplay can be fast paced or slow depending on what you want, so if you want to be stealthy that's an option. The gunplay is very clean and fun to engage with should you wanna blat yo gat. I personally feel it is worth picking up and playing through for most gamers. But, just don't go into it expecting a perfect gem out of this game. I also really would only get it right now if you have a Playstation 5, which I know a lot of you probably don't since there's some sort of fucking cabal in control of the distribution of them right now, since the PC release is a steaming pile of dog shit in terms of playability. Hopefully that is getting fixed super soon, but, yeah.
Until next time, my sweet babybois.
Later!