Deathloop is a tough game to explain, and it doesn’t make the best first impression. It assaults you with nearly two hours-worth of tutorials, and just when it starts feeling like that overwhelming class you got roped in to sit through, it shows you its hand – a gameplay loop that’s unique, replayable and a boatload of fun.
You play as Colt Vahn, an assassin stuck on an island in a perpetual time loop, where he and everyone on the island keep repeating the same day. The only way to break this loop is to kill eight high-value targets spread out over the island in one single day. If that wasn’t tough enough, you have another rival assassin who’s out to kill you while you’re hunting these targets. Fun times!
All this may sound insanely complicated at first, but it becomes much easier as you play through loops and gradually understand the game’s mechanics. You see, every loop can teach you something, after which you can attempt that same loop with the new information. This could be anything from learning movement patterns that allow you to take out two targets in one map, to the locations of super-secret awesome weapons. And this is also what makes playing through the same loop multiple times fun, as you never know what you’ll encounter.
Colt has access to a bunch of weapons to help him on this quest. You’ll start the game with some basic pistols/revolvers or SMGs, but you’ll soon encounter powerful weapons with better perks. In additional to this conventional arsenal, he can also harness the power from supernatural objects calls Slabs to earn powerful abilities – like turning invisible or air-dashing across short distances. How you use your weapons in tandem with your abilities is what forms the crux of Deathloop. Hunting down one target at a time is fairly easy, but to eliminate all in one single loop, your abilities and weapons will have to complement one another.
You can also tweak your build as per your playstyle. Let’s say you’re the run-and-gun type: you could equip a shotgun with the air-dash ability and a perk that lets you dish out insane amounts of damage. Prefer taking out enemies from a distance? Equip a sniper and the invisibility perk, and snipe your targets out from across the map. Or you could adopt the Sam Fisher school of thought and take them out with silenced headshots and backstabs. This ability to heavily experiment with your playstyle is what makes Deathloop really stand out from the crowd.
While you’re busy chasing these targets, your arch nemesis Julianna will be hunting you down. This adds a whole new level of tension to the equation as she can pop up anytime during the hunt – and she can be played by another player. If that sounds hectic, you can disable invasions, but an AI controlled Julianna will still try and make life difficult for you. Killing Julianna and the other targets will drop powerful weapons, trinkets (for both Colt and his weapons) and Residuum, the game’s currency. Using Residuum, you can infuse your weapons and trinkets so that you don’t lose them upon death.
Weapons can’t be upgraded in the conventional Call of Duty way, but using weapon trinkets, you can tweak weapons by increasing their fire rate or clip size. Similarly, personal trinkets – like regenerating health faster – can be used to make Colt less squishy in battle. But you’ll still die a lot in the initial hours, and anything more than three deaths in a single loop will force you to restart that loop all over again, losing any sort of progress you may have made.
Even if what we just described may not sound like it’s up your alley, we implore you to give Deathloop a shot, and more importantly, go in with a patient and open mind. It may not reinvent the wheel, but it fuses a lot of genres effortlessly, and is a refreshing change from the hundreds of shooters that flood the market on a yearly basis.
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