Deathloop Review - Arkane Lite

[Music] well for the past couple of weeks i've been locked down in my corrugated iron shed huddled into a corner around the warming glow of my tv as i've spent 20 or so hours of my time with arcane studios new shooter death loop a game about a man stuck in a violent repetitive cycle waking up each day and forced to relive the same events over and over with no apparent means of escape kinda like life in 2021 yep the time has come and so have i death loop is finally out available currently for microsoft windows and the playstation 5. oh okay and i do have a fair bit to say about this one positive and negative but my real takeaway i think is that this is gonna be a really divisive game that i think people are either really gonna love or hate schweck the first couple of hours with this thing is really slow and to be honest just not all that great but it is a game that also gets exponentially better the more time you spend with it even if it does lack a lot of the gameplay intricacies and moral decisions that other arcane studios games often force the play to consider is it worth your hard-earned dollar redos though well let's find out let's uh break some loops now death loop certainly has an interesting premise you're playing as a guy named colt waking up on a beach on the fictional island of black reef harbor in a serious hangover and a bad case of amnesia turns out the island is ground zero for some kind of top secret experiment which is meant that everyone on the island is caught in a time loop that keeps repeating the same day over and over it's just like that one bill murray movie caddyshack turns out that this was all intentional though and everyone on the island is in on the joke treating cult as a hostile interloper that they attack on side that is when their ai actually allows them to see him for some reason no cult and a mysterious woman named juliana retain their memories across each loop and juliana pops up throughout the game to try and stop colt from succeeding this also forms the multiplayer aspect of the game as well because if you're playing this online anyone can join your gamers juliana and try to kill you and it's pretty damn obvious when it's an actual person doing this instead of the ai catch it [ __ ] there's like a whole new side mode here we can level up and unlock new gear either way though the main focus of the campaign is playing as cult and he's stuck with this complex task of uncovering what's happened on the island and to try to break this cycle becomes the absolute core of the game okay it's been a pretty shitty morning or two so i'm done with you and all of this it ends today compared to previous arcane games that made the player deal with that moral conundrum of whether or not it was worth taking a life death loop just does away with that entirely allowing you to pretty much wipe out everyone on the island performing vicious bare-handed takedowns where you twist someone's neck around so violently that it just sounds like you're bitten into a big old spoonful of cornflakes death loop has a night and day cycle which is broken up into morning noon afternoon and evening and throughout all of these four different time periods there's key events which are always going to happen each night the whole thing culminates in a party at a heavily guarded manner where all the cities elite get together like it's the end of the world which it kind of is because yeah it wouldn't be an arcane studios game without there being at least one mission taking place around the party along with including that mechanic of being able to kick people off now ledges has a ring to it the weather even changes throughout the day as well even starting to snow by the afternoon so you can really see a shift in the city throughout the day which makes you forget that you're really only exploring the same four locations over and over gameplay-wise it's very reminiscent of playing through like a watered-down version of the other arcane games mostly dishonored it also kind of reminded me a bit of bioshock the premise of all of these scientific and artistic minds coming together in one place and ironically creating this kind of inescapable situation artists scientists musicians and headerness with dreams of grandeur all stuck in this living hell in bioshock it's obviously rapture at the bottom of the sea and in death loop it's the city of black reef that's caught in this time loop and much like bioshock i think death loop also does a great job of capturing the time period it's also kind of cool to see arcane embracing their developer dna as well now i don't know what kind of peripherals they had back in the 1960s but i can bet they didn't have anything as good as what steel series puts out yes that time of the week again where i have to take a quick minute to thank my awesome sponsor steelseries these guys make some of the best gaming peripherals including mice keyboards pads and headsets now i never recommend a product that i don't use myself and i've been using their apex pro wired keyboard for a while now along with the rival 5 gaming mouse and i got to say these things still look as good as the day i've got them they also make really good headsets and i'm a huge fan of the arctis wireless which lets me adjust the audio for both the game and the voice chat separately not to mention they're just really comfy sitting on my ugly misshapen head if you're into mouse pads which you really should be they've also got you covered they just make some really great high quality products and i can't recommend these guys enough so if you're thinking it's time for an upgrade well make sure to use the promo code gmail at checkout and you can even get 12 off your next order right so one thing that immediately sticks out here is just how good the whole thing looks and i think death loop really does have an awesome visual style there's just so few games that take place in the 1960s i mean the only ones that really come to mind are no endless forever and we happy few in fact the overall vibe and art style here reminded me a lot of we happy few in particular especially that whole scavenging and surviving aspect it's also a really colorful and vibrant world the shift in lighting as the day progresses looks great and every single air is just cluttered with props and objects making the environment seem real and lived in now i've played this on both the ps5 and the pc and i've got some bad news for pc owners in that this thing doesn't seem to run all that great i've got a 3080 ti 64 gigabytes of ram and an i7 and i still struggle to get a decent frame rate at times which is pretty damn shocking i more than exceed those recommended pc specs i haven't swallowed my pride and dropped the resolution back down to 1080 like a complete pleb but it didn't seem to fix a goddamn thing now i'm pretty sure that death loop uses danuvo and i know that there's conflicting information out there on whether or not that actually affects performance but all i know is that every game that i've ever played that uses it seems to run like crap so i mean off the back of that all i can do is make my own assumptions and assume it does i mean it doesn't run terribly but it just always seems to feel very choppy without just struggling to maintain a smooth frame rate the ps5 version on the other hand runs really smoothly at 60fps the entire time but it's also got a mode that turns on ray tracing capping the frame rate instead at 30. though i think that's not the kind of trade-off that i want it'll be like dating a supermodel with tourette's syndrome holy [ __ ] the only real main benefit the pc version has is that it's got an fov slider and obviously the shooting is going to be much easier with a mouse and a keyboard but whether or not that's worth taking a hit on how smooth the whole thing plays i guess it's up to the person playing it's just a shame considering how good the game world mostly looks even something as innocuous as a notepad on a desk can give away crucial information there's a whole lot more to death loop here though than just reading things and picking up items it actually throws a whole bunch of mechanics at you to begin with literally like a dozen different mechanics within the span of about 10 minutes all of which are explained through text pop-ups which is kinda lazy which is actually kind of ironic because it is a pretty easy concept to explain you see this whole nasty loop that colt stuck in can only be ended if he manages to find and kill all these key figures on the island called visionaries slow down you little [ __ ] the only problem is that these guys are all off doing their own things on each area of the island throughout the day each day starts with colt levine's hideout and then venturing out into an area of the island then becomes a matter of investigating finding clues completing missions and trying to somehow get all of these guys in one place at the same time or at least two or three of them at once there's got to be a way to kill two of them at once or three or four or more one of the first visionaries i went after was harriet who only appears in the morning given a weird sermon to a group of her cultish followers in this abandoned air force hangar but after that at any other time of the day it's impossible to get him so regardless of what happens throughout all of these other three time periods i knew that i'd always end up having to go and kill her in the morning right thankfully there's no time limit for any of this so you can take as long as you want to explore find clues stab a [ __ ] or just go around causing all that mayhem the main missions are obviously for finding and killing all these visionaries but there's also quite a few optional missions as well like finding better weapons for cult to play around with or just figuring out alternative ways to kill people off initially you've got to deal with a pretty massive handicap of losing all of your weapons and abilities when the day resets and yeah that's a pretty big setback running around the island until you wear the soles off your shoes and getting all this cool gear ain't gonna mean jack [ __ ] if you lose it each evening and trying to kill these visionaries early on when you're under equipped is like trying to beat a grizzly bear to death with a pumice stone so pretty early on in the game thankfully you unlock the ability to hold on to items across loops by infusing them with a resource called residum residue [ __ ] oh yeah it [ __ ] it actually actually worked enemies and visionaries drop player or weapon upgrades and the way that this works is that you then sacrifice these items to turn them into residum then spend that residum to infuse the stuff you want to keep savvy like holding onto upgrades for your weapons to improve things like faster reload times there's trinkets for cult that improve his health regeneration or sprint speed or just more importantly holding on to all the badass guns and abilities you come across and if you thought you were just going to be killed once and then that was the end of it well think again because you've even got a slab here called reprise that means you're able to be killed twice before the loot resets and even then if you are killed you're able to just mosey on back to where your corpse is and pick up all the residum that you lost anyway death loop initially even has this whole far cry 2 thing where some of the weapons you pick up are going to have a high tendency to jam when firing but once you start finding better guns which are all graded by rarity like a standard rpg it's a mechanic that you'll completely forget exists to the point that i wonder why they even bothered to put it in the game at all the most fun weapons are definitely the ones you get from these side missions like these dual pistols which can be combined to make a burst fire smg and a lever action shotgun that fires on fight gas but even just the basic smgs revolvers and pistols can be pretty powerful with the right upgrades and when the combat all clicks with these different abilities in play i've gotta say it's pretty damn fun i mean you're not gonna be doing half the stuff they show off in the trailers i think the likelihood of enemies being in these perfectly placed positions is just a marketing tool but you can unleash the right amount of endorphin releasing carnage here with pretty much no repercussions plus it also comes with all of the other accoutrements you'd expect in a game that's riding the line on being an immersive sim like hacking into cameras and turrets with your little doohickey gadget thingy which for some reason just never seems to run out and can be used to control any camera or turret that you can get in reach off same thing with jamming the radios for scout enemies so they can't call in reinforcements it doesn't cost resources and once it's hacked that effect just seems to last forever until the item either gets destroyed or you choose to shut it down gotta say though i did find this pretty fun turning turrets on unsuspecting groups of bad guys and it's not uncommon to see a single turret just shred through half a dozen of these guys with absolute ease now despite there being stealth mechanics in death loop i really didn't think they intended it to be played as one i mean you can avoid enemies and stay hidden if you want but it's the bare bones mechanics needed to have a stealth system that being just stay out of an enemy's line of sight if you're in their line of sight for too long a little icon fills up and then they'll either go into combat mode or search your last known position out of suspicion whoa i'm a poet and i didn't even realize keep telling yourself that you don't have to worry about bodies being left behind because every time you kill someone their body just vanishes into thin air pretty much instantly these guys aren't the brightest crayons in the box either and they have some pretty goddamn awful peripheral vision i mean compare that to dishonored 2 where enemies could see you from the other side of the goddamn city in between the gaps in [ __ ] venetian blinds or something your only melee weapon is a machete that's so goddamn huge it looks like it could be used to circumcise a woolly mammoth and nothing good ever happens to someone on the pointy end of one of these things detected the main silent weapon i think that most people are probably gonna use is a nail gun which is really only effective when aiming for someone's head and i don't think i'm gonna need to tell you that there's no such thing here as sleeping nails there's only one kind of grenade as well which is a standard frag grenade that does general grievous bodily harm to anyone standing near it there's alternate modes for the grenade turning it into a proximity bomb or even a tripwire but both of those are still a lethal option right there's no stun grenades no gas grenades just a grenade designed to separate limbs from torsos so it's a game where it makes no sense to leave enemies alive because when you're detected it's just going to be one more person you've got to deal with and i really kind of feel like they've done this for the people like myself who didn't really like the chaos system in the dishonored games now as a result you've got relatively guilt-free murder here on tap the fact the enemies look like storefront mannequins half the time makes me feel even less guilty for murdering them and either way they're going to be back the next morning anyway so who really gives a [ __ ] now i have always thought that arcane studios games really nailed the combat aspect and that is kind of again the same at death loop like i said you can minimize combat to a point if you just want to get to where you're going but if the enemies do spot you it really is more unfortunate for them than it is for you that is once you've unlocked the slabs anyway slabs are gained from killing off these visionaries and they're the various powers that coal can use sadly though there's only five of them and two of these are just straight out recycled from dishonored i mean one of the earliest ones you're gonna get is shift which is literally just blink from the dishonored games they didn't even really bother changing the animation or the effects for it but i mean look if nothing else it does make navigation a lot easier once you find and upgrade it the other one is called nexus where you can fire out this projectile and link a bunch of nearby enemies together and then what happens to one of them happens to the whole bunch like link a few guys together shoot one in the head and then they all drop like perfectly coordinated bags of sheet but again it's kind of similar to domino in dishonored 2. probably my favorite i think is carnesis now this is a telekinetic ability where you can throw enemies around in almost any direction and it honestly never gets old throwing someone up in the air and shooting them before they land or throwing them off a ledge and watching them tumble to their death and i think it's kind of funny that here we are in 2021 and an ability that's basically just a fuss radar is one of the most fun ones to use in the entire game but again like kind of similar to wind blast from dishonored too it's just now you've got more control every week and throw these guys havoc and either but somewhat original i guess with havoc you gain a shield that prevents you from taking damage along with amplifying the damage you dish out a skill which is entirely focused around combat just again reinforcing my point how the game really wants you to murder the piss out of everyone then on the flip side ether is a really handy cloak where you can turn invisible making stealth much more easier if that's the kind of thing you're going for [Music] but i mean neither of those are really all that creative i mean a damage buff and a shield and a cloak it's been done before honestly too i can't believe that in a game that's all about replaying events over and over in history repeating that they didn't bring back something like that ability to stop time from the dishonored games or an ability where you could bring in another cult from a separate loop or something to help you out during combat kind of like how the doppelganger worked in dishonored 2. you don't need to worry about consumables or anything either because energy for these abilities recharges automatically over time there's health pickups scattered all around the island but there's no med kits or anything to hold on to so again like your energy it also regens automatically to a certain point after taking damage and it just feels like a really dumb down and simplified way to handle your resources i also think it's a huge stuff up that you can only equip two of these slabs at once yeah even though there's only five of these things you're still forced to choose from two at a time and because shift is just so infinitely useful in every situation i think it really makes it like you've only got one to choose from because i just can't imagine trying to play this without that incredibly useful ability to teleport short distances once you leave colt's hidey hole at the beginning of each time period you can't change these abilities either it just seems very odd to me for a game made by a studio who've always been really good at creating sandbox worlds where you can really go nuts with all of the tools they're giving you so to put these outright limitations on what you can and can't bring with you just seems out of place and it definitely prevents the game from being as ludicrous and over the top as it could have been even something as simple as the game lacking the option to manual save which i think really discourages experimentation now i know this has been done intentionally to force you to have to kind of learn from your mistakes as opposed to just being able to save scum and try again but again it just kind of all adds to the feeling of this being awarded down to sonnet oh they just disappeared more than that is how every weapon and ability seems designed to just straight out kill a [ __ ] and there's no non-lethal ways to take enemies out aside from just avoiding them entirely this also goes for the visionaries and as far as i can tell you have to kill these guys there's no other way around it this is not a game for pacifist let's put it that way there's a line of dialogue early in the game where juliana mentioned something about it being bad to kill people but even once i'd finished the game with the kind of body count that would make john wick look like an amateur it didn't seem to affect anything oh they just disappeared i mean look that's fine if all you want is a really fun power fantasy set in the 1960s but people who are more used to the moral decisions that the previous arcane studios games constantly forced the player to consider are going to find this whole approach very simplified what i'm probably most disappointed about though is that there's really zero variety to the enemies outside of their appearance they kind of remind me of a villain out of an old episode of doctor who or something back in the 60s and 70s when the bbc had no budget so they just throw bright outfits on someone to make them look more visually interesting enemies all just carry some kind of gun or melee weapon and their tactics consist of little more than just often taking the path of least resistance towards you and then trying to shoot you to the point that you can easily just bottleneck them into a single doorway and mow them down like complete [ __ ] you think that maybe the visionaries might be unique these are the key members of the project who all have those unique slabs so you'd think they'd all have their own strategies to learn and attack patterns but no they're pretty much just the same as the regular enemies in fact all of them can go down with the basic melee takedown or with a well placed shot to the noggin i think that juliana is also incredibly underwhelming as an antagonist she shows up for a bit at the start of the game but in terms of advancing the story along you only interact with her when she contacts you via radio you never see her in a cinematic or anything [ __ ] why do you even like this place because it is amazing eventually you'll find out the mystery behind who she is and why she's on the island pretty much at the end of the game which is also the only other time you see her face to face in an expositional sense you're gonna give me that attitude other than that though when she invades your world like a dark soul specter with an assault rifle she's there for one reason just to straight up murder ass i mean she's not stopping by fatigue crumpets or spotted dick and this is what i meant when i said she's underwhelming because all you really need to do against her is just kinda shoot her in the face a bunch of times until she dies assuming of course it's controlled by the ai and not another person the pvp aspect is a whole nother kettle of fish and this is where you play as juliana and can invade other people's games to try to kill them or vice versa [Music] this is a standard leveling up system where at the end of a match you can earn new gear and even customize juliana's loadout even unlocking new outfits damn because yeah walking around in brightly colored eyesores for clothes is a great idea when you're trying to kill colt without being seen isn't it you earn points for obviously killing colt in various ways but also just for surviving in the match so even if you don't get the kill then it still took you 10 minutes you're not gonna leave empty-handed this is a good idea i wouldn't recommend playing this before you finish the game though mostly because once you finish it you're gonna be more aware of the layouts for the maps the locations of everything and the possible routes that other players are going to take to kill these visionaries either way though this mode just doesn't seem fully fleshed out to me i mean for starters some of the weapons and the slabs are just broken someone who's smart at using havoc for instance is gonna be pretty much untouchable certain guns are also way more overpowered than others like the guns that leave behind gas clouds do so much damage over time that it's pretty much impossible to avoid as juliana you've got to kill colt essentially three times whereas cold only needs to kill you once so yeah not the best odds i think it also uses peer-to-peer which means the latency is going to be really bad in some matches too honestly half the time it was borderline unplayable and i'm kind of amazed i was even able to score any kills when i was zipping all over the place like i was on a dsl connection back from 1999. i guess technically though there is infinite replayability here so it has got that going for it and if you really want to you can actually join a friend's match and help them out like it's a co-op mode but overall it just feels like a cool concept that's not as fleshed out as it could have been i think most people are probably just going to turn it to the single player mode meaning that the ai is going to invade their game instead of another player and that's a damn shame [Applause] finally i know that death loop is repetitive by design the whole point of the game is to replay the same days over and over but look an ironically repetitive game is still repetitive and there really is a sense of certain missions just being as drawn out and tedious as possible almost in some kind of way to extend the time the player has to invest in the game i mean look for one mission i had to get into four separate hidden bunkers across the island for reasons i won't spoil and the only way to do this was to power up a terminal in the power plant which could only be done in the morning this meant having to go and power up two generators dealing with the nearby enemies beforehand every time then using that diverted power to unlock one of the bunkers the thing is you can only unlock one bunker at a time and the power plant is only accessible in the morning so it's really just a matter of going through the exact same motions four times to unlock the four separate bunkers across four separate days yeah fun the worst one is when it gives you a clue to go somewhere at a particular time only for it to then immediately tell you to come back later on instead i'm gonna have to come back in the afternoon the only way to upgrade the slabs is by picking up the same slab again which means just going back and killing the visionaries over and over this does get easier as you become stronger and more equipped but it's the same process every single time and i don't know man for a full price game to have such repetitive gameplay i mean they're charging up to 130 bucks here in australia i don't know man at times it doesn't feel like it's worth the dollar dues one thing i learned pretty quickly playing death lube is that despite everything being available from the get-go you're often just simply not going to be able to tackle certain missions or objectives effectively i learnt this pretty early on during a mission where i was trying to take out one of the visionaries i just couldn't manage to get through it without having my ass handed to me so what did i do well i went off and i did other missions for a bit i went off and killed harriet for the first time which gave me the nexus ability then i went off and killed fear who drops the useful havoc slab along with just getting some better guns and trinkets along the way then i was able to go back and tear that first visionary a new [ __ ] and it felt pretty damn fulfilling remind me why i can't have a cold storm and this is the kind of thing where i can see that some people would be willing to swallow their pride and go off and chase other missions for a bit whereas other players might just keep bashing their head on that wall over and over trying to finish that first mission until it somehow managed to click that's why i said earlier how i think this game is really going to garner some polar opposite opinions i think we've become so spoiled with games these days where more often than not with most modern titles you can pretty much do anything or everything you want from the get-go to be faced with something like a locked door with a combination that might not present itself for another four or five hours i mean it does kind of go against the grain a bit this is overall a good thing but it's also why i think this game is going to be so divisive i know for me personally i have a bit of a love-hate relationship with arcane studios games i love dishonored one but i hated dishonored too i initially didn't like prey but then ended up loving it and the same thing with death loop at first it seemed like a confusing and convoluted mess but when all the pieces started to come together figuratively and literally it ended up being a pretty fun game let's uh break some loops it's a bit of a shame the pc version runs so horribly though and given the way dishonored 2 got treated on that front i won't be holding my breath for this to get fixed any time soon either it's not a perfect experience but when it all came together for that 17 or so hours it took me to finish it it did do a good enough job of making me forget that i was still stuck living in 2021 [Music] you

Channel: GmanLives

Views: 406,332

Keywords: deathloop ps5 review, deathloop pc, death loop review, death loop, deathloop review, deathloop ps5, deathloop gameplay, arkane studios, death loop gameplay, deathloop ps5 gameplay, deathloop abilities, deathloop trailer, deathloop gameplay pc, first person, bethesda softworks, arkane lyon, video games, deathloop official gameplay, deathloop preview, arkane lyon games, deathloop pc gameplay, gggmanlives, gmanlives, 2021 games, deathloop arkane studios, deathloop pc review

Id: KuwVZkgDkmM

Length: 27min 4sec (1624 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021