But Julianna is no ordinary enemy: she’s another player.
At any point during your game, Julianna might stop by for a visit, locking down your exit routes and hunting you doggedly.
Taking down the Visionaries is also how you unlock and upgrade their Slabs, offering an additional incentive to go back for a rematch.Īnd even as you start to get the hang of combat and the routine of a particular region, Deathloop can throw you another curveball: Julianna. The Visionaries are some of the best boss battles I’ve ever experienced in a game Arkane sets up each region like a playground tailored to that Visionary’s style, which gives you plenty of opportunities to set up some spectacular murders. They’re as much fun as they sound and allow for some wild setups when taking on large groups of enemies.
The Slabs elevate everything about Deathloop’s combat to another level, allowing Colt to leap up to out-of-reach rooftops, turn invisible, and toss enemies around with his mind. Trinkets allow you to specialize both Colt and his weapons to suit the challenge ahead, creating a near-infinite sense of replayability. Guns feel good no matter which archetype you’re holding, and the rarer firearms allow for deep customization depending on how you want to play. What you’ve learned sticks with you from loop to loop so every discovery feels momentous and no moment feels wasted.įrom solid gunplay to the more science-fiction Slab abilities that turn Colt into a super-powered assassin, the combat is a blast. Every loop offers new opportunities to pursue leads you gleaned from the previous day’s adventures. Knowledge is power in Deathloop, and the means of collecting and analyzing all that knowledge is the best part of the game. No part of the story feels bad or superfluous, but it can be easy to get so focused on a particular Visionary that you forget about the bigger picture. While the game’s story is strong where it counts, I did find the objective-based approach for learning each Visionary’s routine distracts a bit from the larger narrative. The dialogue is often hilarious especially the interactions between the main character, Colt, and one of the Visionaries, Julianna. The Visionaries are all well-crafted, interesting individuals with their own motivations and proclivities, many of which can be used to your advantage. Building out each Visionary’s profile and learning about them both as people and adversaries are among soem of the most fun aspects of the entire game.ĭeathloop weaves a thrilling narrative that keeps you guessing through to the game’s conclusion (and even beyond). The mystery of how the loop began and how the Visionaries, Colt, and Julianna are connected to it unravels at just the right pace and in some truly surprising ways.ĭeathloop is a mystery at heart and it devotes itself to this premise: you know nothing about the Visionaries other than a few hastily scrawled words about their personalities and special abilities. Many of the disparate elements that make up Deathloop might seem familiar at first, but Arkane Lyon has recontextualized them in such a way that the result is greater than the sum of its parts.ĭeathloop utilizes its rogue-lite structure as an ingenious method of storytelling it presents the very nature of its world as your ultimate target. Storyĭeathloop starts right in the middle of the action: you’re stabbed to death before waking up on a beach with no memory of who you are or how you got there. And if that’s not compelling enough the pervasive sense of discovery is more than enough to carry anyone across the finish line of this truly mesmerizing video game. From the opening moments, Deathloop presents its rollicking narrative with a dash of humor, a healthy dose of style, and a shockingly wonderful set of guns and skills that never cease to delight.
It is somehow a rogue-lite, first-person shooter, stealth game, and Twin Peaks-esque mystery all rolled into one glorious, confusing product. There’s no getting around the fact that Arkane Lyon’s Deathloop is a very strange game.