Deathloop has lived a troubled life. It was delayed multiple times because of the pandemic, it’s a PlayStation 5 console exclusive despite the fact that its parent company was sold to Microsoft and when it finally arrived it was pockmarked by technical issues and a review bombing.

Despite all of this strife it received almost universal appraise and more than a few perfect scores at launch.

With some time now separating us from all of those problems and the hype, we’ve had our fill of Deathloop and can now try and give a more level headed review as we head into the final quarter of 2021.

But let’s reverse things a bit: Deathloop is an FPS brought to us by Arkane, famous in recent years for Dishonored and the Prey reboot.

DNA from those games is very apparent here down to the art style, the way your character Colt dual wields and even specific mechanics like a short teleport.

Deathloop sets itself apart with timey whimey shenanigans. The game’s setting Blackreef is stuck in a single day loop where all its denizens wake up every day no matter how brutally you kill them.

With amnesia Colt has to solve the many mysteries on Blackreef, chief among them being how to end the loop and escape the island.

Also separating this game is some mechanics carried over from roguelikes. Dying means restarting the loop without your equipment and all progress lost. A win in Deathloop takes place over a single day where you kill all the bosses.

Clues, riddles and discovery are core mechanics here and central to the Deathloop experience. It’s best to think of the game as a reverse murder mystery: Colt needs to kill all eight bosses (powerful characters called Visionaries) but he and the player don’t know how it can all be fit into one day before the loop resets.

Throughout your playtime, players will slowly piece this puzzle together while learning more lore about Blackreef and its inhabitants, collecting loot that can be carried between loops and overall gaining mastery over the maps and its enemies.

Like other Arkane titles Deathloop encourages players to approach situations however they like with stealth and outright loud combat being the two main approaches.

In the beginning, however, stealth is heavily leaned on and feels like the best way to play. This is because Colt does not take a lot of abuse before dying so players really need to pick and choose which hills to die on. Literally.

While Colt does become tougher as the game goes, he can still be shredded by a short burst of gunfire. Even in the endgame with the highest tier loot a surprise turret can easily end a run in a split second.

Aside from guns and superpowers like the aforementioned short range teleport, there are also trinkets which give buffs to weapons and Colt himself.

These are rather boring honestly with small stat changes and minor boons. Sure an extra sliver of health is appreciated by the squishy Colt but some trinkets can’t be stacked and many of them are so uninteresting that hunting for them becomes a chore and an activity you stop caring about after a couple of hours.

A lack of variety seeps into every other part of gameplay too. While the fictional weapons here are fun there is an absolutely tiny pool of them. There are three ammo types in the game – small calibre , large calibre and shotgun shell – but there are only two or three guns that can use each ammo in the entire game.

Even higher tier weapons which can be looted off of Visionaries, found in the world or awarded from side missions, are just the same familiar guns with small bonuses. It’s a real shame that, after working so hard towards finding and killing a difficult boss, you get awarded the same gun you’ve been using for hours but now it has toxic gas or stops enemies from healing.

The superpowers, awarded by items called Slabs, are also lacking in this regard. There’s also a smaller pool of them and players will again quickly find some favourites and never switch off of them.

All of this makes combat, and the rewards of exploration, stale. What’s here is fun, but more variety would have gone a long way to get us excited to start new play sessions.

The world of Deathloop, the island of Blackreef and the NPCs are arguably the best part of the game.

Sneaking around discovering secrets was our favourite part of the experience and some clever design was made around how the daily loop works.

Each day is split into four distinct times (morning, noon, afternoon and night) which each having large changes to what is going on inside of Blackreef. Some NPCs will only be in certain places, doing certain things at certain times, so all of it factors into the final loop where everyone needs to die.

The standout moment for us was a secret villain base / club that really channels the alternate history 60s setting. This James Bond villian-esque lair can be accessed right through the front door, but visitors need to wear a piece of tech that takes away their powers.

Not wanting to walk into a boss arena underpowered, we looked around for alternate openings and found only one: an underground cave entrance which we used to slip in and assassinate a Visionary all while avoiding those overpowered turrets which were scattered throughout.

This was earlier in the day and, during another loop, we needed to return to the lair for another objective. Unfortunately that was impossible because, as the day goes on, the tide rises and those caves become flooded. With the water around Blackreef deadly cold this entrance becomes inaccessible.

This little moment where a great plan had been thwarted by the simple passing of time was excellent and a prime example of the overall themes of Deathloop impacting the player experience.

A quick word on technical issues

Deathloop and its PC performance is a complex topic but we want to share our unique experience with it.

We did most our our playthrough on an aging midrange desktop with a Ryzen 5 3600, RX 580 8GB and 16GB of RAM with the game installed on a decent NVME SSD.

This GPU just meets the minimum specs for the game so we played many hours with everything cranked down to low.

Near the end we did get to play with the same desktop but now with an RTX 3060 and the settings on ultra. As you’d expect things look much better, but going back to the low settings we were surprised by just how good the game continues to look.

Deathloop may be the best and newest current example of art direction and a unique style really carrying the visuals of a game. Because this isn’t a photorealistic endeavour the characters and environments, with all their unique proportions and fictional looks, can still be visually appealing when everything is set to low.

That’s great and all but we also had a lot of bad times when it comes to performance. We experienced much of the stuttering issue which is explained in this Digital Foundry video.

There was also the fiasco of the optional 21.9.1 AMD drivers we explored here. While we would pin this on AMD for making our PC almost unusable, the fact that Deathloop wouldn’t launch without this unstable driver means that some fault should be dished out to Arkane too.

Back on the RTX 3060 and with Nvidia drivers, however, performance still wasn’t as rock solid as we’d like.

Closing the loop

We had a lot of fun with Deathloop and that will bear out in the eight out of ten score you can see in the box below.

There’s a lot of great ideas here, and a lot of solid execution on those ideas paired with almost flawless visual design we recently explored which, of all things, relates to Hot Wheels.

Lack of variety, intended repetition that is unwelcome and a general lack of steam once you pile hours into the game are all marks against the game.

We can absolutely see why some reviewers gave this title full marks and why people may claim this is one of their favourite titles ever, but those points against it cannot be overlooked.

Deathloop still comes through this with a great score from us and a recommendation, especially if you love Arkane or the time mechanics on offer.