DEATHLOOP by Arkane Lyon

Or Mooncrash, the Prey “DLC” that was their first experiment with this style. Mooncrash is tough, intense and interesting.

A lot of the difficulty of Mooncrash was that bloody moon shark.

Although if you really have trouble you could always just farm tons of resources from the Living Quarters area using the security guard (strong character, starts with shotgun). Besides having a ton of stuff to loot, escape is also free via the shuttle there.

In other words, the opposite of Deathloop. :)

-Tom

I finished it. It was good, I suppose. I had to look up an explanation for what happened at the end, so that’s … something.

Unpopular opinion - loop games seem like a convenient way to save on dev costs because you can re-use the same levels over and over.

The voice acting was great, at least.

Apparently the director of Deathloop (Dinga Bakaba) didn’t even play Mooncrash. Seems like a fail to me.

That sounds so, so weird. To not play a game that your sister company did, when Arkane itself barely makes a game every 3 years.

Not only that, but when the game you are making is evocative of the prior sister studio game, to not play it ignores the iterative design process.

One assumes someone at Arkane in a director role would be aware of all their prior games. I guess I might be wrong. (in more ways then one)

It’s surprising and maybe worth questioning but I don’t think it’s fair to call it a fail. There are a lot of examples of creative types like writers, actors, etc. who want to go in fresh so they choose to avoid seemingly obvious reference sources like original novels, films, or the real-life people they’re playing.

Very fair. Yeah. Maybe he didn’t want any influences, but that could be called hubris.

I suppose I should give “the benefit of the doubt.”

Just seems like an overssight.

New update

Semi related…
If there is something that I love in gaming, is when player A criticizes a game for x or y reason, player B, fan of the game, white knights it defending it and saying the game is intended to be like that, and then some time later the devs patches the game improving or correcting what player A criticized, making clear player B was being ridiculous and player A was right. I’ve seen it a few times happen.

In this case, I’ve seen people defending the game’s AI, saying it is supposed to not be that good, because the intended challenge was in solving the puzzle of how to kill the leaders and the invasions, no the normal AI. Well, they have improved the AI in the update, look at that…

This style of game has a real tension. Play early while people are online or wait for the inevitable few patches to fix the launch issues? I chose to wait, but will there still be players after these issues are fixed?

Patch notes like this remind me of just how insanely complicated these big games are.

I managed to jump into this without actually knowing much of anything about it (other than some form of assurance it had a singleplayer campaign) and I’m really having fun so far! Love the art style, and seems like there’s a lot of room for abilities to open up.

Just finished it. I’ll put my impressions in spoiler.

Overall a good, not great, game. It seemed a little undercooked somehow. It was best in the beginning, when Colt was underpowered, and I was just learning the systems. At some point during the game though, I found a rifle with exploding bullets and settled on a slab loadout that I really never changed. The gameplay was not particularly challenging, and by and large, I only died when I was rushing. The game didn’t really reward careful play after a while though. Stealth was pretty broken, with enemies being able to detect you at improbably long distances, and was unnecessary, as it was easy enough to pretty much massacre the entire island.

The ending was pretty confusing and left a lot of hanging threads. I chose to kill myself, rather than sit in the chair. The big reveal (that Julianna was Colt’s daughter) didn’t make a lot of sense, nor was it necessary. If she was his daughter, that would have set up a nice tension if he was unwilling to kill her. But Colt was only too happy to kill his own daughter without a second thought.

No explanation of where the creepy writing came from. Plenty of puzzles left unsolved - which didn’t really matter since none of the puzzles I did solve had particularly good rewards. That huge building in Karl’s Bay with the suppressor device inside it - never entered it or found out what that was about. And what was the point of the multiple Colt’s that kept appearing? Also, if Colt had to take a rocket-plane to the anomaly to meet Julianna at the end… How did Julianna get there?!?

Had fun with it. Glad to be done. Doubt I’ll play it again.

Soo…not great, not terrible :)
Yep that tracks.

Go play Forgotten City now if you haven’t already.

He lays on it thick.

I still want to play it eventually because I have played and finished all of Arkane’s games.

The critique is spot on, even if I liked the game a bit more than him overall.
Still the weakest Arkane game by far.

Weaker than Dark Messiah? That seems unlikely. What explains all the high scores?

Seen the video but haven’t played the game (someday I’ll find a PS5 … someday.)

I will hazard a couple of guesses, though:

  • There’s the common phenomenon where critics will over-praise a creator’s current work because they under-praised the earlier work. See actors who win Oscars for lesser roles because they got passed over for their greatest ones, bands whose album X gets tagged as their masterpiece on release when, looking back, it’s clear album X-1 was actually their best, etc. etc.

  • Some people like their mechanics/genres undiluted, while others prefer a blend. This is explanation the Skill Up reviewer goes with. He considers DeathLoop a watered-down immersive sim mixed with a watered-down shooter mixed with a watered-down time loop game, and that the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Other reviewers are fine with the watered-down nature of some of the mechanics and consider the whole more than the sum of its parts. Towards the end of the video, the Skill Up reviewer acknowledges those folks outnumber him 9-to-1, and basically says, “it’s not you, it’s me.”

(I definitely fall into this camp when it comes to certain franchises… To my tastes, for example, Mass Effect is a watered-down CRPG mixed with a watered-down shooter, and the result for me is, “Umm, it’s fine, I guess.” But obviously the world at large likes that blend more.)