Deathloop Review (PS5)

Deathloop is the latest new IP from Arkane and arguably the biggest Playstation 5 exclusive this generation so far. It’s many things; first-person shooter, murder mystery, time-travelling adventure, stealth game. And whilst it doesn’t do them all perfectly, I very much enjoyed it.

You play as Colt, and you learn you are in the ‘loop’. The loop is the same day, over and over again. However, you’ve been a naughty boy and everyone is out to kill you. Your self-assigned mission is to break the loop. To do this, you must kill all 8 visionaries – special characters within the loop all in a single day. If you die, you start the day again.

For the most part, I very much enjoyed Deathloop. I felt it a bit of a shame that with all the really great dialogue, you don’t necessarily need it to move forward. For example, you get to a bit where two Eternalists are talking, and you’re spotted, so you kill them. The game records the clue they would have given you, and it’s on to the next. I didn’t especially mind this but it rewards more of a run and gun play style which is not the strength of the game. Some of the ways to get to the Visionaries are quite cool too, but if you get spotted, it can blow the whole thing and you’re just gunning down everyone anyway – which happened more often and not despite the attempts at stealth. Finally, there is constantly stuff to read. It’s a personal hate of mine – having a lot to read in games, and a lot of material in Deathloop is written at a high level, so requires a lot of digesting sometimes to make sense of the clue. But the game then gives you another tooltip afterwards of what this translate to in ‘real world terms’ so wasn’t necessary. I found myself skipping big realms of text and just using the clues, which isn’t really in the spirit of it.

Is it the first must-have exclusive for Playstation 5? Well, it’s one of the few, so in that sense yes. It’s not the second-coming of games, as some of the press have regarded it, but I played it in a handful of very long sittings, and I’ll rarely do that to pure single-player games these days, so on that basis, I would heartily recommend it, despite my qualms.