Up until now, folks have been attempting to define Deathloop via comparisons with a fairly broad list of existing games. Previous time loop games, assassination games, and highlights from developer Arkane’s own back catalogue have all come into the crosshairs. After a five-hour hands-on with Deathloop from the beginning of the game it’s certainly true these associations have merit – but it’s equally true they’re not really painting a complete picture of Arkane’s ambitious Groundhog Day murder marathon, as it’s a little different to what I expected.
Deathloop’s grimy, retro-futuristic ’60s espionage aesthetic makes a fabulous first impression, and it’s well-supported by some immediately excellent music and some great voice work from Colt actor Jason E. Kelly. Kelly’s dialogue needs to do a fair bit of heavy-lifting – particularly as Deathloop sets up its main mystery – and imbuing his delivery with a cocktail of indignant confusion mixed with otherwise gung-ho enthusiasm successfully put me in Colt’s corner straight away. I like him, and that’s always a good first step.
Deathloop’s premise is simple: to break out of a 24-hour time loop, main man Colt must kill the eight enigmatic ‘Visionaries’ that run the creepy island of Blackreef in a single day. Die, or fail to get all eight, and the day starts all over again – and everyone you’ve shot, stabbed, or kicked off a cliff is resurrected. IGN’s detailed hands-on preview of this initial slice of Deathloop features a spoiler-free discussion regarding the hunt for one particular target.
Either way, after roughly five hours with the game it’s now very clear that killing all eight targets in one day isn’t going to be quite as straightforward as it sounds. Four times of day and four different environments – but double the targets – means Colt needs to uncover ways to bop off multiple targets in each location on a single visit.
The fact that there’s no way to save your progress while mid-mission is an interesting way to force players to truly lean into the experimentative world of a hypothetical time-loop. Messed up? Deal with it and keep going, or give up and try the day over again. Colt’s special ability to die twice in a level before a third death resets the day for good blunts just enough of the risk to allow me to use a little trial and error, but it only takes two small mistakes to leave Colt skating on very thin ice until I decide to leave a map.
However, it didn’t take long for Deathloop to begin to depart from some of the more common press comparisons I’ve heard to date – especially with Io Interactive’s Hitman series. It’s true that both thrive on repetition within their murder sandboxes; Hitman encourages return visits to its maps via its fun reward system, and Deathloop bakes them into the narrative itself (multiple visits to the maps are required to uncover clues, hidden locations, plus upgrades and other powerful weapons). At the five-hour mark they’re otherwise quite different, especially in terms of their approaches to stealth and the density of NPCs. I’ll stress none of this really seems to reflect poorly on Deathloop, which seems very good so far. Movement and combat in particular feels very refined and I love Colt’s violent kick move. It’s just not as closely aligned with Io’s assassination classics as some of the initial reporting led me to believe.
Of course, another element of Deathloop is the ability to play not only as Colt, but as his rival Julianna. While Colt’s wish is to break the loop by killing the island’s eight Visionaries, Julianna’s role is is to kill Colt.
According to Arkane, choosing to play as Julianna will inject you into someone else’s game, allowing you to hunt down and kill them while they’re busy trying to unravel Deathloop’s central mystery as Colt. For the purposes of this preview, only Colt could be used, and human players were unable to enter our games as Julianna. Only AI-controlled Juliannas invaded my playthrough, and she appeared as a target just twice in the roughly five hours I played. The AI Julianna doesn’t seem too tricky to take down with a potent weapon; she’s a little tougher than standard enemies but not egregiously so.
It is very important to note that Deathloop can be played entirely solo, blocking strangers (or friends) from gategrashing your game and ruining your session. So, yes, you can most definitely play Deathloop and exclusively only ever deal with an AI-controlled Julianna. What’s confounding me a bit, however, is that I can’t really fathom why anybody would choose otherwise. That is, after a decent stint of Deathloop – including a couple of consecutive runs that ended in slightly irritating deaths achingly close to the objective I’d set for myself – it’s entirely beyond me why anyone would ever opt to allow strangers to enter their game.
While I’ve enjoyed picking at the initial threads of Deathloop’s mystery and patiently skulking through the environments, I can just see no joy whatsoever in letting Arkane airdrop a total stranger into my game to potentially wreck everything I’d achieved that day – especially if it meant losing weapons and power-up trinkets I hadn’t yet protected from vanishing when the loop resets. I also can’t see how it would be fun to do it to someone else – especially a friend. Granted, I’m a strict single-player evangelist, but it seems roughly equivalent to bursting into a mate’s house and pulling their PS5’s power plug out of the wall before they have a chance to save their progress. Arkane has established that Deathloop’s PvP wasn’t really conceived with competitive play in mind, so I’ll wait until I’ve seen the PvP in action, but I’m not quite grasping the appeal of this second pillar of Deathloop’s package. Maybe I’m not a big enough jerk.
Fortunately, there isn’t long to wait – Deathloop arrives on PC and PS5 next month, on September 14 – but for now I feel like this may be a mystery I’ll seek to solve solo.
Luke is Games Editor at IGN's Sydney office. You can find him on Twitter every few days @MrLukeReilly.