DEATHLOOP

第一个想到用强引导+清单项来解决循环式设计带来的重复游玩和记忆压力的人简直是天才，配合上阿肯出色的箱庭设计和工业实力，这是一款不可多得的佳作（除了中后期有几个任务有点无聊）

Not my favorite but it's more Arkane!

This one was honestly fun. If you like the 'groundhog day' type of repeating cycle to get sh!t right, this is your game. Only part I was disappointed in was multiplayer. Only playing HIM or HER got tedious and annoying for achievements. If you grab it on sale, I'd def. recommend. Full price would have needed a better MP experience and the ability to mod weapons to the way you want; not the frustration of randomness of mods and an RNG that is honestly just broken IMO. Still worth a few bucks and there are plenty of amusing details throughout.

Ignoring the fact that this game will crash every 40-60 Minutes due to a known VRAM issue and the fact that playing as Julianna (invading other players in a dark souls like way) is nearly unplayable due to the way the multiplayer has been programmed. This game is an excellent in giving the dishonoured-like fix I have been craving. and this game does succeed in immersing me.

Great gun gameplay and I love the premise, story, and solving puzzles. Huge caveat, though: because it's made to be a persistently multiplayer game with invasions (even though you can opt out, thank goodness), if the game crashes you lose ALL of the progress you were making on the mission. There's no checkpointing or anything. I've had a number of very frustrating crashes like that. It is sadly not very stable.

feels like dishonored but with guns

Пистолет с глушителем убирает потребность во всех остальных пушках.. Но мне всё равно было кайф играть

非常希望这是一款线性的游戏，这个抽丝剥茧，找出隐藏线索，把所有角色串在一个故事线里的剧情，确实很带感。然而重复的地图来几遍马上就让人困意十足，玩到后期只想退出，不适合连续游玩。KEY的价格还可以，对剧情或者喜欢ARKANE风格的话，值得一玩，前提是有精力和时间去重复刷图。总体来说不推荐。

DEATHLOOP is a very interesting game with a lot of concepts you won't find in other games of this scale that is unfortunately held back by being a game of this scale and overall just not being able to commit to its own cool ideas. However, this game is exciting to me as this is the type of original experience you just don't find in large scale projects anymore, and overall I would say this game is worth picking up, so long as your expectations are in the right place. DO NOT TURN OFF ONLINE PLAY. The basic gameplay of DEATHLOOP will feel very familiar if you are used to ARKANE's other imsim titles, and at its core is just as fun and well-built. You have weapons, you have powers, the movement feels very freeform and your character exceptionally mobile. Enemies have detection indicators, and you can sneak around or shoot up the place as you like. In fact, shooting up the place has never been a better time, as there are literally zero consequences for doing so (which is story relevant) and the game gives you a plethora of guns to use, some more interesting than others thanks to the more unique named weapons and upgrades available. However, this is one of the ways the game betrays its own concept a bit. The game makes a deal at the beginning of how every loop you will loose all guns and upgrades you have acquired, thus forcing you to use what you find each loop. This could be fun, as it would, in theory, mean the order you deal with certain objectives will affect what gear you will have access to throughout the game, however because of the games "infusion" mechanic, which allows you to carry persistent gear throughout loops, this entire aspect of the game becomes very quickly lost as you can easily assemble a perfect persistent loadout. I believe the developers were afraid that the majority audience would like to keep the super special golden gun they went through all that trouble of finding, however this undercuts an entire aspect of the game. This is especially a problem given that the loop mechanic makes the game inherently repetitive, as you will need to repeat the same levels over and over again. The forced variation of a non-persistent equipment loadout would have done a lot for the game's ability to maintain variety throughout the game. What compounds this issue is the fact that the game's variety (or lack therof) in enemies are just not good enough to provide a challenge to or force creative problem solving out of the player. Unlike in something like Dishonored, you only ever have to fight normal guys, with everything else just being static traps like trip mines or gun turrets, and these normal guys are dumb and slow. You can sneak around them very easily, or if you loose patience (which you will) you can easily flatten them via 12-guage steamroller. The main saving grace of the gameplay is the multiplayer feature, the ability for an invading player to take the reigns of julianna in an attempt to kill you. Because this other player can do most of what you can do, and is presumably a human capable of sapient thought, these fights feel much more dynamic and interesting than whatever resistance the AI can put up. This isn't some run-and-gun slopfest, all those tools you have for im-simming around the level still work in pvp if you are smart about using them, which turns each fight into a high-stakes game of chess powered by gun violence. Or at least it would, if not for the shortcomings. The netcoding, and I am being charitable here, is super mega peepee doodoo ass. I think the connection is entirely on the invader, meaning you won't notice it playing as Colt, but half the time the invading julianna gets to experience hilariously bad stuttering, rubber banding, and other odd issues that can render the game unplayable. Even if you can't see it as colt, you will notice that invaders are very inconsistent. This would be true anyway as player skill is not equal, but this issue makes whether or not a julianna invasion is an actual test of skill or a weird distraction to what you were doing into a coin toss, assuming the invader doesn't just disconnect immediately (which i would recommend if you wind up in that situation.) However, since julianna invasions are the only part of the game where the gameplay becomes actual gameplay and not time-wasting, turning it off isn't really a solution, it just makes the game easy, repetitive, and boring. Luckily, despite being a couple years old now, it still has an active player base, so if you want to invade or be invaded you will get plenty of chances to engage with the mechanic. The story is. That's all i really have to say about it. The main character Colt is kind of funny sometimes, his interactions with Julianna are mildly entertaining about as often as they are just kind of annoying, which is enough to put him a full ♥♥♥♥-mile above most AAA action title protagonists as far as likeability goes. I can't say that i really cared about anyone in the plot though, which makes some nice reveals which could have been really impactful feel kind of pointless. What I do want to actually talk about, however, is how progress through the game is handled. Since time loops in the game, story progression is more about progressing what you know, rather than progressing through a linear series of levels. This means most of what you do is about figuring out how to progress, instead of making any actual progress. You need to figure out how to manufacture a situation in which you are able to kill everyone all in the time allotted by one day. This could have been a very fun puzzle to solve, putting together a bunch of clues and interactions to piece together in your head how to get the stars aligned to do your big killing run. The game undercuts this entirely by very clearly marking out and keeping track of everything you need to do for you, so in practice it isn't actually a puzzle for you to solve, but a series of objective markers to blindly chase around until you win. The amount of thinking you need to do to solve the game is so much less than what the game seems to want from you that it completely undermines the potential of its premise. Again I fear this was a compromise to try and make this game palatable to a majority audience who will never have the attention span, focus, or problem solving skills to handle a genuine longform puzzle type game where you need to actually pay attention and recall details from many hours of playtime ago. This betrays the developer's lack of trust in its audience as well as their lack of understanding that a game like this was always going to be of niche appeal, no matter how sanitized you make it. The only thing this dumbing down does is ruin its niche appeal as well. This aspect of the game is by far the biggest let down for me. You can't go in expecting a very high-brow game for intellectuals, its point-to-point job running all the way down. However, despite its many, MANY shortcomings, the basic gameplay of DEATHLOOP is Arkane enough to be fun in its own right, and given how few of this type of game we get in the big gaming space, I think its worth your time and money. The game does have an active player base still, and there are some great moments to be had with it, but I wouldn't blame anyone for skipping on this one either. Its existence does give me hope that there are still some big name devs out there willing to take risks on some new ideas, perhaps Arkane will take the experience of developing this game and be less scared commit to their own vision a bit more on a later title. I wonder what that studio is up to these days? *checks notes* ... oh no.

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