Those games sought to temper the player’s aggression by making the world a darker place for all their violence and giving plenty of options for non-lethal approaches, but Deathloop hands you an orgy of set-piece shootouts and practically dares you to dive in. It’s also not as daring and morally nuanced as Dishonored.

Deathloop is more self-consciously showy, a theme-park dystopia, a ready-made backdrop for the acrobatic thrills it provides. What it doesn’t have is the all-encompassing, dread-heavy atmosphere of the Dishonored games, which imbued every building, every street, every object with a sickly Victorian pallor. Filled with brilliant graphic design, it is a world that can be explored like an art gallery. Art deco buildings combine with 1960s kitsch and the towering painted billboards of Weimar Berlin, building a glorious picture of a ruinous, elitist society and spectacle. Two of the characters are having a secret affair, so could they be taken out at once? One guy is obsessed with fireworks and isn’t great on health and safety – surely a deadly accident waiting to happen? The beauty of the structure is that there’s no rush to discover these narrative threads – you can always revisit them on the next go-around.īlackreef is a luscious world constructed with the idiosyncratic eye for detail we’d expect from this team. Players also need to work out the rules of the loop, using multiple revisits at different times of day to piece together information, listening in to conversations to get tips on how targets might be assassinated.

You can sneakily scale the rooftops, quietly hacking security cameras and picking off enemies one by one, or you can leap straight into the crowd with an eviscerating shotgun and a fistful of grenades.īut this is Arkane, of course, one of the most stylish and intellectual studios currently working in mainstream games, so Deathloop offers more than just cathartic action. Colt can pick a few of the weapons, powers and items he finds to keep for the next time loop, and you need to make tactical decisions about what suits your style of play. For the player, this means reliving the same 12-hour period over and over, getting ever more familiar with the island’s inhabitants and buried secrets.

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