Gameplay

Arkane Studios is the mastermind behind famous titles such as Dishonored, Prey, and Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Their latest game, Deathloop, takes you to a 1960's island that's caught in a time loop—every day repeats. Should you die, you'll instantly be returned to life on a new day, with everything unfolding again. Previously, your character was unable to remember anything from the previous loops, but this changes at the beginning of the game, so you're able to learn from previous mistakes and discoveries. Your goal is to break that time loop somehow, so you can escape from the island. To achieve your goal, you have to kill eight characters called "Visionaries" in a single day. Problem is that these people aren't easy to find, and even harder to kill.

I have to admit Deathloop comes with a fascinating game concept. Instead of progressing through a game by visiting new levels and worlds, Deathloop consists of only four maps that you enter repeatedly, dozens of times. What makes things interesting is that your mission objectives are in different parts of the map, so you'll discover new things every time, at least for a while. With every mission, you learn to navigate the map better and better, come up with ideas on how to skip enemies, or take them down more efficiently. Everything spawns at the same location every "playthrough," similar to many rogue-lite games, giving you a chance to master the areas and become a pro speed-runner. This is a great idea, but does get boring towards the end of the game. I feel like having more than just four maps would have helped. Sometimes, I wondered whether this is how to cut down on development costs—just make a bunch of maps and replay them over and over again. Also, the maps aren't large by any means. You can traverse them in less than a minute once you know the lay of the land. This is facilitated by various character abilities, like double jump, run speed increases, or a targeted short range teleport.

These abilities are unlocked as you murder the Visionaries. You'll do so several times as these people are back every day, too, which yields additional variants of these abilities for every Visionary kill. There is no skill tree in Deathloop, you can equip up to four items that greatly affect your playstyle. There's also a selection of weapons to use; a handful, mostly variations of the same few base types. This is not Borderlands loot spam, and you'll quickly settle on a bunch of favorite guns and use them for most of the playthrough. There's no crafting or equippable armor, but you can apply enchants to weapons to make them stronger, improve reload speed, etc.

An interesting addition is that after every loop all your gear is gone, so you have to pick it up again. With further progress, you'll learn the ability to make items permanent, but you can't take everything into the next loop, either. You'll have to select what's most useful for you and sacrifice the rest, which is a cool idea that fits the game design well and isn't as annoying as it sounds. What is annoying is that you can't manually save in Deathloop, not even auto-save within a map. Progress is only saved between maps. Especially at the start of the game, when you're not a pro at navigating the maps yet, this is a huge source of frustration since you can't just stop and resume your gaming session—pausing the game is possible, though. I keep hearing about save scumming as an explanation for such an approach, but it's just a lame excuse in my opinion. We're talking about a single-player title here. Let me play the way I want. It's always possible use Cheat Engine anyway.

I'm also not a fan of making games with a single difficulty setting. I found the game to be relatively easy, much easier than Dishonored, for example, which added to the "boring" experience in late game. Stealth, tactics, or finesse isn't required at all in Deathloop. You'll be fine just running in, guns blazing and killing everyone. There's two or three missions that are an exception—you can't be discovered or the mission fails. Enemy AI is non-existent as these are just bullet sponges that die in less than a second. Even the Visionaries are super squishy, just run up to them and gun them down, or use the overpowered machete. There's a "takedown from behind" option, but it's not nearly as important as in other games. Arkane included some basic puzzles that were apparently designed to be solvable by everyone to avoid disappointment, a sad new trend in game development.

I didn't encounter any major game-breaking bugs. The game did crash on me six times during my playthrough, which is slightly above average, I'd say, and sucks even more because you can't save and have to replay the mission if the game crashes at the wrong time. The story of Deathloop is interesting and unfolds VERY nicely as you make it through the game while plotting how to take out the Visionaries. The overall low of the story isn't linear, rather there's eight story arcs (one per Visionary) that move forward linearly piece by piece, with one affecting the other. For example, while staking out A's office, you find out that he's in a romantic relationship with B—opening up the possibility of killing two birds with one stone. Playing through the whole game took me roughly ten hours. If you complete every side mission, you can get a few more hours out of it.

Overall, from a gameplay perspective, Deathloop is solid and worth a purchase if you're starving for new content. It's definitely not a 10/10 game like some big publications claim, I'd say 8/10 ignoring the technical issues. I'm quite sure it'll be sold at a discount in a few months, which also gives Arkane more time to fix the graphics and performance issues I'll be talking about next.

PC Port / Tech / Graphics / Performance

Arkane is using their in-house Void Engine for Deathloop. Roughly ten years ago, Arkane licensed id Tech 5, which powered the original RAGE, for example, and started adapting it for their own needs. They removed the MegaTexture feature, added dynamic lighting, and ported it to DirectX 11 for Dishonored 2. For Deathloop, they ported the engine to DirectX 12, added support for dynamic resolution scaling, ray tracing, AMD FidelityFX FSR, NVIDIA DLSS (coming soon), and additional post-processing effects.

The game still looks dated, as you can see from our screenshots on page 2. While the textures look good and are highly detailed, especially when combined with the well-made occlusion maps is the geometry of characters and models poor. The maps are well designed from a layout perspective, but everything looks extremely flat and blocky. This is definitely not next-gen graphics; I'm not impressed in any way. Actually, maybe the dynamic lighting of some scenes seems decent, even without ray tracing. In terms of art style, I do feel like Arkane found something that works reasonably well with the crude world design, reminding me a bit of Team Fortress 2, which is still a good game. In some scenes, I was reminded of a 1960's James Bond set, but graphics definitely isn't Deathloop's strongest suit.

What's a huge issue, and the "mixed" Steam reviews reflect that, is that the game has serious issues with stutter and microstutter. The frametimes are very uneven, which is very noticeable when turning the camera. This also depends on your monitor's refresh rate and how susceptible you are to noticing this effect. You do get used to it after a while, at least I did. In 2021, I also find it unacceptable that a game doesn't offer to run at uncapped FPS. The underlying reason for that is Arkane's outdated engine design, which requires a fixed "tick" rate to keep track of time in the engine and to calculate physics correctly.

Let's talk about ray tracing. You've probably already looked at our RT comparison shots and wondered "are you fucking kidding me, that's it?" Yup, seems ray tracing was sneaked in at the last minute, probably to grab some $$ from console or GPU vendors. Instead of including proper ray tracing, Arkane added ray tracing support for shadows cast by the sun only. No other light source is taken into account for RT. This means that the indoors looks exactly the same with RT shadows on or off. The reason for this design choice is that they'd otherwise have to go through all levels, mark all the individual light sources as "RT enabled," properly test whether everything looks right, apply fixes, etc. But c'mon, it's just four maps, I can do that in an afternoon. It also seems there's no secondary light bounces, and the rays are cut off after traveling a certain distance, both of which cushions the performance hit from RT. I had to lol when I realized that the player doesn't cast any raytraced shadow, so much for "RT = realism." A second ray-tracing effect is "ray traced ambient occlusion," which is somewhat hidden in the "Ambient Occlusion" settings menu: You have to scroll down while the dropdown list is open.

Ambient occlusion helps create dark areas in spaces that are nearby other surfaces blocking some light. A baked version of ambient occlusion has been around for many years. AO details are calculated during game development and "baked" into the world textures. This has the drawback that everything has to be static. The classic real-time ambient occlusion algorithm is a screen-space effect and was first seen in Crysis. Here, the depth buffer is inspected to calculate the amount of occlusion from surrounding pixels—really simple, dynamic, fast, and easy. Of course, this approximation has its drawbacks, and there's many corner cases, which is why ray-traced AO was invented. Here, the actual scene geometry is used to cast rays and check whether a surface has objects nearby that occlude it. As our screenshots show, the effect on the actual scene is minimal because classic AO algorithms already work very well for the world in Deathloop, which is completely static anyway.

I find it surprising that we don't get ray-traced reflections. As seen in many other recent releases, these are easy to implement and would make sense considering the game is set on an island world with plenty of reflective water. Overall, our comparison screenshots clearly show that the differences between RT on and off are minimal, impossible to spot in regular gameplay. I had to go back and forth between my comparison images just to find interesting areas to highlight. If this is what ray tracing offers, I'd say ray tracing is a scam and waste of performance. Good that much better implementations of RT exist. I also suspect that the limited RT capability of consoles played a role here. Let's face it, games are developed for consoles first and ported to PC later. I feel like NVIDIA, being the ray-tracing leader on PC will have to do better here to convince developers to add meaningful ray tracing to their games, so they can sell their graphics cards and people won't just buy an AMD-powered console.

In terms of performance, Deathloop runs very well. A GeForce GTX 1660 Ti or Radeon RX 5600 XT is sufficient for 60 FPS with ray tracing off. Ray tracing roughly adds a 20% performance hit on top of that, definitely not worth it for no visible difference (during gameplay). 1440p at 60 FPS is in reach for the Radeon RX 6700 XT and GeForce RTX 2070, and fluid 4K gaming is available with the RX 6800 XT and Radeon RTX 3080. Generally speaking, NVIDIA handles Deathloop a little bit better, but the differences are smaller than in most other titles. Both companies have released game-ready drivers, which we used for all our testing.

What's interesting is that VRAM usage is really high. With 10 GB even for 1600x900, Deathloop allocates a lot of VRAM despite the weak graphics. Our performance benchmarks do show that cards with 8 GB can handle this without any noteworthy loss in performance, as apparently not all allocated assets are accessed that often. The 6 GB RX 5600 XT takes a small hit in 4K due to limited amounts of VRAM, but it's not designed for that resolution anyway. Only the Radeon RX 5500 XT with 4 GB memory is clearly dragged down in all resolutions, so reduce settings on cards with 4 GB or less.