Deathloop review – the party that never ends

metro.co.uk:

The makers of Dishonored and Prey create a Groundhog Day style adventure where you have to escape reliving the same day again and again.

Although it was a PlayStation 5 and PC timed exclusive at launch Dishonored is now also available on Xbox Series X/S, and because Microsoft now owns publisher Bethesda it’s also on Game Pass. It’s exactly the same game as before, although an update including an extended ending is coming to all formats as a free update.

It’s not hard to imagine the game Arkane Studios must’ve envisioned when they first started work on Deathloop, and the unavoidable compromises they had to make in order to turn it into a mainstream game. Publisher Bethesda has tried their best, but this is a difficult game to explain unless you actually play it and it’s almost certainly not what you think it’s going to be (which, ironically, means it would’ve been perfect for Game Pass, except it’s a timed PlayStation 5 console exclusive – one of the last deals Bethesda made before being acquired by Microsoft).

Deathloop is part of a proud tradition of video games which involve time travel, not just as a passing plot point but a key element of the gameplay. It’s essentially the inverse of The Sexy Brutale, which was a non-action game about saving the lives of mask wearing people at a decadent party. In Deathloop you’re trying to kill seven key targets at once in order to destabilise a time loop that otherwise keeps you replaying the same day forever.

With only a few exceptions, everyone restarts the loop with their memories wiped and as the game begins so do you, as you wake up on the beach of a small island in the Arctic Circle. The island was formerly a fishing community with a (not very) secret army base conducting