Deathloop
Review

Deathloop (2021) is a shooting game where you play an assassin stuck in a time loop. You wake on a beach while residents of Blackreef island have gathered for a party that seemingly lasts forever. Your mission is to assassinate 8 guests but at the end of each night time resets and starts again.

It's a shooting game where the novelty is that you can learn behaviours and patterns of enemies each time you play the current day's loop. This enables you to work out how best to kill the eight individuals you need to assassinate.

The game-day is split into four. You can spend as long in each as you want but you can only explore one district in each time. At first, this means it's impossible to kill everyone in your single day. You need to work out how to get them together by investigating their lives and schedules throughout the day. You also need to learn how the environment changes in different periods, with the party kicking off, a snow storm freezing water to offer new routes and changing patrol paths of guards.

Although you start fresh each day, you can spend resources to keep some upgrades from one day to the next. Still, you need to pick up items each day to make good progress. Over time you build a character who fits your approach to the challenge of the loop.

On PlayStation 5 the game uses the DualSense controller. If your weapon jams in the game, the triggers of the controller can't be pressed and are blocked. If you run out of ammo the trigger goes limp. This kind of control feature means that you can't use the DualShock 4 controller to play Deathloop.

Deathloop is a quest to live a perfect day, albeit a perfect day for a killer. For those mature enough for this gruesome task it offers an intriguing and challenging experience that needs as much thinking as it does shooting.

Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Deathloop 3 years ago. It was re-examined by Ben Kendall and updated 3 months ago.