Deathloop review - not Arkane's most surprising game, but possibly its best

Deathloop is about killing the people who are killing time. Set in a kind of alternate 1970s that feels more like the far future of Dishonored's Gristol than part of Earth's history, it's a freeform, first-person mix of shooting, assassination, hacking and sorcery in which you wind and rewind a single day both to experiment with tools and manipulate targets such that you can massacre them all before darkness falls. The lead is Colt Vahn, a hulking amnesiac who - shortly after being hacked to death by a mysterious woman - wakes on a time-locked Arctic island occupied by a hedonistic Bond movie organisation called AEON. To undo the rippling Anomaly keeping the island's never-ending murder-party in motion, Colt must slay the eight "Visionaries" who preside over four, separately loading areas, which also involves digging into the island's buried secrets, slaughtering no end of rank-and-file "Eternalists", and unravelling the riddle of his own presence. Amongst the Visionaries is Julianna, the aforesaid mystery lady, incorrigible nuisance-caller and the game's second playable character, who stars in a multiplayer mode where you invade the worlds of other Colts and kill them for unlocks.

What follows is a stylish, bloodthirsty and considerate reworking of ideas from Arkane's other games, which clears away a little of Dishonored's haughty perfectionism and grants you ample leeway to run amok. This is captured by the art direction, which retains Dishonored's brooding, salt-soaked shorelines but covers them with neon signboards, boutique low-poly statues and jaunty Space Age cabins - an upper cruster's carnival with heady overtones of Tarantino and Wolfenstein, perched atop the ruins of a much less forgiving game. I'm not sure it's Arkane's most adventurous or surprising work - for all the louder presentation, it sometimes pulls its punches. But it might be Arkane's most straightforwardly enjoyable game.

To begin with, Deathloop just feels like Dishonored with guns and gadgets pilfered from Q's workshop. Among the first tools the bleary-eyed Colt gets his hands on are a wireless hackamajig for use against security sensors and automated turrets, and a fancy bomb that can be morphed into a tripwire, a landmine or a grenade. You could play through the entire game with just these devices, mining chokepoints and creatively rearranging the defences. But you'll have much more fun if you make use of Slabs, magical abilities plucked from the cooling bodies of the Visionaries.

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