Arkane Studios’ upcoming time-looping assassination game, Deathloop is looking really, really good, with its Edge of Tomorrow/Groundhog Day-esque experience where you live the same day over and over. Then when you die you try to learn from your mistakes in what looks like a breath of fresh air and excellent fun. Interesting is the addition of Deathloop multiplayer. Looking to blend seamlessly with the single player, the multiplayer mode in Deathloop sounds like it could provide a real challenge for players looking for one. If there’s one thing we know Arkane do well, it’s assassination games, so there is a lot of hope that Deathloop will live up to the hype.
How Deathloop Multiplayer works
In Deathloop you play as Colt, an assassin that’s stuck in a loop of one day who is trying to win his freedom and break the loop. To do this you will need to take out a number of targets across the island of Blackreef. With the addition of multiplayer other players can take control of rival assassin Julianna. From here they can sneak into your game and kill Colt, keeping players stuck in the time loop and forever hunting their targets.
Julianna is able to take on the appearance of any of the island’s NPCs allowing them to perfectly blend into the world and thus making your job as Colt that much trickier.
Not to be outdone, Colt also has access to a number of abilities, hacking devices and other gadgets and weapons that can be customised to how you want to play.
This approach is a little similar to games like Dark Souls where other players can invade your world and kind of ruin your day.
What if I don’t like multiplayer?
Thankfully, for those not wishing to take part in the multiplayer shenanigans, you can switch the feature off entirely. It is a completely optional experience. However, if you do switch the multiplayer aspect off, Julianna will still appear from time to time, albeit as an AI controlled character. As your main rival she will still provide players with a tough challenge as you try to complete your hits.
It will be interesting to see how the multiplayer pans out as it could be a very fine line between this mode being a fun and interesting mechanic that makes approach encounters differently and just straight up being griefed. Hopefully it will change the gameplay in a way that propels it to a new and fun way rather than something many try once and quickly turn off.
With the addition of multiplayer you may be wondering if there are any Deathloop co-op modes. Unfortunately there are not. The ‘invasion’ style multiplayer is the only multiplayer experience that will be in the game when it releases later this year on the 14th of September.
With Arkane Studios having great success at making assassination games with the Dishonored series. I think it’s safe to say that Deathloop is in good hands and the game is shaping up to be a fantastic one.
