Video Gamers Podcast - Deep Divin’ Deathloop - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

Gaming visionaries Josh and Paul are resetting the loop and diving into Deathloop in this week's episode. One of the hotter gaming releases recently, Deathloop is getting lots of acclaim. Does it live up to the hype and what’s it all about? Join us as we breakdown gameplay, weapons, levels and more. All in a non-boring format meant for gaming lovers everywhere! Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad  Thanks to Razer for sponsoring the show. Use code: Multiplayer at checkout for your free gift! Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we jump into today's episode, we want to give a very special thank you to our partner Razer for sponsoring this episode. Razer is the world's leading lifestyle brand for gamers. I recently got my hands on the Huntsman V2 keyboard. The thing's amazing. It's got optical switches that are next generation. They are lightning fast, much faster than the old school mechanical switches. They actually give you an advantage while gaming.

I've got my Huntsman V2 keyboard right next to my Razer Basilisk V2 mouse for that one-two punch. And if you want to use the exact same gear that Josh and I use, you can head to multiplayerpodcast.com slash Razer and make sure to enter promo code multiplayer and you will get a free gift along with your items. Let's start the show. Hello everybody! Welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. It is a deep dive Monday. We are so excited to jump into today's content. We are a podcast run by two dads who love gaming. It's our number one hobby. We love to just sit and chat about it twice a week. On Mondays, we have these hour-long episodes. And if you have not already done so, please rate our podcast five stars and leave us a review.

Periodically, we do read reviews on the show. And so if you want to have a chance to have yours read, make sure to leave one. I am your host, Paul. And then joining with me, as always, he is a visionary among visionaries, creating chaos, trying to break out of a time loop. It's Josh. Paul, we should just call this the Time Loop Podcast. I know, right? Is it the last four games? Is it the last four, five?

It feels like the last 25. I don't know how we ended up playing so many time loop games this last couple months. It's not our fault. We're just, we are men of the people, Paul. These games have come out together and our job is to review them and talk about them for people. So it's not like we are time loop lovers necessarily, although some of these games have been great, but it's just, these are the games that came out and we got to talk about them. My goodness. We had 12 Minutes. We had The Forgotten City. We have Deathloop. All these games just happened to come out around the same time. So, you know,

if you guys are sick of hearing about time loops, I'm sorry. This is the last one on the docket, is all I can say. I don't think we have any more time loop games before the end of the year but as you guys saw in the description we are going to be talking about death loop today which just released a couple of weeks ago uh before we jump into our deep dive content we do want to give a special thank you to legendary supporters jake ranger miller 73 ace of shame ad and t-fols we very much appreciate your guys support and we have a brand new epic supporter on patreon it actually happens to be a personal friend of me and josh it's michael the butler uh who by the way is not a butler in real life but michael the butler is his name

he is a close buddy of ours and i heard a rumor that he actually might be joining the podcast soon as a guest spoilers spoilers paul i gotta i'm gonna have to put a warning in the episode title now but yeah yeah do you want me to just bleep just bleep that part in the podcast? That way people will be like, what were they saying? What was that? That Paul's got such a potty mouth. All right. Well, that's all that we have by way of announcements. We're going to jump into all things Deathloop.

All right, Josh. Starting out here, I've got a description here from Steam. Deathloop is a next-gen FPS from Arcane Lion, the award-winning studio behind Dishonored. In Deathloop, two rival assassins are trapped in a mysterious time loop on the island of Blackreef, doomed to repeat the same day for eternity. All right, now one thing I did want to mention here at the get-go is that deathloop is available on windows and they do have a one-year exclusivity deal on console so right now the only console you can get it on is playstation 5 so i know that this game is not as universally available as most of the other games that we cover uh but deathloop here josh and i have played a lot of hours of death loop i feel like we have teased it on several episodes finally we get to talk about it uh josh let's just jump right

in all right so it's a first person shooter the game starts you're playing as this guy named colt you just kind of wake up on the beach you don't really know what's happening before the game actually starts. How do the first few minutes of this game play out? Like a bad hangover. That's exactly right. Yeah. So Colt wakes up on a beach. It's a beautiful scene, but there's bottles everywhere. Like Colt's been partying down apparently. And he doesn't know what's going on. So you kind of wake up. I'll say this. The first thing I noticed in this game was amazing graphics, really, really solid presentation. I mean, honestly, from start to finish, you can tell that they put a lot of love and polish into this game. But yeah, Colt wakes up. He kind of gets his bearings and you start to notice these weird,

like floaty words, you kind of, kind of highlighted. And you're like, what's going on? Am I like seeing things or are these clues? Is this a tutorial? Like what's going on? And, you know, just like any game, the first probably, I don't know, five minutes is just getting used to the keys and what you can do and how to walk around and all that stuff. But before you know it, Colt is exploring around a little bit. He's got his bearings and he has figured out where he's at and he's in this time loop and he's got to figure out. I don't know why in the very beginning he decides that he's done with this time loop and he wants to break out of it. Especially because he has no memory of anything before.

He does not know anything before waking up there on the beach. So why he is so insistent on breaking this time loop, I don't really know. Other than, I guess, I guess he just figures he needs to. I mean, hey, some days I wake up and I decide I don't want to go to work. And then other days it's fine. So who knows? Yeah. So it kind of like you're seeing the floating text that you mentioned and you don't really

know, is this like a hallucination? But it seems to be kind of guiding you in the world. Right off the bat, you're supposed to enter a code to get it through a door, and the words say you already know the code. So it's kind of like very mysterious right from the get-go. But Josh, I want to ask you a question here. So Colt finds out he's in this time loop. He talks to this woman named Juliana, and basically you find out she's trying to preserve the time loop you're trying to break out of it and can you describe the plot and the science

behind this time loop because the game kind of goes into some of these details but i thought it was terribly confusing do you feel like you could explain this to someone who has no clue what Deathloop is? Easy, Paul. Easy. Let's hear it. So you're on this island. This island is magical, but nobody knows why. But there's a bunch of scientists that have realized this is a magical island. It's kind of like Lost, if you've ever watched the show Lost.

People know there's something going on with this location. And through science, they determine that there's an anomaly that is surrounding this island that they then learn to harness through the magic of science. And because of that science, I'm just going to keep saying science so I sound like I know what I'm talking about here. No, go ahead. You're doing great. But they then figure out that they can harness this. And on top of that, these visionaries realize that this island

has given them unique powers as well on top of the whole time loop resetting thing. And then, you know, there's a way to break it, but apparently the visionaries are the keys to the time loop, which is your whole quest in this. And then science says that it will loop every day. Okay. So you did shockingly good with this because the game really glosses over every possible detail. You just know scientists are working with this anomaly,

and that's kind of the extent of what they really explain in the game. I thought that it was actually kind of hard to follow. Oh, it was for sure. If you noticed, I didn't pay a lot of attention to try to wrap my head around the whole time loop thing. No, no, no. You actually did far better than I could have just right from the get-go. I actually had to go look up a couple of descriptions and summaries to try to actually put a lot of this together.

Because as you play Deathloop, and it should be said here near the beginning, that we are not going to be sharing any major spoilers. We will talk about some things like weapons and some abilities that you unlock, but we're not really going to have any major spoilers in terms of the storyline. I think the only thing that I would say that I thought was very funny is that for whatever reason in this time loop,

the visionaries who are working to maintain the time loop, they did this because they want to party for eternity they're young scientists i mean they they throw a giant bash at the end of this night and then when the night ends everyone's gonna wake up with the same day but the weird thing which again they don't explain in the game is that almost all of the visionaries who are the scientists running it, they don't have any memory of the time loop or the day before. To them, they are always on day one. The only exclusions to this is a woman named Juliana, who does remember every loop resetting, and we'll talk about her quite a bit later. And your main character, Colt, does not have any memory before

you start playing the game but he does start remembering the loops resetting once you're actually playing and for whatever reason the time loop will be broken if you are able to kill all the visionaries within a 24 hour window so this is the overall mission of the game. I guess they're kind of like time horcruxes from Harry Potter. That's a good way of putting it. That's exactly what they are, right? They are. If you defeat six of them, and then it hits nighttime, or if Colt dies, the time loop resets.

Now, we don't know how the Visionaries did this, but it's somehow tied in with their life force. And if you kill all of them, then you know that this time loop will be broken and you'll finally break loose. Do you think that's a good summary of the story? That's pretty good. The game does try to explain a little bit that the visionaries are the protection for the loop. They're kind of like the fail-safe so that if anything happens, this loop will continue. And that's by design. A few of the visionaries are world-renowned scientists. And so they're responsible for kind of harnessing this energy and getting all the science behind it going. And I guess they do come to an agreement that they will act as protectors

for this loop and the only way to break the loop which obviously they don't want because when you're living a party every day that's you know you just want to keep going sure but yeah so the game does delve into that a little bit as far as why are the visionaries tied into the loop and i don't you know we're not going to give any spoilers there but there it is part of the plot. I mean, it's hard to follow. It is hard to follow. It's just like any other time loop game. The part of the issue is maybe we're burned out on time loop games.

So it was like, okay, you and I are pros at this point. And I think maybe I just glossed over a little bit of that. I did pick up enough to get the gist of the game and the plot of the game, but I don't think it was like where I'm so focused on trying to understand every little aspect of how did this loop come to be? How are the visionaries there? Where'd they get their powers? Why do you have to kill all of them? What happens if you don't, you know what I mean? Like that kind of stuff, because you just naturally discover some of that through playing the game and i don't think you have to necessarily wrap your head around all that stuff to enjoy it unless you

really want to dive into that plot and understand like the nuance and stuff but that that nuance is there if you seek it out and you really care about that stuff yeah and doing a lot of reading of all the journals and all the things which i don't want to do in a first-person shooter-ish type game. Yeah, yeah, I hear you. So basically the way that the gameplay functions is that you're on this island, Black Reef, and it's divided into four areas. It has the Complex, Updom, Carl's Bay, and Freestad Rock. And all of those four areas can be visited at four different times of day you can go out in the morning noon afternoon and night so essentially

it gives you 16 levels if you want to think of it that way but it's really only four locations over four times of day why does the time of day matter in Deathloop? Because the visionaries are doing different things at different times. And I'll be honest, it sounds weird, but it works. In this game, it does feel like 16 different levels. Like, it's a little weird to get used to. I remember playing this and thinking, like, why does the time of day? Like, wait, I have to go to this map at this time, but then there's four different times. And I remember being a little confused by everything, but then it just, it starts to work. And the maps, even though the layout of the maps is identical throughout the

four times of day, the maps change enough, or at least I felt like they did. Like the atmosphere changes. If it's morning, you can tell like, there's not a lot of enemies out. Everything's nice and kind of clean for the day. As the day progresses, you know, all of a sudden, like this building is burned down, you know,

and there's more enemies out and they're wandering around or they're congregating at this like central area. Or there's like a bunch of them standing out front of this place called the library. But if you go out at night, everybody's getting ready for this big party. And so now there's a ton of enemies and it's dark, but a lot of the outer, like the outlying areas aren't as busy and stuff like that. So the game does a really, really good job of making you feel like this world that they're living in is actually alive and that things are happening even though

you're not there. And I think that's a neat touch in a game like this because it does add to that. This game's really a lot about the atmosphere and this island, this Black Reef Island and these different zones. And so if you become invested in those zones a little bit and what's going on, I think it really does help for the enjoyment. And I think they did a pretty good job of that. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. So to kind of give you like a silly example, in one of the side missions, maybe you find an opened safe and they leave a scrap of paper with the combination written on it and they leave that because now the safe is empty. And so if you discover that in the afternoon, well, now you know

the next time the time loop resets, I'm going to come back here in the morning. And now that I know the code, I can open the safe and actually retrieve whatever was in it. And so the game does play with the time loop in ways like that. And then also, since you have to kill all the visionaries in a 24-hour window, you do have to be efficient in how you do this. And as you track these visionaries over the course of a day, sometimes they might gather together. And so you can kind of like kill two birds with one stone. And so there's, you know, different ways that you can, you know, use the environment and the time of day to help you with that mission. The one other thing to mention about this is that the time loop is not determined by any timer.

So it's not like 12 minutes or even Forgotten City where if you wait too long, the day ends. In this game, you have all the time in the world to walk through that part of town for that part of day. But then once you're done, you basically go back to the tunnels, back to your home, and then the time will automatically move forward. So if you finish in the morning, as soon as you go back to your base, now it's afternoon and you pick a new location to go to.

And so you have to purposely go to the right parts of town at the right time of day to find out the right information to help you with your quest. And that's different. Honestly, that's one thing that this game does different than a lot of the other time loop games that we've played recently, or even like Outer Wilds, for instance, is that there is no timer. And that's kind of unique for a time loop game because you can take your time and you can look around. And in this

game, short of death, you get to decide when that loop resets. And that's kind of neat because it does slow things down to where you don't feel like you're constantly under this time crunch. And you can explore, you can go off the beaten path, you can look for secrets and things like that versus the I need to hurry, hurry, hurry, because I've only got seven minutes left before this loop resets. And so there's that can be frustrating sometimes. Like, I think it's very well done in some games and not so much in others. Outer Wilds versus 12 minutes. But, you know, in this game, it is very neat that it's your choice when the loop resets, unless you die, in which case, well, it just reset anyway.

Yeah. It's definitely the most chill and laid-back time loop mechanic, because it's 100% in your control, unless you die. And even then, that's fine. You just start your day over, and the game does let you advance time. So if you don't want to go explore UPDOM in the morning and you just want to go straight to night, the game just lets you hold the enter button for a couple seconds and then just keep fast forwarding and then stop at the time that you want to explore. Now, this might sound like it's a lot to try to manage and remember and figure out over the course of the game, but the game actually has a very nifty journal that keeps track of all of this for you. I know that I've already compared a couple other games to the computer and Outer Wilds, but this functions somewhat similarly. If you discover

some kind of tip or hint in the game, the game will automatically give you basically like line by line different quests, and it'll keep track of the latest hint. So if you find the open safe, your journal will automatically say, you found an open safe. Now you have the code. Maybe I should return here in the morning at Carl's Bay and figure out what's in this safe. So that way, you don't have to memorize these things. And it actually works really, really well. It's a great system. They streamlined it really well. Honestly, it's needed. There's a lot of stuff to discover in this game. I mean, not only do you have to learn who these visionaries are, where they're at, at any

given time of day, because they move. One visionary might be somewhere in the morning, but then later on that day, they go home or they go out or various things like that. And to try to keep all of this stuff together would be pretty difficult. I actually remember approaching... This is kind of funny because I remember when I very first started playing this game, in my mind, and I don't know if I picked this up from the trailers or maybe I just invented it, but I thought this was going to be like a puzzle to try to solve this loop. And so I remember trying to absorb as much information as I could. I was seriously overcomplicating this thing. Like, honestly, I legitimately was. I'm going to laugh

at myself because I was extremely overcomplicating the solution to this game. And the game does a phenomenal job of at what specific time, the safe codes and all this other stuff. And then I went, wait a minute, like this system's great because it's keeping track of everything for me. And it's not a detriment to the game at all. Like it really does help you just enjoy playing. But I don't know why I thought like this was going to be like a brain bending solution type game at first. Oh, it's so funny. Yeah, but I do love the fact that it will give you tips on things that aren't critical. was going to be like a brain bending solution type game at first. Oh, it's so funny. Yeah. But I do love the fact that it will give you tips on things that aren't critical.

Like it keeps a list of those things. But then things that are critical, you can track and it'll say, hey, this is during this time of day on this map. Maybe you should go there at that time. So it does keep everything very nice and tidy and neat. And you know where you're supposed to go at any given time time based on the quest line that you're on at the time. Yeah. The journal does the organizing for you. You don't have to be like Charlie from Always Sunny in Philadelphia with the famous meme where he's smoking in the mail room and he's got all the pictures and all the strings and trying to figure out the conspiracy. Your journal does it all for you. And they divide it between two different tabs.

So one of the tabs is leads in regards to the visionaries. So that's your main quest line. So you've got eight visionaries. So there's eight different quests that are tracked there. But then you also have arsenal leads, and that will tell you maybe ways that you can get gear in the game. So maybe upgraded weapons, or maybe certain attachments you can use with weapons, or maybe unlocking a new ability. And so if you kind of get tired of the main storyline, you can spend some time doing side missions. Or if you just want to finish the game, you can ignore your arsenal leads and just straight up do the visionary stuff. To give you guys one concrete example, which is a very

mild spoiler without any details, maybe you find a picture that shows two visionaries together. Well, now the game will tell you that it's your job to explore and try to find where the picture was taken. And then you try to figure out what time of day. And so now you can track down when these two visionaries were together. And so the journal walks you every step of the way. When you discover the location, they tell you, great, you found the location. Now here's the next step of the quest. And that way you can fully understand who gets there when and what they're doing and that's all a ton of fun i think one other thing that's really neat

i don't know if you liked this or not but when you would complete major quests like once you those are really cool because that tells you that you're progressing in the game i agree because a lot of like a lot of this game is exploring these areas. There's a lot of fighting and gunplay and abilities and stuff like that. But your overall goal of breaking this loop and trying to find these visionaries and how to kill them and then how to kill them all in one day. I mean, that's the overarching goal. But when you do a major milestone in the game, like killing a visionary for the first time, when you go back home, you get this really neat kind of summary cutscene that is like this almost like cartoony graphic novel type thing. It's actually kind of neat. And then it tells you what happened. And that's how you know, like, oh man, I just actually accomplished something really cool. I liked that touch. It made me feel good about like, oh yeah, I just did something really cool

here. I've learned something. The game's kind of rewarding me for that. But yeah, I thought that was a neat touch too, because they're not real common. There's not a ton of them, but when they happen, it's just like you kind of get a little like, hey, all right. Well, not only that, it might have been like a 12-part quest. And so maybe you've played over the course of eight or nine hours because you're going back and forth between them all. And the cutscene kind of fully summarized everything that happened. So Colton will narrate and he'll say, okay, great. I learned that this person relates to this other visionary in this way. And I know that at this time they do this and here's why. And now I know that I need to do X, Y, and Z. And so I thought that it really helped remember the story and kind of summarize

what you did because you're simultaneously working on all the quests at once. And sometimes you just kind of forget exactly where you're at. So I thought that the cut scenes were really well done. They were fun to watch. And some of them are kind of long, like they're kind of like one to three minute cut scenes. But I really enjoyed them. I thought they really improved the experience. All right. So Josh, we have not yet talked about combat now this game since it is made by the same developer who did dishonored it's very similar and prey actually yeah and prey which is a very well renowned game yes the game gives you the option to play with stealth mechanics you can have guns blazing you can do a little bit of a hybrid of both. Overall, how did you play this game?

I did a hybrid. Now, I know you're going to think I'm just guns blazing the whole time, but I was not. I do actually enjoy a little bit of stealth. I don't like it when it is 100% stealth because then I just want to shoot people. But in this game, there are definitely times where stealth is needed and it's more convenient. Honestly, it's like instead of blasting through 50 enemies, I can just sneak around three of them and that makes a lot of sense even to my brain. But I mean, I'll say this, this game is very well done in both aspects. They give you a lot of ways that you can do stealth.

They give you a lot of ways. It's like one of the things, if somebody hasn't played Dishonored, Dishonored 1 and 2 are really great games, but they're great in the sense that it allows you to tackle problems how you see fit. And it's that ability to decide how you want to approach something that makes it so much fun. And that is very well done in Deathloop as well. Like you said, it's not just stealth and guns blazing. It can be a combination. And if you want to go aggressive, you can shoot people or you can use your abilities and fling them up in the air and then off of

ledges you i mean there's any number of really cool things you can do and so it's like a playground of just death yes or stealth if you want to go that way um but yeah that's that's kind of the uh the flavor that this developer brings to their games, and it definitely shines in Deathloop as well. Yeah. Now, it should be said that Juliana, who we're going to talk about more later, she's the character that you talk to the most, who is your adversary. She has warned everybody on Black Reef to shoot you on sight. So as you're exploring these areas, there are no friendly characters for you to just stop and talk to. Everyone's out to kill you. And so if you enter their line of sight and you're too close, you kind of get like the Metal Gear Solid, like the exclamation mark above their

head. They will start to investigate things if they hear you or see you. Their little bubble turns yellow. And then if you're fully alerted it turns red and then they might hit an alarm or they might call out for others and open fire on you and then there's also tons of security cameras everywhere in this game so you can see the lasers you can see where it's scanning you also have a hacking device and so you can hack doors you can hack doors, you can hack turrets, you can hack these security cameras. What's the name of that thingamajig? The hacking device? The hackamajig or something?

He's got a goofy name for it. Is that what it's called? It's the hackamajig, but that's why I said the thingamajig. Because it's like, I don't know who came up with that name. It's like the hackamajig thing. Sure. Somebody's just like, that's what we're naming it. So yes, there are certain levels that force you to

go stealth there are some parts that force you to use violence because you do have to kill the visionaries and i did think that it gives you a nice mix of both you also have some weapons that are louder than others you can also take down enemies if you walk up on them and i i do like that it lets you use whatever methods you want if you want to jump up on the rooftops and jump from rooftop to rooftop and just be careful and look out for snipers that's one way you can traverse the city you can also use certain abilities to evade them as you you know walk through on the ground level there's tons of ways hack turrets and sensors so that they turn on the ground level. There's tons of ways you can approach it all. Hack turrets and sensors so that they turn on the bad guys.

And then chaos ensues and you just slip away. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there really is a lot of variety to how you approach the combat in this game and the exploration in this game. I love it, honestly. I wish more games did that. I get that it's probably really difficult to program that for

because people are going to do a gajillion different things. But it makes it a lot of fun, and it's fun to play around with sometimes, too. Yeah, the one thing I really like, and Cyberpunk did this as well, you don't have to press a button to go into cover. If you just pull out your weapon and you hold down the right mouse button, you look down the sights. And if you are near a ledge, then Colt takes cover and peeks. And it's such a cool system. It doesn't require additional buttons. You don't have to use Q and E to lean. Just stand next to the ledge and it lets you peek

without being seen. And that's another big part of the game you overhear conversations and things that they say get added to your journal as well and so someone might say oh i heard that a certain thing will be uh you know going off at a certain location and so the game kind of alerts you okay that's been added to your journal and so a lot of the game actually does help if you go stealth because you'll actually pick up additional clues yeah all right now josh we're at that halfway point so we want to give a very special thank you to razor they have supported today's episode josh we've been using our huntsman v2 keyboards what do you think of it i love it so much paul i'm teary-eyed. Honestly, it's great. I'm getting to where people are starting to laugh at me because earlier today, a buddy was complaining about his keyboard, and I kind of shouted. I was like, hey, Razer Huntsman V2. And he kind of turned around and

looked at me and he was like, what? Because it's just like, it's the best keyboard you can get. Like, I don't know what else to say because that's the pinnacle. If yes, you know, you're going to spend some money on it, but it's money well spent. Like don't skimp on certain things, you know, don't skimp on a keyboard. Don't skimp on a mouse because you're using one or the other a hundred percent of the time that you're on your computer. And so it's just one of those things where quality matters. It's the best keyboard you can get. You can pick yours up by going to multiplayerpodcast.com slash Razer. Pick up your keyboard, pick up your mouse, your gaming keypad, your headphones, whatever you want from Razer. You know what's going to be quality. Enter code multiplayer

at checkout. They're going to send you an amazing piece of gear and a free gift for using code multiplayer. All right, Josh, let's talk about the loadouts that you can use in this game. So basically, to summarize it all, you've got a couple of weapons that you can carry with you. The weapons themselves can have different attachments put on them. Because of the islands, you know, scientific anomalies, you have magic. And so you find these things that are called slabs. It doesn't really make any sense, but whatever, you wear a bracelet,

you suck it into your soul, and now you know magic. And so you not only have these slabs that give you abilities, but you also find different upgrades that let you customize those slabs to use that magic in different ways. Yes, I'm going to stick with magic, whereas you stuck with science, because there's no other way to describe this. It's magic.

So let's talk about weapons first. Do you want to maybe just talk a little bit about what kind of weapons you liked to use or which ones you found interesting? There is a wide variety of weapons. Now, I don't know how many different weapon types there are, but I feel like there's probably eight to 10 different types of weapons in this game between pistols and shotguns and rifles and you can dual wield and there's SMGs. So there's a bunch of different categories. And then in each category, there are rarities of weapons. So you've got your just common weapons and the game does a good job of saying like, Hey, this is common. You can pick

this up anywhere, but it's going to jam. Like your weapons will actually jam and they will jam at the worst time possible right in the middle of a firefight. So then you have to like unjam your weapon, which takes like three times as long as a reload does um but then it might only have like one slot for an attachment and then you can get you know your blue quality weapon which might have two attachment slots and then it'll have a perk with it and then you you know you get your purple which might have two perks or a much stronger perk and then they never jam and now you can do two attachments and and all the way up to Legendary, which have some really, really cool traits to them

that are pretty game-changing at that point. I really liked the weapons in this game. The problem that I have with the weapons is two things. Number one, dual wielding is a thing, but I never dual wielded in this game. I never once did either. I mean, if you give me dual wielding in just about any video game, I'm gonna go dual wielded in this game. I never once did either. And I mean, if you give me dual wielding in just about any video game,

I'm gonna go dual wield, you know? But in this game, it just felt clunky for some reason to me. Well, also, you've got your right hand and your left hand, and your left hand is what's using your magic or your hackamajig. So if you're going dual wield, you cannot quickly use your hackama Jig or an ability.

So to me, it never made sense to dual wield. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't deter from the game, but it's like dual wielding was almost thrown as an afterthought. And it's very strange for me to say this, but it just doesn't really work in Deathloop for me. Mm-hmm. The other issue that I have is that I found one weapon that was just amazing.

And with the attachments on it, I never needed to use a different weapon the entire game. Oh, what kind of weapon? It was the Kellick 5050. It's like a shotgun with a round drum underneath. I think that's what it's called, right? Please tell me that you put on the extended mag attachment so it would hold 50 shells at once. You never had to reload. You never had to reload.

50 shells with the long range attachment because it's a shotgun, right? So I had the increased mag, the long range attachment or mod, which makes it much more effective at longer range and faster reload for a little while. And then I think I changed that to no recoil because it was a shotgun, like an automatic shotgun. I had a lot of recoil. And then it just, dude, I was just Commando, Rambo, Terminator. You know what I mean?

Just blasting everything in sight. And I don't know if they meant it that way because there's some other really neat weapons. Like there's a pistol that you can get where it's got two magazines in it, so you can fire while you're reloading, which is actually a really good thing because reloading sucks in this game because you're usually getting swarmed by guys. So I really like the weapons. They're very unique. They feel different. They sound good. But found like this gun that just trivialized everything else and i just didn't have a need for anything else at that point i did play around a little bit

with sniper rifles i'm gonna put a pin in that until later when we talk about what worked and what didn't uh you did not mention the weapon that i used for or the weapon class that i used for 90 of the game, which is the nail gun. Yeah. I was going to say, I kind of figured you'd like that. Cause you tend to go a little stealthier than I do.

Um, and it's a neat, it's just like a pressurized nail gun and it's very silent. So you can take people down without alerting people around you. Is there any kind of like Epic or legendary nail gun though? I only found a blue one, so I don't know. Yeah.

I was using a purple. There might be a legendary that I never ran across, but by the end, I was using my purple one. And the nail gun is kind of neat. It holds 12 nails at once, and so as long as you get headshots, it's a one-shot kill everyone, except for some of the visionaries.

But for me, I mostly went stealth. I used the nail gun an awful lot if i accidentally alerted someone it was all shotgun from that point on because that one shotgun was just too good with 50 shells my goodness if you can't if you can't do what you need to do with 50 rounds without reloading i i'm not sure what to tell you and then we we should clarify too on the higher level the epic and the legendary guns get these these cool traits where but they're they're kind of random so my shotgun that i had would slow enemies when i shot them right so that was kind of cool but then you can get a pistol

that shoots like it leaves a gas cloud behind when you shoot somebody it leaves a cloud of gas so you know there's that one um i one. There's a lot of these cool abilities and cool traits. So these guns actually do feel epic and legendary. You feel like, man, this is a really cool gun that we got. Maybe it's a super fast aim down sights so that you don't have that delay and raising and stuff like that too. But I think they did a really good job with all the weapons in the game combat to me felt really good i never minded getting into a fight and the guns felt snappy like there was just not much bad that i can say about that other than

i just i felt like that one gun was a little op maybe that's on me for using it the whole time i don't know but you give me a great gun i'm gonna use it so it's a little bit like a very very poor man's borderlands gun system it is far far less in scope but it's kind of that similar idea you're gonna find some really neat ideas the the two magazine pistol is so neat because you can empty the one and while you're firing on magazine two you reload one so you can just continually fire it no matter what very neat idea and there's stuff like that all over death loop i thought that some of the weapons were an absolute blast the slabs i found even more interesting than the weapons probably because i was mostly going stealth and i didn't get into a lot of firefights. But the slabs you can find when you kill a visionary

for the first time, you can loot their corpse and it's going to give you whatever slab they had, which will give you a magical ability. There are a total of five in the game. You have carnesis, which gives you telekinesis where you can throw people around with your mind. That one's fun. There's havoc, which basically just puts you in berserk mode you take less damage and you deal more damage you have nexus which is a very unique thing i don't think i've ever seen in a game it

lets you link multiple enemies and whatever you do to one enemy it does to all of them at the same time and then there is uh i don't know if it's pronounced Aether or Aether. Yeah, Aether. Aether. I always say Aether because why put the A on it if you want me to say Aether? Sure. So there's Aether, which lets you go invisible for a brief time. And then there is Shift, which just lets you quickly teleport a certain distance.

And the game kind of gives you your your little whatever they call it energy meter mana bar you have a certain amount that you can use to use these abilities did you have a favorite i don't think i ever took blink off of my abilities it's just so handy it really is i tried playing around with a couple of them but the way that i approached it was i did try the carnesis flinging people through the air is a lot of fun. And then if you link them, like at one point, I tried the Nexus to link them all together. And then I flung them. And then there was this huge group of people just went flying off in the air. And I kind of chuckled to myself. I was like, all right, that's pretty cool. But for me, because I was hybrid kind of play style,

I used my slabs for the stealthy teleport kind of those portions of the game. Sure. And then I used my shotgun for the combat portion of the game. So like 80% of this game for me was using the invisibility slab, which is the Aether one, right? Aether? That's the one where you're invisible? Yep. Right. And then the blink one, because that let me pretty much get wherever I needed to go without

learning any of the bad guys. That is exactly what I did. I found that if you had those two tools available to go invisible and to blink, then you could get to ledges and areas of the game that made entry into certain buildings or certain areas so much easier. We're not even going to talk about personal trinkets, but I assume you used double jump like I did. Yeah, never took it off. Never took it off. When you can double jump and blink and prevent fall damage, I mean, all these things added together, you're kind of just flying around the map uh which feels really fun even if it to me didn't really seem to match colt's personality uh but that was exactly what i loved using now

the one thing that we didn't really talk about and uh i know that we're already about 40 minutes into this but in in most time loop games you lose items or you lose your inventory and maybe the time loop mechanic just lets you gain knowledge like in 12 minutes or something like that well in death loop it's very different because they come up with this system where you find a certain magical material called residuum which okay great it i guess it's residual through time loops but you find this material and then basically if you pay a certain cost it'll let you keep that weapon or that slab or that upgrade for the rest of the game now i i did not really understand how that worked but once again like everything else in death loop you just gotta roll with You see, Paul, let me explain the science to you on this.

So in the island of Blackreef, in this anomaly that creates the time loop, some items spontaneously absorb some of the anomaly. And that is referred to as residuum. And so when you find an item that has residuum in it, you can then harness the residuum, which sucks it into Colt's residuum reserves. His magical bracelet. Yes, his magical bracelet. And then you can use that residuum and transfer that to an item that you might have found, in this case, a slab or a gun that you want to hang on to during the next loop. And that residuum is resistant to the anomaly that creates and resets the time loop. So therefore, you're able, through science, to keep that item in your next loop.

Oh, dear. Great. Okay. So again, it's... Call me Dr. Time Loop PhD. So through magic, you get to keep these items through time loops. All right. Now, we have mentioned Juliana a couple times. Let's talk about her for a couple minutes here. Throughout the game, you have some kind of comm system that is linked to Juliana. Every time you wake up on a new day, every time you enter a

city, Juliana is calling you and you're having a conversation. You do not really talk to any of the other visionaries. You might overhear a little. There might be a short conversation here or there. But 99% of this game's dialogue is you and Juliana. You do not really know how you know Juliana. You don't really know your history with her. But clearly, she knows who you are.

And there's definitely some attitude. You can tell there's a lot of history. And just kind of randomly throughout the course of the day, you never know. You're in some part of the city at some part of the day, and all of a sudden it says Juliana is hunting you. And this sometimes happens at the worst possible time. But she'll pop up out of nowhere and just start guns blazing. And now you're in the middle of a firefight. Maybe you're in the middle of trying to do a stealth mission in a giant manor that's filled with people.

And all of a sudden, here's Juliana. And now you're fighting the whole army at once. But she just kind of comes to invade to try to stop you. What else is there to say about Juliana? She creates a lot of the mirth in the game. The conversation between Colt and Juliana is very clever. It's very, very well done. It's not family friendly. There's a lot of language that's used between them. But you can tell that there's some sort of history there. And even though you don't know what it is, you're trying to kind of figure that out through this conversation. And Colt is even very brazen about like, were we together? Did I tick

you off at some point? Why do you keep harassing me? She's trying to say like, why are you trying to break the loop? And there's a lot of really funny back and forth banter there i really actually enjoyed that part of the game um the invasion when juliana invades you is is great now you're right in that it happens at the worst times but what she does is force you to deal with that and she's dangerous man she'll take you out if you're not careful so for me this is like a boss fight in a game because there's really not a lot of those. You do fight the visionaries, but I found that the visionaries weren't very tough to fight. It was more about how do you find where they are and figure out how to get to them and that kind of stuff. But I loved the combat with Juliana. The game actually plays on that because that's the

multiplayer aspect of this game yep is you can't do co-op you can't do any of that but what you can do is you can invade somebody's game as juliana and they don't know if it's the juliana from the game or a real player at first because this just says hey juliana is hunting you and then you realize oh okay this is actually a person or this is the AI in the game. I love what it does. I love the tension. I love the fight in the multiplayer aspect. I thought it was super fun to try to outwit another person. It just adds a ton of flavor that I really enjoyed. And the cool thing is, if you kill Juliana, you get a slab, a random slab from her. So if you haven't killed any of

the visionaries, you have a chance of getting a cool slab because you killed Juliana, which I thought was kind of neat. Her loot table includes all the slabs and all the attachments. So you'll get something good from Juliana. And I did like that it just throws that monkey wrench in the system because I actually found the game to be very, very easy to navigate. I remember the first couple of times I'd entered the city, I was so slow and I'm looking everywhere. And soon I just kind of realized I can just jump on these roofs and just kind of sprint anywhere. And if someone's alerted, I shoot them with the nail gun and I just keep running. And so it kind of became almost too easy to control the environment. So by having Juliana randomly show up at the worst time,

I was actually kind of delighted because those were the moments where the game actually was a challenge. Overall, I actually found the game relatively easy. But you did mention that this is the multiplayer aspect of the game uh this might be the thing that people complain about maybe not the most but i don't know anyone who thinks that this is a great multiplayer system why don't you tell the people exactly how it is you can join your friend's game it It's a neat idea. It just doesn't really work in execution long term. And I guess I'll explain that a little bit. But basically, the way that it works is when you start the game, you can choose to break the loop, which means, hey, I want to play the game as Colt, and I'm just going to play through the story.

Or you can choose to protect the loop as Juliana. And that means you're going to invade somebody else's game and play as Juliana and try to hunt down and kill their cult. And it is another person. I mean, you're joining their game that's going on and you're hunting them. And the way that the multiplayer works is it creates this satellite dish that a cult has to try to destroy or he can't get back to his safe zone. And so he's forced to deal with Juliana at some point.

Now you can try to ignore her and just continue on with your quest, but Juliana is coming for you. And so you kind of have to stop what you're doing and you have to track down this satellite dish. There's an icon on the map that tells you where it is, but you know that Juliana is probably lying in wait somewhere around that dish to prevent you from disabling it. So it's this very, very neat

game of cat and mouse. You can, as Colt, lay traps and mines and stuff like that. You only have to kill Juliana once. She has to kill you three times in order to win. But if you kill her, you're rewarded for it, which is great. Like I said, you get a slab, you get a bunch of residuum and stuff like that. I really enjoy the aspect. You and I, because you can join random people's games or you can set it to friends only. It was much, much easier to just join some random guy's game and take him out. And the neat thing about playing as Juliana is you level up. And so as you play and you kill people in their game, you gain experience levels and you gain attachments and you get stronger at the same time as the hunter, which I thought was a very neat

aspect. The problem is it's hard to do with friends you and i had so many connection issues and so many like it wouldn't join if it joined i got dropped out right away if it did join and then it was like oh we'd start fighting and then you'd get disconnected and it was just a buggy mess and it really didn't work very well um it's one of those things that's super fun for about 20 minutes. Like the idea is very neat. And then it's like, okay, but this isn't really that fun longterm. Yeah.

I think 99% of people load up the game and they're going to immediately play as Colt. Cause that's the main storyline. And I think maybe the thought process was once you finish the storyline, there's nothing else to do. So let's just make it last longer by letting you invade other people's games as Juliana. And now you can just kind of play for forever and you're just hunting other players. The problem is that it's most fun if you can invade your friends, but it has to be a friend

who has entered a part of the city at a part of day that has another visionary, and they have to have just started that area. So if they went into that area and did all their objectives and they've been there for 20 minutes, you cannot invade their game because they don't want you showing up at the last second, and then they lose all their progress. So it just made it hard to join friends because it had to be where all the conditions were perfect. And you had to hope you didn't have any technical problems. And even then, now you're Juliana. Great.

You still have to run around this whole part of town trying to find Colt. And if that Colt is playing more stealth-like, it's kind of boring. Like, it's very boring. And then you have a firefight for six seconds. And then it's just kind of boring like it's very boring and then you have a firefight for six seconds and then it's just kind of over i uh it's it's very neat in theory and it's very fun the first like time or two but then it just for it quickly got very old for me and i love trolling people like you would think i would be the person that they designed this for because there's nothing like invading somebody's game and then hunting them down, killing them. And if you kill them, it resets their loop. This isn't just a,

haha, I killed you and you go back to your game. Your loop is reset. The progress that you made is done. You've got to reset. There's definitely penalties there, but it just doesn't work long term. It's a neat idea, but it just doesn't stick. Yeah. All right. Now, it should be said that the game does have multiple endings. We're not going to talk about what those are, obviously, but you do have a little bit of choice at the end. I found that some of the endings were kind of curious because it didn't really feel like what my character would do or what other characters would do. Some of it didn't really feel like what my character would do or what other characters would do. Some of it didn't really make a whole lot of narrative sense to me, although they were clever ideas. But let's talk a little bit about what works the best and what you thought worked

the least. I guess I'll just go first. I thought that the endings did not really do it for me. I thought that they tried to be clever, and it didn't totally work for me. Overall, I just didn't really care about the overall story of the Eon project and all of this. But I did really love the banter between Juliana and Colt. I thought that those little snippets of dialogue were fascinating. I loved their dynamic, and I really loved that over the course of the game. My number one complaint, though, we have to talk about the AI in this game. Because Josh, if I start shooting my shotgun, only people within 30 feet of me are alerted. If someone's 40 feet away and I'm blasting my shotgun at everyone around me, they could not care less. I thought that this was one of the stranger things because

if you're far enough back, you can snipe every person on every level. No one's ever alerted to you. No one cares. You can set off explosions everywhere and no one gives a crap. Yeah. Yeah. The AI is not the best. It's very easy if you do accidentally get into combat to take out the one guy that got alerted, even though there's another guy that's 10 yards away that didn't get alerted. And now all of a sudden everything's fine. And so there is that issue. There's also the issue that the AI just kind of piles at you. So if you just stand in a doorway and wait for them to come in, eight guys will come running in the doorway, and then you just mow them all down.

And then you just wait another five seconds. Here come three more guys. And then you mow them down, and now combat's over. So I'm with you on that. The AI was definitely not real smart. I mean, for me, it's kind of tough, man. There's a lot that I really like about this game, and there's some stuff that just doesn't quite sit 100%. I didn't care about the visionaries, and that's the main part of this game. You don't really know them.

Yeah. And that's the thing, right? Like there's these guys that you're trying to kill and they have these really cool abilities and you get to absorb their abilities and you have to kill all of them on the same day. And so it seems like this is the real heart of the game, but I just don't care about them. And I feel like that's a very big missed opportunity. And they try to have like little audio files and little computer email messages and stuff like that. But all of the visionaries look exactly like the NPCs in the game. You know what I mean? They might have a lab coat.

Yeah, maybe. But they just don't stand out. And that was a weird aspect to me. Maybe they wanted them to blend in, but I felt like there was a missed opportunity there. And then you mentioned something where there's a part of the game that just becomes trivial. Once you get the transversal and the blinks and the invisibility and stuff like that, at that point, it just becomes easy, I guess, to get around. And then you're not even really worried about the AI in the game. Yeah, maybe you alert one of them and you just take them out and then you just keep on going. And so I feel like there was this really good system of weapons and abilities and all of this stuff, but then you didn't need to use a lot of it. And I felt like

that was like a missed opportunity as well. You know? And then like the other thing with like, we talked about like the carnesis and linking everybody and like, you have all these really cool things that you can do to kill people, but it's just so much easier to shoot them with a shotgun. It was more work. Do you know what I mean? It was more work to pull out my ability to activate it to aim it to link people switch to the other ability and then switch to the like in like it just that became a chore almost and instead it was much easier for me to just go blam blam blam blam and then everybody's dead and then i can just be on my way yeah i totally understand what you're saying yeah so that's my i mean they're minor

gripes but they're they're they're, they're there. And I think it holds the game back just a little bit. All right. Well, let's jump into the community reviews, Josh, what you got for us. All right. So we always pull some, some reviews from the community just to, you know, Hey, we're two guys. Maybe people don't agree with our thoughts and ideas and not that you guys have to either. I mean, every, you know, everybody's different, but, um, so I pulled a few reviews. This first one is recommended. This guy has 30 hours on record. So probably beat the game. And it says fun game. I was able to snag it for $45 and recommend it only on sale. It has some replayability. If I hadn't gone for a hundred percent achievements, I could have finished the game in maybe 15 hours.

To me, that's not worth the full price tag. The biggest letdown of this game was the insane amount of hand-holding, with markers literally everywhere you look guiding you to the exact place you need to be. For a game that is supposed to be a mystery unraveler, it sure leaves little to the imagination. I think that's really fair. The only time you really have to figure out a puzzle is when you're using a certain machine that has symbols, and you've uncovered clues, and you have to figure out the order to press them. And outside of that, you definitely are handheld the rest of the way. And see, that goes back to what I was saying, where I thought I was going to have to solve this puzzle of how do I get all these guys together to where I can kill them and that kind of stuff. And it's not. It's very just on, I don't want to say on rails, but if you just play the game, the ending is going to happen.

It's bumper bowling. Yeah, honestly, it kind of is. So, all right, this next one is not recommended. 20 hours on record. It's all right. It's far too easy and kind of bland. You just go checkpoint to checkpoint through mostly the same maps. The loop thing doesn't add a whole lot. The story is all right, but it's far too wacky to get invested in.

Player invasions are fun for 30 minutes, too laggy and unbalanced to be anything else. Overall, it's very stylish, but that's about it. I 100% could have written that review word for word myself. For the negatives in this game, that is spot on. Yes. It's not a bad game, but it's not a great game. It's kind of fun. I think it's highly forgettable. I don't know if a year from now, I'm going to even remember hardly anything about Deathloop. All right. So this next one, not recommended, 18 hours on record. And it's just

one word, death poop. Oh, boy. Some grade A comedy right there. I like it. And then finally, this one is recommended 24 hours on record. If Dishonored had a baby with Hitman, 10 out of 10. Hitman is the first game that came to mind to me. But ultimately, in the end, you're just more handheld. Hitman is a little more wide open where you can make people walk and move and stuff but it's definitely definitely a little bit of hitman dna definitely a lot of dishonored dna if you like those games you'll probably like this one i just don't think it's as good as dishonored or hitman right all

right paul so that's the uh that's the the thoughts from the reviewers. We always take a guess on what we think the rating is on the Steam scale of 0 to 100. I believe you actually won finally last time. Oh, did I win last time? Maybe I did. I couldn't remember. Yep. So you get to go first then. All right.

All right. So from 0 to 100%, how many Steam reviews are positive? Oh, boy. I don't think that this game got review bombed or anything. I think it's definitely going to have a fair amount of detractors. I'm going to say 84%. Okay. My guess was 88%.

Oh, okay. They're very big on touting 9 out of 10s. If you look up reviews on a lot of the gaming websites, a lot of the more popular ones give it nines and tens even. I've seen it get some perfect tens. I didn't quite feel the perfect ten out of this. There's an awful lot to enjoy, but then there's a lot that doesn't quite land the mark either. So guessed 88 i thought it was going to be liked but you know maybe not super high the actual paul is 76 percent and i will say this it did it did get review bombed oh did it the majority of the negative reviews there are it actually took me a little while to find some decent negative reviews that commented on the gameplay itself.

Most of the negative reviews were because they added the Denuvo anti-piracy to this game. And it created a lot of issues for people on PC. Stuttering issues, frame rate drops, all kinds of performance issues and stuff like that. And so what happened is people got really upset and they started review bombing it. So it probably is actually higher than 76, but fair is fair, Paul. That's what the actual is,

which means you win again. I'll take it. You and I are going on streaks. I think you won like four in a row and now this is two in a row for me. So maybe the pendulum has swung. Well, time to introduce that next segment buddy all right let's hit that music hey there juliana feel my shirt you know what it's made of boyfriend material

that might be your best one yet oh oh juliana juliana juliana all right so this next segment here we call make love marry or murder this is where individually you and i will rate this game whether it's something that we would play and recommend long term if it's something that's fun for a short amount of time and then you stop or if it's just a murder and it's just not worth the money, not worth playing, not worth buying. This is a tough one for me because of the price point. $60 is kind of a lot. If my choice is to play Deathloop for $60 or split that $60 and buy a bunch of $3 $20 games, I think I'd rather buy the three $20 games. This is kind of a tough one. I totally agree with the guy who said if it's on sale for 45, I think it's worth playing.

I'm kind of torn on this. I kind of want to say murder because I feel like I haven't murdered a game in a long time. Wow. Are you feeling the itch, Paul? Is that murder itch creeping up on you? It could also be time loop, you know, overdose at this point. I'm going to say murder, but I don't feel

good about it. It's not that the game's not fun, it's just that it has things that take away from it. You're saying it's not a joyful murder, Paul? No, no. Some games I love to murder, and it's like, no, this game sucks. This game is fun. I don't and it's like no this game sucks this game is fun i don't think it's worth the price point i think there's too much that takes away from it i'm gonna say stay away i'm gonna say murder really i'm surprised i think it's a make love i the game is somebody

touched on it in the reviews this game is very stylish Like I will remember this game just because of the style of it and the, like the towns, the different maps that they built, the dialogue between Colton, Juliana, that banter, the, some of the cool weapons.

Like this is a game that I will definitely remember. I will never go back to play it ever again. And I'm with you in that. I almost feel like $60 is too high of a price point, but it is a AAA title. It's very polished. It's bug-free. You know what I mean? It's a complete game.

It really is. My only complaints with it are I felt like it got to be a little too easy. And there was a point where I felt like it was almost a little bit of a slog. I've killed this visionary three times. I've killed this visionary three times. I've killed that visionary three times. And then the loop resets and I have to go do it all again. Now that's inherent in time loop games. And Deathloop does a great job of not feeling super repetitive.

But the maps are decent size. And after a while, you just kind of get tired of going through them, you know, and that kind of stuff. So I think it does start to wear on you a little bit. I did find myself having to slog a little bit to beat the game, you know, at that point. And so I do get that it's by no means do I think this is a flawless game. I don't know how some of these gaming websites gave it 10 out of 10s. I think it's fine. I think it's fun. I'm glad I played it, but I would recommend it to somebody hands down at like the $30 or $40 price point. But $60, I don't know that it'd be for

everybody at that point. Yeah. You know, in some episodes in the past, I've kind of done this like genie's wish. Like if you could change one thing about the game, what would it be? I think for me, the biggest thing that I just grew tired of is the four parts of town, because no matter how much they change the people, it's the same ones. I always knew, okay, I always go out the left door. I have to disarm these three bombs right here at the exit. And now I'm going to jump up to the left, up on this ledge. ledge so to me it just became a little too repetitive in that regard maybe if you could make it more of an open world and a bigger map and a little bit more to explore i think that would make all the difference in the world for me um but just with the way it is i don't know only four parts of town i just i i kind of fell in love with it very quickly for the first three to four hours.

And then the rest was a was more of a slog. Yeah, I get that. It's I definitely understand it. Yeah. All right. Well, let's go to the leaderboard. See where this game stacks up. All right, Josh, how about you tell the people what our leaderboard is if they're unaware?

Okay, so leaderboard, every game that we review, we force ourselves nonsensically to rank this game against every other game that's out there. So that means that we are about to rank Deathloop against games like Overwatch, It Takes Two, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Valorant. All of these insane different genres of games, and we've got to figure out where it falls in there. And yes, it's crazy, but that's why we do it. Well, we've got a murder and we've got to make love paul um and so that tells me that this game is probably not gonna be in the top half how many games do we have total now 57 this will be number 58 wow okay i i am with you in the sense that I don't think this is going to be in our top half. No. Um,

somewhere in the twenties or thirties. I'm thinking, man. Well, outer wilds is 29 and I will die on my deathbed before I put death loop above outer wilds, Paul. And that's at 29.

So I'm guessing we're going into the thirties, thirties or forties. Um, I don't think i could go into the 40s man that's pretty low there is a lot to like about this game some people absolutely love this game um yeah you know what looking at our list i would not put it in the 40s in the 40s we've got stuff like payday 2 the cycle 12 minutes civ 6 i would definitely put it above those i definitely had more fun with this so i think it's got to go somewhere in the 30s. We have Knockout City

at 35. That's bananas. Next time we review the leaderboard, that one needs to go down a few. That's a recency bias right there. I do think Deathloop is definitely better than Knockout City. I think it's better than RimWorld. I don't think it's better than Borderlands

3, so for me, I think my ideal spot would be at 34. I will die before you knock down RimWorld for this game. If you're going to knock down RimWorld, it's got to be a better game than Deathloop. No, no, no. I'm with you. I'll put

it above Knockout City, but i would want to keep it below all right so i put at 35 i'm totally fine with that you're good with that i think it's fair it's a good game there is enjoyment it's not for both of us apparently it is not this 9 out of 10 10 out of 10 game that a lot of these game sites um if it's funny because i've mentioned before that i'm a big fan of watching reviews. I always watch the reviews from sites like GameSpot and IGN and stuff like that, but I really enjoy some of the smaller sites. And what's interesting in this is that GameSpot and IGN gave it 9 out of 10s, 10 out of 10s. But if you watch some of these other reviewers, these smaller

ones, they had a lot of the same criticisms that we have in that, yes, this game is polished, it's stylish, but you know what I mean? And I feel like that's much more honest in that aspect. It's a good summer camp girlfriend, but nothing beyond that. Yeah. It's not going to be a game that we're talking about three months from now. All right. Well, that covers everything that we have by way of Deathloop. I think you and I would say if you've got a ton of funds and you just want a fun game to play, this is a good one. This is a very good game to play. I think it's just the price that's really holding it down. Our next deep dive, we have been keeping a secret because it was selected

by legendary supporter Ace of Shame. Should we let the cat out of the bag at this point, or are we still keeping it? I say let's do it because there might be people out there that want to pick it up and play it beforehand. And being that it's a fairly affordable game, let's spoil it. That'll also tell us how many people are listening at an hour and 13 minutes in, Paul. It's not many. No, Ace of Shame selected this game, and he has posted multiple photos wearing t-shirts of this game, having pillows on his couch of this game. This man loves this game series. Why don't you tell the people what we're doing? It is a game that I have heard of and never played up until this point, but it is Shovel Knight.

Yes, we picked up the Treasure Trove and we have been playing a lot of Shovel Knight here the last couple of weeks. We have. Yeah, it's I will say this. No spoilers, but I'm very glad that Ace picked this game because I never would have picked it up on my own. And I remember questioning him at first going, did you mean Hollow Knight?

And he went, no, Shovel Knight. And I went, oh wait, yeah, that is the other Knight game that's real popular. Well, every time I played Mega Man, I always said, I just really wish that I had a Shovel. And now I get to play exactly just that with Shovel Knight. So that's all

that we have for today. We'll have our next Twig episode on Thursday. We hope you guys will join us then. Once again, thank you so much to Razer for their support. And come check us out on social media at MultiplayerPod. You can also find us on Discord. Should be a link in the episode description. There's also a link on our website, MultiplayerPodcast.com,

which also has a copy of that leaderboard. So if you want to see all 58 games, you can see it there. Happy gaming, everyone. We'll see you later this week. See you, everybody.