Deathloop just came out, and it’s great. Playing as Colt is a thrilling, mind-bending experience that’s honestly a little hard to explain.
However, there’s a second side to this equation — you can also play as Julianna, whose sole purpose is to murder Colt. This puts you into another player’s game to basically troll them to see which of you can outlive the other. Julianna is equipped with an array of tools, like disguises and the ability to alert enemies to Colt’s location.
I’m skeptical of this side of the game, to be honest. I’ve played enough Red Dead Online to know that if you give players the tools to troll other players, they will do so with glee — even if it means destroying the community of the game that they love.
The good news — or bad news, for the trolly-est of trolls — is that this part of the game is pretty frustrating to deal with. If you attempt to play as Julianna, you can choose to invade a friend’s game or a random player’s game. If you have no friends playing at the moment, you’re forced to join a random game. And this means you’ll be staring at this screen for several minutes at a time:
There’s a persistent beeping sound as the game tries to match you with some poor unsuspecting sap who’s playing as Colt. And you’ll just wait. And wait. And wait.
To be fair, I did eventually find a match, and I spent most of it waiting for Colt to show up. As it turns out, he was off on some other side of the map, and he ended up getting gunned down by Eternalists long before I ever found him. I got into a second match, and managed to blast Colt twice before he eventually got me. That second match was honestly a lot of fun, but I’m sure whoever gunned me down was pretty peeved about me randomly appearing in their game. The balance, I suppose, is that actually getting to use this feature means you’ll be doing a lot of waiting.
I have to suspect that this will get better over time. As more people pick up the game, there will be more folks playing past the first in-game day, which is when this feature becomes available. So there should hypothetically be more potential targets later today and over this coming weekend.
But honestly, I’m not sure how long this side of the game will even survive. What is the life expectancy of a feature that is wholly dependent on there being enough players at the right point in the campaign who don’t have online interactions disabled?
Only time will tell, I suppose. If Arkane Lyon can retain enough players on both sides of this teeter-totter to keep it active, I can see it being a fun, well-implemented feature (though one that requires a lot of patience). However, I also fear that if you don’t get into Deathloop in 2021, you might miss the opportunity to experience this side of the game at all.
But even then, the real meat and potatoes of Deathloop is Colt’s story, so it might not even matter if Julianna doesn’t get her chance to steal the spotlight.
