In Deathloop, the main game takes place from the perspective of Colt Vahn, an amnesiac killer who’s trapped in a timeloop. However, you can also play the multiplayer mode as a character called Julianna, allowing you to invade the games of friends and strangers.
These invasions aren’t just about killing your opponent - they’re about fighting with style. Things like doing damage and staying alive for a long time are incentivised over killing Colt outright, netting you points that you can spend on weapons and abilities to use in subsequent invasions. Completing these optional objectives is also the only way to unlock cosmetics for Colt and Julianna.
“The reward to that will be: you get those points, they will allow you to unlock Julianna's tools, which are the same powers and weapons but you get them randomly, in order to ensure that after three hours, your Julianna and my Julianna will not be the same,” game director Dinga Bakaba explained during our recent interview. “And you can also unlock the really cool-looking costumes that [art director Sébastien Mitton] and his team have made for both Colt and Julianna - that's the only way to unlock them, to play as Julianna.”
You have to play the game as Colt for a while before you can unlock the ability to play as Julianna. The invasion mechanic sounds extremely flexible. In fact, it’s so free and loose that you could potentially invade a friend’s game and play Deathloop like a co-op game if you wanted to. It should add a cool layer of unpredictability to each level.
This being an Arkane game, those levels are already complex in themselves - each timeloop is different depending on the order you tackle the four levels and what objectives you’re trying to complete when you do. The time of the day you travel to each region will impact what NPCs are present, as well as what’s happening. For example, you might visit a club where a band is playing during the evening. Go during the morning and you’ll find the band setting up, and you can remove them from the board to change the context of that location during the evening.
It’s a ridiculously complex, deep game, and the presence of another player adds to that complexity. I can’t wait to see how players approach it when Deathloop releases for PS5 and PC on September 14.