Deceive Inc. is a cartoony multiplayer stealth FPS where you play as a spy tasked with stealing a case locked in a vault. You have access to state-of-the-art gadgets, can holographically disguise yourself as anybody on the map, and of course, have loads of cool weapons. Your job is to disable security terminals, capture the objective, and extract your target from the location. Just another day at the Spy Office.

The gameplay loop largely revolves around your holographic disguise. You start as a civilian and by scanning NPCs, can disguise yourself as staff, guards, technicians, and VIPs. Each disguise is colour-coded and allows you access to areas with higher levels of security, each of which may have keycards or intel for you to collect. Intel is used to hack terminals, doors and safes in order to give you access, while keycards allow you to enter rooms sporting the same colour without spending intel. Both are crucial to allowing you to upgrade your character in the level and give you an upper hand during the game.

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Sound easy? It’s not. There are other players on the map with you, all working towards the same objective. It’s kind of like Hitman, except your targets are the nine other players on the map, and your objective isn’t an assassination, it’s a heist. You can play the game in a lot of different ways – you can go on the offensive, gunning down everybody who looks even a little suspicious, but that will trigger guards to come after you and you’ll have to eventually find cover to recover your disguise.

Deceive Inc. Squire shot by Chavez

You could play it stealthier and try to act as nonchalant as possible in your various disguises. The game facilitates this by giving every security level different social actions – staff water plants, security stands guard outside doors, et cetera. It’s a slower way to play for sure, and if a fellow spy thinks you’re acting weird, you could get found out and killed very fast. And of course, once you get killed, your game is over and you have to start anew. It’s like Among Us, with guns.

Don’t want to get found out? The vault gets hacked automatically after ten minutes, so if you really wanted to take it easy, you could collect some intel, sit around and wait for the vault to open, then pop in and grab the objective as quickly as you can. Of course, the game disincentivizes this by making the intel cost to open the final vault doors very high, so it would be far easier if you had some keycards. You wouldn’t be able to just wait at the extraction point to steal the objective either, because there are several that the winning spy could head to.

Deceive Inc. All Characters Fragrant Shore

What struck me immediately was the spread of available characters. It has eight at launch, all with different weapons and abilities. One of the three starter characters you get, Squire, is a fresh recruit with a silenced pistol and the ability to detect intel in any room. Another, Ace, has a sniper rifle and the ability to mark operatives so they can’t easily evade her. There are characters who disappear, become invulnerable, use slingshots, wield twin pistols… every character changes how you play, so you can cater to your strengths. I was also impressed with their visual diversity, with four of eight characters being female and plenty of racial representation to be found.

I liked the maps as well, though they’re quite limited in number for now. There are only four at launch, but they’re huge and well-designed, with visual cues hinting at what you’ll find in each area. Some of these are more subtle, and it takes time to familiarise yourself with the different areas in each map – there’s a handy navigation tool that tells you how to reach marked objectives, but finding resources and keycards is another story altogether. Like most games, it pays off to spend time familiarising yourself.

Deceive Inc. Hard Sell map

Despite having a tutorial, the learning curve here is quite steep. It’s immediately fun to experiment with your loadout and gadgets, but there are things I had to figure out on the fly while playing that detracted slightly from the experience. For one, the game didn’t actually teach me how to switch between tools and weapons, leading to me frantically pressing buttons during the tutorial while being shot at. There’s no explanation about the game’s currency either or how to unlock more playable characters, though it’s not hard to find the menu to spend your gained XP if you click around in the interface for a while.

What threw me off most was how the tutorial let you disable one security interface to show you what it’s like before telling you there are multiple to be found in the actual game – what they don’t tell you is that there’s no indicators as to whether a security interface has been disabled, so you might end up spending intel unlocking doors to access an interface just to find it’s been disabled already. This feature allows you to trick other players and leave traps for them, but the tutorial doesn’t explain that well, leaving new players more susceptible to being duped.

Deceive Inc. Chavez Cavaliere and Squire

The game is also plagued with bugs right now, with players reporting failures to launch, frame drops, packages teleporting across the map, not being able to kill guards, and more. I kept encountering a bug where changing my tools would leave them switching endlessly. I also noticed NPC AI was a bit janky, with some sliding while doing social interactions and moving strangely. Considering that blending in with the NPCs and learning their behaviour is so crucial, I’m hoping it gets fixed quickly.

Despite its bugs, Deceive Inc. is fun enough that I immediately started asking my friends to play with me. Nobody has taken the bait yet so I haven’t tried the multiplayer mode, but solo mode is fun enough that it’s tiding me over. Here’s hoping that the game fixes its many bugs quickly, because there’s plenty else to love about this game as long as they build on the base they’ve started with.

2-Deceive Inc-SCORE CARD

Score: 3.5/5. A game code was provided by the publisher.

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