Deathloop – Invasions

Though we have successfully broken the Deathloop, there are still secrets that have yet to be revealed, things that we didn’t cover on stream.

But I don’t care about any of that. To be honest, the only thing I want to do is kill Colt. Let’s join Juliana for a couple of invasions to protect the loop and commit some good ol’ fashioned patricide.

Thumbnail by Sam Callahan.

As any Dark Souls player can tell you, invasion mechanics can be frustrating depending on how they get implemented. If the two players are evenly matched, then the one trying to make progress in their campaign has a 50/50 chance of being crushed through no fault of their own, and those odds only get greater if they’re lured into fighting in an area with other AI enemies present.

The way Deathloop addresses this problem is by skewing the odds in favor of the Colt player, whose game is getting invaded. Most obviously, Colt gets the advantage of having three lives compared to Juliana’s one. Juliana cannot win by getting a single lucky blow. She’s got to be smarter and manipulate the level so that she can decisively kill Colt thrice. Meanwhile, the Colt player can absolutely win a battle of attrition just due to having a larger health pool.

Additionally, Colt is the only one between the two of them capable of hacking security and turrets. Once he does so, Juliana can disable them by destroying them or taking out their battery (just like her opponent), but she has no way of hacking them back to her side. Once Colt claims control, those hazards are permanently his to manipulate for the duration of the duel.

That said, Juliana does have one big advantage: Every other character in the world is on her side, and she can point them to Colt if she knows his location. If he gets into a loud enough fight, it will also be pointed out on her HUD so that she can quickly move to intercept him. Technically, she also has the Masquerade power to switch appearances with another character, but I’ve not found many practical uses for it in my time playing.

It sets up a tense and exciting game of cat and mouse I never tired of through all of my time playing, even when we were on stream. There’s a thrill that games can only ever truly recreate by pitting human players against each other, one that no NPC could ever replicate. And Deathloop plays heavily into that by creating these dynamic scenarios for Colt and Juliana to fight in.

Every aspect of the mechanic has been lifted from other contemporaries, but none have mixed and combined them in exactly this way before. I can only hope that others took notice.