Introduction

Deathloop is an interesting twist to the action-adventure genre. You are a stealth assassin stuck in an endless time-loop (similar to "Groundhog Day" or "Edge of Tomorrow") where you are supposed to kill eight high-value targets spread across an island in a single day to escape the loop, or the world resets itself. If you die during the mission, the world resets itself as well. Each of the eight targets has a unique approach, part of the map, mixture of enemies, and the need for different tactics. There are also some "Mirror's Edge" style Parkour sequences. If the time-loop element puts you off, don't fret: It doesn't work in real-time, there are instances where the progression of time slows down. It advances as you move between the various regions of the island hiding your targets.



Developed by Arkane Studios, this Bethesda title is powered by the Void engine, which is a fork of idTech from several years ago since "Dishonored 2," which Arkane developed over time. In its latest version, the Void engine supports DirectX 12, including real-time ray tracing. Arkane developed Deathloop to be exclusive to PC and PlayStation 5 at launch, with an Xbox Series X/S version closely trailing. In this review, we take the game for a spin across a selection of contemporary graphics hardware to show you what it needs to explore this strange new world in time.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at the highest settings with ray tracing disabled. The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

• The first settings screen deals with the usual monitor-related settings
• The game supports "windowed," "borderless fullscreen," and "fullscreen."
• You may adjust field of view between 65 and 110 degrees. I found the default of 80 degrees too narrow and ended up playing at 100°.
• Deathloop supports NVIDIA Reflex right out of the box. Reflex reduces the render latency of your gaming system to have clicks and keypresses register as quickly as possible. Besides "off" and "on," there's also "on + boost," which automatically overclocks the GPU, too. All this is part of the NVIDIA driver, Deathloop just enables the feature, so there is no risk of instability or similar.
• "Low Latency" is a similar option; I suspect it actually
  changes how many frames are rendered in advance and queued for display. When enabled, latency is lower, but frametimes are slightly more uneven.
• You can disable V-Sync, but an FPS limiter is always active because of how the Void engine is designed. The FPS limiter (last option on this page) lets you select an FPS limit between 30 and 120 FPS in steps of 15 FPS. For all our testing, we worked around this and increased the FPS cap to 500.
• "Upscaling" lets you enable AMD FSR. There's also an empty space in the dropdown for NVIDIA DLSS, which isn't available at this time. We'll take a closer look at AMD FSR quality and performance in a separate article soon.
• AMD FSR mode can be "Adaptive Resolution," which dynamically adjusts the render resolution based on whether an FPS target is reached, or not. The other options here are the expected choices recommended by AMD: "Ultra Quality," Quality," "Balanced," and "Performance."
• Using the "Adaptive Resolution" settings group, you can fine-tune the behavior of the dynamic resolution feature

• The "Advanced Options" screen has additional settings for specific details settings
• Lots of choices here; I like that you can turn off motion blur and depth of field
• Also worth mentioning is that the AA options are "off," "low," "high," and "temporal." When FSR is enabled, "temporal" is automatically forced.
• The ray tracing capability of Deathloop is hidden behind the "Sun Shadows" option. If you switch it from its default of "simple" to "ray traced," the game will render shadows cast by the sun using RT instead of classic rasterization. Just to clarify, the sun is the only light source that's taken into account for RT. Indoors, there's no visual difference between RT on and off. The player model also is not included in ray tracing, so you will not cast a shadow. We also noticed several other spots in the game where RT wasn't anywhere close to accurate. It seems this feature was added at the last minute, which also explains why other light sources aren't supported for RT, as just the sun is much simpler to implement.