6 Best Games Like Deathloop To Murder In

Deathloop has come out to near-universal acclaim with dozens of outlets giving it perfect scores. Many critics noted the game’s freedom of approach and non-linear level design as a particular highlight and its highly unique time loop structure that makes the player consider each activity like a puzzle to solve and make them think like a professional Hitman. 

Now without any further wait, let’s jump into these 6 best games like Deathloop to murder in List:

Games Like Deathloop

While Deathloop is a highly unique title with a structure that belongs only to itself, if you’ve managed to break the loop and are considering something else to play that makes you feel akin to a stealthy assassin or a clever Hitman, consider checking out these 6 games like Deathloop.

Dishonored

What better games to start a list about games like Deathloop than Arkane’s very own Dishonored series. While Dishonored encourages more non-lethal stealth gameplay over balls to the walls action(please disregard the attached image above), the series has equally well-developed action combat that is as fun as it is satisfying. Set in the fictional sci-fi/steampunk city of Dunwall, Dishonored sees you playing as the Royal Protector Corvo Attano, framed for murdering the Empress.

Throughout the game, you have to form alliances and eventually clear your name through various means, and it’s where the game’s biggest mechanic comes into play. Whether you embrace the role of Corvo The Assassin, or Corvo The Royal Protector is up to you as you have to decide whether you murder everyone in your path, or put your opponents to sleep and sneak past them.

People have often criticized the Dishonored series for punishing the players for playing the game aggressively. The more lethally you play, the more the game highlights your character as a killer in the story, which eventually leads to the game’s bad ending. It seems Deathloop is a direct answer to those criticisms by being a game that encourages the action that Arkane is very good at while also directly pushing the players towards that approach.

Hitman

Anyone who enjoyed Deathloop’s clever puzzle-like gameplay of figuring out different ways of assassinating their unfortunate targets is going to have a blast with the escapades of the legendary Agent 47. One of the most beloved series in the stealth genre, Hitman is a series unlike anything else in the industry. Instead of forcing the player to be quiet and sneak around enemies, Hitman requires you to hide in plain sight and traverse the levels using clever disguises over the classic sneaking and crawling.

The game also highly encourages creative ways of assassinating your targets, with their being systems in place set to trigger some particularly creative assassinations that can make every death look like a Final Destination-esque death scene.

As for where to start the series, there are 8 entire games to play here. There are some outstanding options out there, but I’d recommend starting with either Hitman 4 Blood Money, or the latest entry in the series, Hitman 3, which lets you play levels from across the entire reboot trilogy in a single, linear fashion.

Pros:

• Hitman 2 features excellently designed maps and each map has at least 20 hours worth of content that can keep you engaged throughout.
• You have access to a wide range of weapons and gadgets to use in your missions, which helps in keeping the missions fresh while giving you new and satisfying ways of killing your target.
• There are many 4th wall-breaking jokes in Hitman 2 that many players find incredibly funny, which adds personality to the game.
• Hitman 2’s story is well-written and does a great job of keeping you engaged, as the story has many twists and turns that can surprise you.

Cons:

• The Civilian NPCs are programmed very badly in Hitman 2 because they show some very predictable and unnatural reactions, which takes away from the immersive experience.
• Your stealth or disguise might get exposed due to some very unnatural and illogical reasons, which can get incredibly frustrating for some players.
• The final 2 missions in Hitman 2 are locked behind paid DLC, which frustrates many players who do not have the budget to buy Hitman 2 DLC.
• The sale strategy for Hitman 2 is notoriously unfair and many players think that the practices are very anti-consumer.

Thief

Dishonored before it became Dishonored, the Thief series was developed by many of the same people who worked on the Dishonored franchise. One of the hallmarks of the stealth genre, and a game that was sadly overlooked in favor of Hideo Kojima‘s stylish and cinematic “Metal Gear Solid” for the PlayStation.

Intricate levels, deep stealth systems with some of the best sound design you could find at the time and a great protagonist cemented Thief as one of the prime examples of stealth done right. While Thief at its core is a game of hiding in shadows and getting past areas without killing anyone, it sets a very polished base that Arkane would later make its Dishonored series on and now recently, Deathloop.

Pros:

• The story in Thief is incredibly well-written and can compete with some of the modern games that are out right now, as it does a great job at setting up the game’s incredibly eerie and dark tone while having a lot of surprising plot twists.
• Thief is known for being the father of all stealth games, as this game was what inspired a lot of the games in the stealth genre we know today.
• The characters in Thief are great and are not just there for the sake of it, as a lot of these characters impact the story in different ways and have a very significant existence.
• The voice acting in Thief is very good, as the voice actors do a great job of portraying the characters’ feelings and bringing the characters to life by showing real emotion.
• There is a wide variety of weapons you can use in Thief, each with its own unique abilities and characteristics that make it stand out while keeping your gameplay experience fresh.

Cons:

• As Thief is a game from the 90s, you cannot expect it to have graphics rivaling that of modern Triple-A titles, but they are still a factor when playing a game and Thief does have outdated graphics.
• The level design of Thief can be inconsistent sometimes, as some levels are great and have a lot of things that make them fun while some levels can be incredibly repetitive and tedious.
• There are some major accessibility issues with Thief, as a lot of the graphic cards in modern PCs cannot run Thief for some reason, as many players have reported that the game refuses to load on their PCs.

Deus Ex

Often considered by many to be the peak of the Immersive Sim genre, Deus Ex is a series dealing with political intrigue, international conspiracies, and the moral dilemma of transforming your body with cybernetic augments. In the first game which came out in the year 2000, you played as JC Denton, a newly recruited agent at UNATCO, and had to uncover various conspiracies while dealing with various moral conflicts throughout the game. A premise that the series has gotten only better at with time.

The series motivates the player into trying out different avenues of approach at every encounter and highly rewards experimentation and exploration similar to Arkane’s own games. Letting you play as a lethal Terminator or a Pacifist silver-tongued devil that could talk his way out of most situations and sneak through the rest.

While in terms of gameplay and sheer enjoyment, many would consider the 2011 Deus Ex: Human Revolution as the best of the series, and though little can be said to dispute that claim, I would highly suggest starting with the original Deus Ex for various reasons. Visually, the game is outdated, but it still has some of the most interesting writing in gaming that puts a lot of modern games to shame. It also has my favorite soundtrack in a Cyberpunk game. All this is without mentioning its plot that somehow managed to predict real-life events today with shocking accuracy over 20 years ago.

Pros:

• Deus Ex Human Revolution’s unique cybernetic augmentations give you a wide range of abilities and powers to use in combat and exploration.
• The gameplay is open-ended, and Deus Ex Human Revolution allows you to choose how you want to approach each mission and make character dialogue choices that affect the overall story.
• The environments in Deus Ex Human Revolution are beautifully designed and packed with detail, immersing you in its futuristic world.
• The story of Deus Ex Human Revolution is incredibly engaging and well-written, as it deals with subjects like AI-enhanced humans and their effect on society.
• Deus Ex Human Revolution’s gameplay features an awesome mix of combat and stealth that is incredibly fun.

Cons:

• The loading times in Deus Ex Human Revolution can be very long sometimes, and end up wasting a lot of your time.
• The voice acting is not the greatest and it can take away from the immersive experience.
• The enemy AI in Deus Ex Human Revolution can be somewhat basic and predictable, which can ruin the overall experience.
• The optimization and performance in Deus Ex Human Revolution are horrible, as it does not even run on modern hardware and many players have reported constant crashing of the game.

Bioshock

The closest to a horror series on this list(at least the first two games), the Bioshock series is often considered to be the pinnacle of storytelling and atmosphere in the medium. While I’m not here to either prove or disprove that claim, what I will say is that Rapture is one of the most interesting and well-realized settings ever put into a video game. A large sprawling underwater city gone to hell that you explore throughout the story and get to see how each of its gears function.

Filled to the brim with charming, and intriguing characters that either guide you or whom you listen to through the game’s various audio logs. Bioshock set a standard for enhancing a setting through logs and notes scattered around the world that gave you insight into the daily lives of the citizens living in Rapture. Something that Arkane’s own games, including Deathloop, have in spades. On top of that, a story with a twist so memorable that people still talk about it to this day which is why Bioshock is still beloved in the hearts of many despite its somewhat weak gameplay.

Pros:

• The narrative of Bioshock is incredibly unique and it innovates a lot of heavy themes while being full of plot twists or turns, with many heavy morality questions, which make the narrative very deep.
• The villains of Bioshock are incredible, as they are very complex and well-written, with motivations that make sense for their characters.
• Bioshock’s graphics might be old but they can still hold up to this day since they do a great job of setting the game’s atmosphere and having a distinct but memorable feel to them.
• The soundtrack in Bioshock enhances the overall experience and emotions you feel throughout the story a lot, as it fits the moment perfectly.
• There is a wide variety of levels in Bioshock and almost all of them are unique, as each of them has its own challenges that keep the gameplay experience fresh.

Cons:

• The dev team of Bioshock has added a new launcher called the 2K launcher to the game, which is notorious for causing a large number of problems that can make the game borderline unplayable.
• The final cutscene of Bioshock has frame drop issues, which can be a huge disappointment and ruin the overall impact of the cutscene.
• Bioshock does not have much replay value, as it fails to convince you to play the game after you have finished it once.
• Bioshock can get a bit repetitive for some players after playing for a while.

Prey

What better for a final entry in a list about games like Deathloop than one of its very own. One of Arkane’s very best yet most underrated game. Prey was largely overlooked by many when it came out; a buggy launch that led to a major publication giving the game a 4/10 didn’t help its case either. Yet, looking past its initially buggy state, Prey is a fantastic experience with an extremely engrossing and immersive setting with TALOS-1, the spaceship in which the game is set in. The game has a very familiar sense of exploration discovery, much like Arkane’s other titles, but Prey bumps things up a notch with one of its main highlights.

The small headcrab looking Typhon enemies are total assholes that disguise themselves as random objects and attack you if you get close. This one detail alone makes even the idea of exploring a tense endeavor as you slowly walk around careful of every item around you while trying to avoid getting jumpscared by a crab.

If you liked Deathloop for its time looping aspect, that idea also began right here with Prey and its Mooncrash DLC. Mooncrash was an optional Rogue-like inspired game mode where you had to escape TALOS-1 in a procedurally generated setup, and each time you died, you looped back to the beginning having to do it all over again. Also, did I mention that once again, the music slaps?

Pros:

• The environments in prey are incredibly unique and stunning, as they are bustling with personality and have many secrets that you can discover as you explore more of the area.
• The narrative in prey is especially unique, as you are left in a space station that is full of alien creatures, but the space station can give humans special powers and teach them various skills instantly, which is a very interesting setting to be in.
• Prey’s space station, known as Talos 1 is an incredibly well-designed place, everything about it feels natural and every tool or area looks like it has some sort of real use, which makes Talos 1 breathtaking to explore.
• The graphics in Prey still look great, despite the game being released in 2017 and modern games have made so many advancements in graphics, Prey can still hold its own and looks beautiful.

Cons:

• Prey can tend to get repetitive after playing for a while, as many players have felt that the encounters end up all feeling the same and the game loses its charm.
• There is a rare bug that happens at the start of Prey where the audio gets glitched out and the game becomes unplayable, while the bug is rare if it happens there is no known solution right now.
• The controls of Prey can be very frustrating for some players and end up ruining the whole gameplay experience.
• The UI is poorly designed in Prey and can look very unsatisfying to some players.

Deathloop is fantastic, and so are these games. Once you’ve had your fill with Arkane’s latest, consider checking out these games like Deathloop as well. And as always, thank you for reading if you got this far. Hope you have a good day.