Deceive Inc – Review

First-person shooters might be one of the most popular genres in gaming, but you’ll struggle to find another FPS quite like this.
Deceive Inc is Spy vs Spy for the modern audience, an online multiplayer battle where you must sneak or fight your way to victory by any means necessary.
Deceive Inc’s servers have been live 48 hours, and after spending over 20 of those sneaking through 80+ games, I’ve unlocked 28 of the 36 achievements for a total of 575 Gamerscore, so I think it’s time to reveal my thoughts on one of the most unique multiplayer games I’ve played in years.

The basic premise of Deceive Inc is pretty straight forward, your objective is to extract the case from the vault, but you’ll need to find and unlock 3 terminals to unlock the vault.
To access these, you’ll need to pass through a couple of rooms that need unlocking either by a coloured keycard or a number of intel found around the map, thankfully getting around is simple with such a canny disguise. All Deceive Inc agents have the ability to clone and conceal themselves as anyone they meet, in a second, thanks to a hi-tech holo-watch.

With hackable intel devices scattered all over the map, you’ll quickly be able to grab what’s required to progress and eventually unlock 3 terminals, access the vault and extract without being detected…
Well, that’s the idea, but with Deceive Inc, you’ve got other teams and players trying to do exactly the same thing, and if you’re seen unlocking a door or hacking a device, you’re likely to come under fire and as soon as a bullet hits, your cover is blown.

It’s quite possible to complete a mission successfully without killing anyone, but it’s tough when anyone around you could be another player just waiting for you to blow your cover by collecting that ammo, or in teams, trying to revive a fallen team-mate is an open-invitation for an ambush.

You’ve got the choice between solo or teams, playing solo has more of a battle royale feel, as you can bide your time and then make a push to grab the intel right at the end, or you might try to ambush a player as he’s waiting to extract.
In teams it’s slightly more tactical, three characters running around together is pretty obvious, but if you’re cool, calculated and co-ordinated it’s poetry in motion, especially when you fool an opposition player into revealing themselves.
Thankfully you can regain cover and re-establish your disguise if you evade enemy fire for a short-period of time, but it’s generally best to remain concealed behind a disguise because you never know who’s watching.

Each of the 8 agents have their own unique weapon, skill (expertise) and passive abilities to help tilt the match in your favour…
Firstly, Chavez and Squire are Vanguard class characters, these guys are balanced all-rounders, such as Chavez who can automatically replenish some lost health, or Squire’s ability to instantly detect nearby valuables. Ace & Cavaliere are Trackers, able to mark and trace enemies and Hans and Yu-Mi are disruptors with a projectile skill that slows and disrupts enemies, the final class is Scoundrel, with Madame Xiu and Larcin (who were two of my favourite characters) these guys have a few tricks up their sleeves, such as Larcin’s ability to steal items from a melee attack or Xiu’s passive which pings the location if an enemy nearby has their cover blown.

There’s quite a range of options, so you might have a couple of people playing the same character but each with a very different approach dependent on playstyle and any variations of the characters skills and abilities.

The holo-watch is already a pretty impressive gadget, but to further aid your espionage you can choose two more gadgets to help your battle.
these gadgets are grouped as Defense, Traps, Deception and Recon.
One character might take the spyglass which allows hacks from distance to remain covert as well as the holo-mimic which opens up the watch to also clone certain objects such as seats, plants or boxes.

Likewise equipping the bounce-pad and shield-brella will allow an agent to make a quick escape and activate a temporary shield making them even more difficult to take-down. At launch there’s only 8 gadgets, and like the characters, and their skill variations, these are going to take some hours to unlock, with the average player likely to need about 6-8 hours to unlock the 5 locked characters, and about the same per character to unlock their extra skills and perks as you level them up.
Finally there’s also field upgrades, which are a customisable selection of buffs which you collect dependent on the corresponding colour within each match.

Going back to the core gameplay, and it’s worth mentioning how smoothly everything works out, knowing that there’s a dozen human controlled characters running around isn’t always as straight forward as it might seem, I’ve often followed a character jogging along and standing next to a locked door, only to find out they were a perfectly innocent civilian after replacing their brain with lead.
Likewise, I’ve had my cover blown at times when I’ve been as careful as possible and avoided making any obvious tells to blow my disguise.
There’s definitely a fine art when you do get it right, or spot an unsuspecting victim, but there’s still a small element of luck which keeps things interesting without ever making them unfair.

The difference between team and solo makes for an interesting fight, in solo you’re more likely to get ambushed during extraction, as if there’s enough enemies left you may be under fire from half-a-dozen others.
Whereas in teams it might be slightly harder to get to extraction, but if you make it with a team of three there seems a higher chance of success when you’ve got someone else to share the incoming fire.

Overall presentation of Deceive Inc is all very positive, maps are varied, well designed with plenty of places to hide in plain sight, the characters and locations all have a slight 70’s feel, which adds class and personality to an already interesting line-up of agents, there’s enough cosmetics to allow players to personalise their favourite characters and while there are micro-transactions to buy, these purchases are purely cosmetic and can still be unlocked with standard gameplay, it’s also worth mentioning that it’s not going to take Battlefront play-times either, after around 6-8 hours of gameplay, I’d raised enough in-game currency to unlock the 5 locked characters, and with a few “loot crates” awarded for free you’ll start to have a basic collection of uniforms, poses and inks to colour your weapon and gadgets.

The overall sound is all impressive enough, I personally would have liked to hear more voiced-lines and dialogue between characters on the same team (like when you start a game of Overwatch) which I feel would further strengthen the personality of the characters, but you’ll still get the occasional line when hacking devices. Guns and abilities are all loud enough to know when somethings happening nearby, which keeps stealth the best option and while I can’t say the background music is a personal favourite, the calm music still adds a tranquil sense of peace before the madness begins, I would have loved some more 70’s inspired tracks, but I’m really having to nit-pick, because it’s generally all high quality.

One area I enjoyed the most is the element of surprise. You honestly never know what to expect from one game to the next, one match I’d barely seen my team-mates so I was minding my own business when two other teams started fighting and I saw one character try to hide on a walkway just next to me, unaware of my suave disguise, I was able to take them down with ease, only to find they had the intel, which I was able to collect and extract to snatch the win.

A few matches later, again paying teams, I had two great team-mates and while we were never far apart, we maintained enough space to avoid detection, but still managed to hold a few firefights, each of us reviving each other the one-allowed time, after opening 2 of the 3 terminals (and another team the third) we quickly entered the vault, collected the objective and extracted with clinical precision.

There’s a definite sense of achievement with every win.

With the general presentation there’s little to complain about, I had a few graphical glitches which were noticeable but never enough to kill the flow of the game and every hour or so the game seemed to get stuck on a menu, requiring a force close and restart, small issues but both likely to be fixed quickly with a patch.

My main complaint is the matchmaking system for teams, playing with randoms isn’t as bad as many games might make you believe, but there were times I’d start a game to find myself in team alone, against 3 other teams of 2-3 characters. Obviously, you still give it a shot, but 3 vs 1 is never easy, or fair.
It seemed to happen every 4-5 games which is annoying, which might push a few more to Solo play, but I personally prefer the way team-games play out, maybe it’ll improve if the game picks up some traction, but on launch week, I didn’t expect to be seeing many half-filled lobbies especially with cross-play enabled. There were also a few instance son the menu seemingly freezing, when searching for a game, it was few and far between, but required a force close and restart.

Another area I wasn’t quite comfortable with were those unlocks, while there’s plenty eventually, at first, you’re stuck with 3 characters. You do start with enough in-game currency to unlock a 4th character which is a nice touch, but if you make a bad decision, you’ve probably got a good hour or two of suffering before you can unlock the next one. For teference the 4 characters I enjoyed using most, where all initially locked.
The benefit of this is, players who become engaged are likely to hit 20+ hours before they’ve got a wide selection of cosmetics unlocked, which prevents Deceive Inc from feeling repetitive too soon.
While there’s only currently 4 main missions, after over 20 hours, I’m still drawn to go back and play more purely because it’s such a fun and unique experience and with the developers already outlining fixes and the promise to balance characters and gadgets, I’m sure these few issues will all be resolved quickly.

Overall Deceive Inc is a fresh and unique game that reminds me of the old Spy vs Spy games on Commodore 64, You can concentrate on the objectives, or let your enemies do the work and go for the last-minute ambush.
Either way, at around £16/$20 it’s easy to recommend, especially if you have a few friends to team up with, there’s some major potential if players communicate and strategize together.
Sure, this might impact solo players who prefer team-games (like myself) but time will tell on that one.
If you fancy an online battle unlike 99% of anything else you might be playing, Deceive Inc is a unique experience that’s likely to keep you coming back for more, at least for the first 10-20 hours. There’s also the promise of Seasons being added which will no doubt see the addition of more skins and hopefully new missions, gadgets and characters in the future.

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