I have had a PlayStation 5 for quite some time now, but I have noticed a distinct lack of games that use and showcase real-time raytracing, even though the console does have support for it. Some time ago I googled to see if there are any PS5 games that use raytracing, to see if perhaps there could be some that I would be interested in.
Most of the results were either games that I already own on the PC, or which I have no interest in. One game, however, picked my curiosity, as it was listed as supporting raytracing on the PS5, and was of a kind that I was interested in: Deathloop.
I googled for some reviews of the game, and they were quite positive, almost overwhelmingly so. Thus, I purchased the game.
The very first impression I got was extraordinarily negative. That's because I bought the game explicitly to see some real-time raytracing goodness. I got none.
Most prominently and importantly, if you turn on the raytracing mode on (ie. the heaviest rendering mode supported by the game), the game becomes unplayable. And I'm not just exaggerating or being needlessly picky. I literally mean it.
In this mode the framerate is restricted to 30 FPS, even though it literally feels more like 20 FPS. The framerate itself is not really the problem (as long as it's consistent and doesn't stutter, I'm completely fine with it). The major problem, which literally makes the game unplayable, is that in this mode the input delay is absolutely enormous. Any movement of the thumbsticks has a delay of about half a second to one second before the action is performed on screen. I'm not kidding or exaggerating. The amount of input delay is just incomprehensible and astonishing. And makes the game literally unplayable. Not only is the input delay highly annoying, a game, especially a first-person shooter, literally cannot be played with this much input delay, because you have no way to react to anything in time.
On top of that, turning on raytracing made literally no visual difference. Again, I'm not kidding or exaggerating. I explicitly tried to look for any visual differences that there could be between the raytraced and non-raytraced modes (something made extremely tedious and annoying by the fact that the game had to be completely closed and restarted between changing modes), and I saw no difference. Lighting was exactly the same everywhere, reflections were of the screen-space kind in both modes (this can be easily checked by rotating the camera so that the thing being reflected goes out of the screen, in which case it also disappears from the reflection as well), and I saw no discernible difference in shadows, or anything. Even in situations where raytracing could have been a perfect fit, like the reflections on car windows and other surfaces of a car, there were no raytraced reflections. Nothing.
Raytracing was quite clearly turned on because of the quite noticeable lower framerate and unplayable input delay, but visually the game looked completely identical, with zero visual indication anywhere that raytracing was being used.
So in that regard the game was a complete waste of money.
But hey, graphics are just graphics. Who cares? As long as the game is fun to play, that's the most important thing. And most reviews were quite stellar (with several websites giving the game a full score of 10 out of 10). Surely gameplaywise the game was a blast?
No. The game was boring as hell. The premise sounded interesting (Groundhog-Loop day, where you start the same day again every time you die, and you need to do different things every day based on what you have learned in previous days), but the actual execution was very subpar. The Groundhog-Loop day idea and mechanism was so underutilized that it might just as well not have been there (if the story just played as one continuous timeline without any time looping, it would have made very little difference), there are only like 4 or 5 levels, and even though the levels are open sandboxes, the tasks and thus the game are pretty much completely linear, with no choices, and with a compass always telling you where to go next.
The gameplay itself was also not very engaging, and in some aspects a bit frustrating. I got so bored with the game in something like 3 or 4 hours that I just couldn't continue playing and stopped. (And believe me, I hate leaving games unplayed half-way through, especially games I have purchased. This is not something I do lightly.) And watching some third-party youtube reviews of the game it seems I didn't miss much, as the game doesn't really improve much from there, is very linear, not very well designed, and overall boring and repetitive (after all, as mentioned, there are only like 4 or 5 levels, which you play over and over again.)
How did I get fooled into buying such a mediocre boring game? One of the major mistakes I made when making the purchase decision is that I didn't check the Metacritic score:
Quite often the Metacritic score is quite telling, when the professional scores and user scores differ by this much. When professional critics love a game but the general public doesn't really like it all that much, it usually should raise a red flag. That's because, as we all know, professional game critics are extremely biased.
Biased in which way? What could possibly make professional game critics give high scores to a mediocre game? Well, looking at the official cover art for the game, something particular comes to mind (and I'm not the only one who suspects it):
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