Deceive Inc review

The Danger of Hubris

Being a spy isn’t easy.

Constantly looking over your shoulder, infiltrating high-security areas, and convincing the people around you that you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be is a delicate balancing act. And, unlike more innocuous jobs, this one can earn you a hole in your head if you mess it up.

I’m not a convincing liar, so my ambitions of being a spy have mostly been relegated to spy-themed media. Yes, that means I’ve seen every James Bond film under the sun. It also means that I usually have my ear to the ground when something new in the genre hits the market, which was exactly the case with Deceive Inc.

I took a look at it just before its release and found that it had some unfortunate growing pains that marred an otherwise great concept. I jumped back in recently to see how it fares a few months and several patches later, and we’re going to see if it’s more successful or has its cover blown yet again in this review of Deceive Inc. on the Xbox Series X.

Deceive Inc. was created and is being consistently supported by Sweet Bandits Studios, an indie developer based out of Quebec, Canada. This is their sophomore effort after their self-published title Coffence, the coffee-themed fighting game that used the Amazon Lumberyard game engine as its foundation.

Shooting for a long-running live-service game right after a smaller title with a relatively new studio is a move that either shows extreme confidence or outright foolishness. Especially given the current gaming landscape, where live-service games are either shutting down or dead on arrival left and right. I’m willing to give Sweet Bandits the benefit of the doubt, but only time will tell which side of that argument they ultimately fall on.

Deceive Inc. is a competitive online multiplayer game that carries the Overwatch DNA into a Prop Hunt-like game of cat and mouse. Each player chooses one of nine different spy units, each of which has a delightfully unique design as well as their own abilities and gadgets. Three of these spies are unlocked from the beginning: Chavez, Ace, and Squire, and their respective skills give new players a pretty good spread in terms of tactical options. As is the case for most games of this style, you gain levels through experience, but that progress is tied to each character rather than your profile, so you lose some steam if you swap out characters too much.

With your spy selected, your goal is to remain incognito through the three phases each match is made up of: Insertion, Infiltration, and Extraction, with up to eleven other spies hiding on the map. Actually making it to the final stage of a match has been an exercise in futility in my experience, but I’m sure that’s just because I’m not a very good spy.

Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It

Deceive Inc. is a competitive online multiplayer game that carries the Overwatch DNA into a Prop Hunt-like game of cat and mouse.

Each player chooses one of nine different spy units, each of which has a delightfully unique design as well as their own abilities and gadgets. Three of these spies are unlocked from the beginning: Chavez, Ace, and Squire, and their respective skills give new players a pretty good spread in terms of tactical options. As is the case for most games of this style, you gain levels through experience, but that progress is tied to each character rather than your profile, so you lose some steam if you swap out characters too much.

With your spy selected, your goal is to remain incognito through the three phases each match is made up of: Insertion, Infiltration, and Extraction, with up to eleven other spies hiding on the map. Actually making it to the final stage of a match has been an exercise in futility in my experience, but I’m sure that’s just because I’m not a very good spy.

Rather than blending into crowds or hiding on rooftops a la Assassin’s Creed, Deceive Inc. has a much more high-tech solution for its stealth, and this is where the Prop Hunt comparison comes in.

The game has a “cover” system in which your unique spy can disguise itself as any of the NPCs on the map. This is helpful when you feel like you’re being tailed, because you can just follow closely behind a different NPC and become them in a matter of seconds. But the usefulness doesn’t end there, as each map has several high-security areas that can only be accessed by very specific NPCs, all of which are color-coded. If you have to get into a green “Staff” area, you can take cover as a waiter, and if you need to reach an objective in a blue “Guard” area, you’ll have to get close enough to a big beefy bouncer to steal their appearance.

However, while you’re jumping from cover to cover, you also have to keep in mind that any of the NPCs around you could also be an enemy spy, which perfectly encapsulates the kind of paranoia that is synonymous with spies. The number of times I blasted a civilian in the face because they suspiciously stood in one place too long is actually shameful, and the NPC AI is definitely designed to make these kinds of moments very frequent.

It’s actually an ingenious system that I had quite a lot of fun with when I used it intelligently. You see, if there is an opponent nearby, they’ll be able to see you changing your cover, which opens you up to a fight that you’re probably not prepared for because you’re focusing on changing your cover.

This is where the spy gadgets each unit has come into play. There are bullet-deflecting shield umbrellas, decoy holographs for diversions, and inflatable bounce pads for when you need to reach a high area or make a quick getaway. They’re all pretty nifty, and there are plenty more to unlock as you rank up, but the game doesn’t really emphasize their use as much as it could. This was one of the biggest issues I had with the game at launch, and it seems that it’s unfortunately still the case.

Status Report

I hope the balance changes in the future to favor these gadgets more, because entering combat generally doesn’t feel very good. This is clearly a sneaking/espionage game first and foremost, so the first-person gunplay feels like it's deliberately hamstrung to discourage indiscriminate shooting. The gadgets have the potential to successfully fill this gap, though they don’t at the moment. Believe it or not, it wasn’t the gameplay that reeled me into Deceive Inc., It was actually its presentation. The game takes on a groovy 60s aesthetic that perfectly fits its classic spy conceit, but then that look is layered on top of characters that wouldn’t look out of place in a Pixar film, right down to each character’s personality-infused animations. Even the handful of NPCs in the game carries the same visual language, giving the entire package an undeniable sense of consistency.

That rock-solid sense of style carries over into the four currently available maps, and will hopefully stretch into the planned fifth map. The sprawling villa of Hard Sell is a great starting point, but I found the Bioshock-like Silver Reef map to be the standout of the group. And that’s not even to say the remaining two aren’t worth mentioning, as I had plenty of pulse-pounding moments in those as well.

There are a few things I can criticize about Deceive Inc., which I’m getting to, but its presentation is definitely not one of those things.

So, is Deceive Inc. a good game? For all intents and purposes, I would say yes. However, there are a few things that were present in the game’s rocky intro period that I still came across in its most recent incarnation.

First, I have to mention the texture pop-in. This visual anomaly has unfortunately become commonplace to the point of being generally accepted thanks to the Unreal Engine 3 days, but it still irks me quite a bit. Every intro to a match or even entering a lobby with other players subjects you to several moments where more detail loads in right in front of your eyes, which isn’t an experience I’d prefer to have.

And while that’s absolutely a nitpick and not at all something that takes away from the gameplay, what DOES take away from that experience is a known issue where players are able to exit the bounds of the map and yet still affect other players by, you know, shooting them to death. While they are all but invincible in some liminal space just out of reach. Deceive Inc.’s community has been begging for a fix for this for some time, so it’s definitely on Sweet Bandits’ to-do list, but hasn’t been tackled yet.

That to-do list is also apparently quite long, thanks to Sweet Bandits’ ongoing dedication to the game. The most recent roadmap includes new features, improved performance, and more on top of the ongoing development of new characters and the fifth map. These roadmaps and the developer’s communication with the game’s community gives me hope.