I have been finding YouTubers to be worse than ‘traditional’ reviews lately in the ever escalating search for clicks
A lot of them yes, but if you weed through all of that you do find a handful that are better than traditional reviewers. At least that what I find.
About Deathloop, unfortunately (and unless I'm mistaken) it's being done by a different Arkane studio than the mainstream Dishonored titles. I think it's Arkane Austin or something.
From the reviews I've seen it seems like it really struggles with its own identity. It doesn't really know what it is. And the marketing team seems to have caught on to this, which is why we've seen the bombardment of gameplay videos. But from the reviewers I've watched, aside from the aesthetic which is really nice, it seems it could be underwhelming. At least compared to the mainline Arkane titles (Dishonored, Dark Messiah and Prey).
Personally, I don't know what to make of it. From what I've read stealth is not really encouraged, or at least not as encouraged as it was in Dishonored. And it seems the AI is particularly hard at spotting you, to a fault. So I'll likely need to play it guns blazing. And I'm not sure how fun that will be. Plus the first-person weapon models just seem outlandishly huge, and take up a lot of the screen-space. The abilities you unlock also seem very generic and uninspired. I believe I've read there's only 5 of them. At least 2 are taken directly from Dishonored. And the rest don't really inspire much confidence.
What I'm hoping will impress me is the world and story. But I have read reports of people, that loved the Dishonored games, finding the story meh. And the ending underwhelming. But as I said, I think I have too much outside info on the game right now, so I'll leave it be for a while and return to it later on.
I took a look at the early player reviews on Steam, since it released today, and it seems almost all negative reviews are due to performance issues. People with all sorts of highend gpus, like 2080s, or 3080 (even a 3090) complaining that it runs pretty bad on very high settings. That's what I also heard from Gman's review. But hopefully they can fix that, the same as they did with Dishonored 2. Currrently it's sitting at Mixed on steam. I'm curious how it progresses.