Deceit 2 Review

Deceit 2 is an FPS horror and social deduction game developed and published by indie studio World Makers and is a sequel to their original debut game, Deceit. It was released on the 14th of September and takes place in a similar location and situation to the original, but has major changes and additions of all kinds.

Although the game still has its basic story and horror aspects, this time, World Maker decided not to focus on these aspects and instead entirely go for the social deduction part of the game. The infected can still be scary, and the game does have some interesting dialogue both from the announcer and the playable characters, but much less than Deceit. The game's basic mechanics are still there, but it's definitely not the same and only roughly resembles the original. Even though horror and shooting are still pretty central points, the mind games between players are much more important than they were before.

The core gameplay isn't very different from the original's: there is a group of people (In the original 4–6, but in the sequel 6–9), and two of them are "infected" and need to kill all the rest. There are day phases and night phases, and humans can vote out players during the day phase in the original. In Deceit 2, however, that isn't a thing, and instead, the infected can turn at any point if they have done all the prerequisites. In order to win, the humans need to either vote out all the infected or survive until the end of the match. The original game had three locations you played in, and it went like this: you start during the day, the night comes, you survive the night and go to the next location. In the sequel, however, there is only one location and, honestly, that's so much more boring. Although the overall feeling of the environment and game is very similar to the original's, the changes combined with the removal and replacement of a lot of the mini-games make it not feel like a sequel but more like a completely different game. It feels a lot more chaotic than the original and much less unique, as if it's just a weird 3D version of Among Us and not its own game.

Visually, the game is impressive for being an indie, but isn't particularly special. It's nice to look at and feels pretty real: the models for weapons and characters are all great, and the terror form of the infected looks amazing. It's definitely an upgrade from the original's graphics, but not a really big one. Although performance does suffer a big impact, I got around 20% less FPS in Deceit 2, and it doesn't look that much better than the original. Sound design hasn't received a lot of changes and is pretty much the same, although there are new sound effects and character voice lines. The music is about as good as Deceit's, and there aren't really any interesting new tracks or anything. 

Overall, Deceit 2 is very underwhelming and takes away a lot of what made the original game so good and engaging. It was an almost perfect combination of FPS and social deduction, but it's now just a very glorified clone of every other game of this genre. Almost everything that made Deceit unique has been removed or replaced, and it's a worse game for it. While there are a few improvements and some actually good changes present in the sequel, they come at a cost that's simply not worth it — losing what set Deceit apart from all other social deduction games.

In conclusion, this isn't a particularly good game. It takes away a lot of the original's charm and doesn't really have any distinctiveness of its own. It's not worth migrating over from Deceit to Deceit 2, especially since the game costs money while the original is Free To Play. And even if it'd have been as good, the performance issues in comparison to the visual improvement make this a much worse experience.