Instead, the winners were those who were best equipped to fill everyone else with holes. In the handful of matches I played, I don't think there was a single time when the person who first got the package was able to win the match by getting away. You drop whatever you're doing and try to kill them, making the last five minutes of each match turn from psyop to shooting gallery.Īlthough permadeath makes for tense shootouts, there's currently no reason to even bother with all the espionage when you can simply wait by the extraction point for someone to grab the package and promptly kill them. As soon as someone picks up the package, everyone playing is alerted to their location. In concept, that sounds like a lot of fun, however, in practice, it doesn't always work so well. All the while, you're copying the identities of the NPCs in the facility to gain access to different areas that require different levels of clearance. Essentially, the goal is to infiltrate a science facility, grab a package, and high-tail it out before the other players can beat you to the package or stop you from leaving with it. I think that they definitely succeed on some levels, but there's still a long way to go.Įach match consists of three phases: insertion, infiltration, and extraction. After talking to some of the development team at Sweet Bandits Studios, they gave me the impression that the goal of Deceive Inc. is to recreate the tension of going undercover in a spy movie, translating it to a multiplayer video game environment.