While you’ve all been bashing zombies in Dead Island 2 and polishing your lightsabers in anticipation of Jedi: Survivor, I’ve spent my evenings honing my spy skills in Deceive Inc. My friends and I have become completely obsessed with this clever little stealth game, and I think with time there’s a chance it will become one of the most popular multiplayer games out there. While not the first spy vs. spy game on the market, Deceive Inc. is by far the best to do it.

I love the feeling of tension it creates by forcing you to hide in plain sight, hoping you’ll spot someone acting strange before they spot you. It’s slow and methodical one second, and explosively exciting the next, and I’m having a great time learning the nuances of each character and perfecting my ability to act like an NPC. Unfortunately, the players dominating this game don’t have the same interest. While I’m trying to play 007, it seems like everyone else just wants to play Call of Duty.

If you’re really good at Deceive Inc., you can move all around the map collecting intel and hacking terminals without anyone noticing you. You can use your recon equipment to give you valuable information and predict exactly where to lay traps for your enemies. An exceptional player is as good at blending in as they are at noticing idiosyncrasies that cause other players to give themselves away. To escape with the briefcase and win you have to be patient and observant, you have to have great map awareness, and you have to have the intuition to predict what other players will do, and when they’ll do it. Or, you can run around with an assault rifle and shoot everyone in the face until you’re the last man standing. Both strategies are viable.

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I’ve had some incredible matches in Deceive Inc. True cat and mouse games that tested my wits and made me feel like a real spy. But for the most part, Deceive Inc. just feels like a team deathmatch with disguises. People with the skills to dominate in traditional shooters don’t have to worry about playing the spy game, because they know even if they reveal themselves they’re good enough to kill everyone first. Even if they lose a firefight, they know they can get into more matches (and earn XP quicker) if they just start every round firing bullets into the air to draw everyone's attention. You don’t have to hack computers or sneak out with the briefcase if everyone else is dead, and a lot of players aren’t interested in playing the slow game.

One of the first post-launch updates was meant to address this problem, but it didn’t go far enough. The Heat System is a meter that builds every time you kill an innocent NPC, and at each increased level on the meter, the player takes additional damage. This is meant to discourage people from shooting everyone in sight until they find the real players, but the penalty isn’t nearly harsh enough. It’s a new system so I expect it will get tuned over time, but until people feel sufficiently disadvantaged for going in hot, they’re not going to stop shooting first and playing correctly never.

There ought to be a permanent penalty for shooting civilians. Once you build heat, you should have to live with those consequences for the rest of the match. It would severely penalize people that massacre NPCs, and it would force everyone to be extra cautious when they think they’ve identified a fellow spy.

The other thing developer Sweet Bandits Studios can do is make the NPCs act more like players. A big factor that separates good players from bad ones is the ability to move and act like NPCs, but it only takes a few games to see the difference between someone that moves with intention and an NPC that aimlessly wanders around the map. There are certain behaviors, like jumping, opening drawers, and even walking diagonally that identify someone as a real player. I don’t want to lose that element of the game, but making NPCs act more human would help slow down overly aggressive players a lot. Having NPCs occasionally sprint and open doors to high-security areas just isn’t enough.

Some XP adjustments could also help discourage people from going Rambo as soon as a match starts. Right now you get a hefty amount of XP for kills, but no penalty for losing cover or killing NPCs. If there were greater rewards for playing the objectives, staying in cover, and avoiding unnecessary combat, then people might not feel so comfortable spraying bullets every which way.

There’s never going to be a way to completely eliminate trolls and mercenaries from the game. People that can’t climb in Valorant will always seek out games like Deceive Inc. where they can act like the pub stompers they wish they were. But right now these types of players are damaging the integrity of the game by causing too many matches to devolve into shootouts right away. There are too many good ideas in Deceive Inc. to see it squandered, and I hope Sweet Bandits can find a way to reign it back in and get ahold of the playerbase before it’s too late.

Next: Deceive Inc. Review – It's Fun To Be A Spy