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After years of anticipation, Kojima Productions has released the long-awaited sequel to Death Stranding. This sequel relocates the game’s setting from America to Australia and promises to expand upon and further develop the gameplay mechanics of the first title, as well as pay homage to many of Kojima’s previous titles. With the first Death Stranding game being one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time, this game has a lot to live up to. After all these years, does Death Stranding 2 live up to the standards set by the first title, or is this sequel one that fans can pass on? Let’s break the game down piece by piece and decide that for ourselves. Because Hideo Kojima’s gaming catalog is one where story often comes first, this review shall be spoiler-free.
We’ll start the review by talking about what might be the most impressive aspect of Death Stranding 2: its graphical fidelity.
Graphically, Death Stranding 2 is one of the most beautiful-looking games of all time. The game’s character models and world look as realistic as a game can achieve. A screenshot of this title could easily be mistaken for a real-life photograph of Norman Reedus.
That realism doesn’t come at the cost of the game’s art style either. Death Stranding 2 is an incredibly colorful game, with sunrises and sunsets frequently lighting up the horizon with vibrant hues that are awe-inspiring.
At many points during my playthrough, I had to take a step back and just take a photo of what I was seeing. Sometimes, just seeing the large moon in the sky is enough to knock a player off their feet.
What makes the graphical accomplishments of Death Stranding 2 even more amazing is that it doesn’t come at the cost of performance. The game runs smoothly as butter on a launch PlayStation 5.
Moving on to the actual meat of the game, let’s discuss the gameplay of Death Stranding 2. While one would expect me to begin by speaking about how it felt to deliver packages in this game, that shockingly isn’t the one thing the gameplay focuses on this time around. So let’s begin by speaking about the combat.
Death Stranding 2 is surprisingly more combat-focused than the first game was. In the first title, combat could be avoided almost entirely outside of a few scripted instances, whereas here, every other mission will require Sam to take on a base of enemies.
Of course, Sam is a deliveryman and not a soldier. This means that enemies will turn you into Swiss cheese if you are careful. So, for most of the game, it is recommended that you sneak around these bases and take enemies down one at a time until there are only a few left.
While this is undeniably a change that will take some getting used to, it can be extremely satisfying to sneak through an enemy base and take down every foe without being seen once, or go in guns blazing with upgraded weapons and take them all down.
The experience is very reminiscent of what it felt like to play Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain when it first released. In fact, Metal Gear Solid’s influence can be spotted all over Death Stranding 2 in ways I feel it didn’t in the first game.
Aside from the combat and stealth focus, the player will be fighting against colorful bosses and mecha enemies frequently throughout the game. I would never describe Death Stranding 1 as a spiritual successor to Metal Gear Solid due to what the gameplay focused on, but Death Stranding 2 can certainly be called that.
This Metal Gear influence, of course, extends to the story as the player now has a robust cast of characters who will call them in the codec to speak about the plot frequently. Metal Gear Solid 2 and 4 seem to have been of particular influence here, but as this is a spoiler-free review, I shall leave the comparison at that.
Alongside the combat, there is, of course, the main selling point of Death Stranding’s gameplay: trekking across the continent to deliver packages to people in need. This gameplay approach made Death Stranding 1 one of the most unique games of all time and has been almost entirely unchanged in the sequel.
Players will once again be able to joyfully help each other get to their destinations by building bridges, placing ladders, and of course, working together to build entire zip line networks which connect a large chunk of the map. Everything that made Death Stranding 1 an incredible experience is here and unchanged.
And that is where my problems with the game begin to show themselves.
What was once an entirely new and thrilling approach to game design has now been turned into a mundane routine, one that can get very tiring when you have to participate in it for fifty hours of game time.
That isn’t to say that the gameplay of Death Stranding 2 isn’t good; in fact, I would describe it as great. Everything about this game works perfectly, and it always feels great when you’re required to backtrack and can travel the distance in a tenth of the time because of the structures you built.
But everything working perfectly might be the problem in itself. Some of the best moments of Death Stranding 1 were the times when the player had to struggle. Not every mountain had a simple way of crossing it, and the player could easily be frustrated by a bad tumble that made them lose all of their packages.
Meanwhile, Death Stranding 2’s world is always easy to traverse, even before you place down your structures. One can almost always identify the intended path to walk through an area and get through it without any trouble. While this lowered difficulty within the world design decreases the chance for potential frustration, it also decreases the satisfaction that comes from completing each delivery.
Overcoming a snowy mountain in Death Stranding 1 could take an entire play session of effort and ask the player to wisely use the ladders and climbing anchors they brought, while a very similar situation in Death Stranding 2 will simply ask the player to walk along a path for half an hour and prepare to hold down the shoulder buttons of their control whenever a quake happens.
I would never describe my time with Death Stranding 2 as unfun, as I was enjoying my time with it, it didn’t spark the same amount of joy in me that a less well-polished experience would have. It feels weird to describe a game as being too well-designed for its own good, but there are few other ways to describe Death Stranding 2’s world.
While the gameplay loop of Death Stranding 2 is the same as the first game’s on paper, it is much more noticeable in this title because of that lack of feeling you truly accomplished something by getting to a location it becomes much more noticeable that each area of the map only exists to deliver the next cutscene to the player.
This feeling of monotony and being able to only think about this unchanging loop for about twenty hours of my playthrough is why I feel so conflicted about Death Stranding 2. Because although the middle of the game can feel like a complete slog, the first few chapters of the game and the final few are some of the best in any Hideo Kojima game.
While I shall not go into detail on what those chapters entail, as this is intended to be a spoiler-free review, they more than make Death Stranding 2 worth playing. While one would think a solution to the game’s problems would thus be to cut down the length and rid it of those middle chapters, the answer likely wouldn’t be so simple.
The entire premise of Death Stranding’s gameplay is about walking across the entire in-game world, slowly making your way across the map. If the game were cut down, then the overall theming of the game would be lessened. I wouldn’t remove the parts of this title I found to be monotonous; I just wish the world they took place in had a bite to match its bark.
Throughout it all, though, I never stopped admiring the game’s multiplayer mechanics and the sense of camaraderie that players feel when traveling this world. You will never encounter another player during your travels throughout Australia, but you will see the structures other people have built and make use of them.
Being able to jump across a river with a ramp constructed by one player only to land on a bridge that was built by another is one of the greatest feelings in gaming. Putting in the effort and helping others by placing a ladder or contributing materials to build roads makes you feel like you’re truly part of a community.
With Death Stranding as a franchise theming itself around connecting humanity and the inherent joy that comes with movement itself, these mechanics form one of the most perfect examples of gameplay and story integration in gaming history. Which is quite an impressive feat for a game which tears the fourth wall in half at many opportunities.
And that’s really my opinion on the game overall. I was instantly engaged by the game’s opening few chapters and wanted to see more, felt quite bored by the time I was halfway through the Australian continent, despite always admiring the existence of this gameplay formula, and then thought the climax of the game was one of the best gaming experiences this year.
This leads to Death Stranding 2 being an incredibly mixed bag that I can only truly recommend to people who are huge fans of Kojima’s work and want to see what kind of madness he was able to come up with when given complete and absolute freedom.
If you consider yourself that type of gamer, then Death Stranding 2 is just the game for you. If you are just someone who enjoyed the original Death Stranding then I am not sure if Death Stranding 2 will be engaging enough for you to stick with it to the end.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
Bottom Line
Death Stranding 2 can feel like a disappointment at times as the unique magic of the first game fades, but it's still an incredibly well constructed piece of art from Kojima Productions
