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Death Stranding 2 On The Beach is functionally more Death Stranding, albeit with a fresh story, a new batch of signature self-indulgent Kojima meanderings, and a swathe of new gadgets and gear. It manages the rare trick of being both desperately monotonous but profoundly engaging, banking towards one of these two poles depending on how much you’re willing to put in. It’s a game that demands that you meet it half-way and shed expectations, your pace dictated by your stomach for patience and perseverance. But if you do, it’s a wonderfully strange and roaring spectacle unlike anything else out there.
Picking up 11 months after the events of the original, you play as the returning Sam Porter Bridges, a gruff, accommodating delivery man played by Norman Reedus. Hunkered down in a shelter in the southwest of the US, he’s happily playing house with Lou, the BB (one of the cocooned unborn babies able to spot the otherworldly spectres of the dead known as BTs) that trekked across America with him in the first game. One thing leads to another and Fragile, played by Léa Seydoux, coaxes him into repeating the feat. Starting with Mexico and then Australia, your task is to patch up facilities, shelters, and other isolated outposts to the Chiral Network, a futuristic internet designed to save humanity from extinction.
Like in the original, the meat and potatoes substance of Death Stranding 2 are fetch quests where you march across desolate and unsettling landscapes ferrying packages from one facility to another. If this is what put you off the first game, don’t expect it to be any different this time around. But, within that taut framework of pre-trek menu-heavy preparations and juggling carrying capacity, degrading gear, depleting stamina, and Sam’s temperamental balance while you inch up mountains, tumble down crevices, and trudge across parched deserts, is a hypnotic, delirious, and tense freedom that very few other games succeed in mimicking. You’re dropped in a beautiful playground with no set paths or invisible leashes, left to weigh up risk and reward at the foot of every rock face, gushing river, and area infested by haunting BT apparitions.
Beyond that, you’ll get the chance to use vehicles, gadgets, and structures to make deliveries easier. The latter are particularly instrumental in remedying what is mostly a lonely experience as you encounter echoes of other players through scattered bridges, abandoned ladders, and messages of encouragement, dishing out Likes as thanks. The biggest change from the original is found in the combat, which in keeping with the pre-launch marketing, is dosed with its fair share of Metal Gear-like stealth and silliness. This is mostly in the range of tools at your disposal, which make both loud and quiet combat more viable this time around. Due to embargo restrictions, it’s not possible to go into granular detail, just know that giving the player options is the resounding theme and there’s no shortage of weapons and gadgets to get creative with when taking on bandits and brigands. Though if progress and expediency are central to your playstyle, this abundance does end up being somewhat underutilised. Deep into Death Stranding 2’s final third, the game does something with BTs that’s both surprising and tons of fun. Again, I can’t say much else.
Death Stranding 2 is a very sonic game. It’s not just the stacked playlist of slow, meditative bangers from Low Roar, Grimm Grimm, woodkid, and the like, but also the buzzing clanks of closing hatches, the crispy snap of sleek UI menus, and the sonorous growl of Sam’s Odradek scanner skimming the ground ahead. The natural landscapes of Mexico and Australia heave and creak too, and the foreboding aural shift of approaching BTs is haunting and eerie. Visually, Death Stranding 2 vacillates between photo-realistic and arrestingly gorgeous, its vistas stretching for miles into the distance, every hyper-detailed ridge and craggly rock intentionally placed. Both the Mexico and Australia maps extend organically, eschewing the way most open-worlds favor credulity-sapping convenience over true-to-the-real-world topographies that meld and morph subtly over long distances. It’s a beautiful game.
The story is a maudlin, meandering mess that’s hard to follow, but is always good fun and somehow always engaging. Sing-alongs, opaque tangents, a glut of cameos, anime nonsense, stagy boss fights, philosophizing pomp, and a whole new branch to add to the bulging lexicon of acronyms and terminology from the original – it’s all there. Like the first game, it suffers from the occasionally frustrating need to constantly over-explain itself, especially the more esoteric elements of its world and story, but it’s done in such a way that it never quite lets you succeed at connecting its fragmented dots. Much of it is told through Kojima’s signature opulent, hyper-directed cut scenes that I found myself looking forward to despite them wavering between corny, goofy, genuinely touching, and entertainingly cinematic. There’s a degree of end baiting that happens and by the credits it does feel like a lot of it could have been condensed down into something a little more svelte. But once you do reach the end, it’s as ridiculous and absurd as it is grand and, bizarrely, fitting.
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Kojima’s ability to upend established AAA convention is admirable and despite the self-indulgence and the man’s swelling vanity (and appetite for space travel), Death Stranding 2 is a bold reminder of this. It’s a goofy spectacle, the folly of a man who has let it all go a bit to his head, utterly bizarre and enigmatically incoherent but nevertheless an earnest exploration of loss and connection. At any other studio, such a muzzily, decadent vision would have led to a quiet aside to tone it down or been simply shelved in favour of a safer bet. Thankfully, Kojima’s auteur status means he’s immune to this, free to fling about millions as he sees fit. Long may it continue.
Reviewed on PS5. Code provided by the publisher.
About the Author
Death Stranding 2 On The Beach
- Platform(s): PlayStation 5
- Genre(s): Action, Action Adventure, Adventure
