The strand sequel has a lot more combat options, but delivery loses some of the spotlight.
Embargoes ended earlier today for Death Stranding 2 reviews, and the signs seem clear: Kojima and company still got it. “It” being the ability to make a maximalist meditation on spirituality, connection, and the sacred act of moving stuff from one place to another.
PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon has been doing a stint of non-PC gaming to give us some Death Stranding 2 impressions ahead of its all-but-inevitable PC launch, calling it a “bottomless toy box of weapons and gadgets” that, by virtue of its crunchy collection of mechanics and systems, feels more like “a PC game in console clothing.”
Suffice to say that those of us on staff who never picked up a PS5 will be kicking ourselves for however long it takes for DS2 to hit PC. Considering how long it took the first game, we’re looking at at least eight months of self-kicking.
Here’s what Death Stranding 2 reviewers are saying elsewhere.
“More Metal Gear Solid than ever, for better and worse”
GamesRadar: 4/5
At GamesRadar, Oscar Taylor-Kent writes that we were right on the money with our read that Death Stranding 2 sure looked like it was playing with a lot of ideas from Kojima’s previous work, though it comes at the cost of some of the original’s specific gameplay flavor.
“Sam’s arsenal is pretty overpowered as a result. Once I unlocked a suppressed, lightweight assault rifle I found I could take out most camps at range via headshots without people noticing,” Taylor-Kent says. “Still, there’s a satisfaction to camp-clearing that tips its well-armed helmet to those found in Metal Gear Solid 5’s similarly designed open worlds.”
He also says that DS2 delivers some better performances, particularly from returning Norman Reedus. “The stakes feel more personal than ever too—Reedus has to inject a lot more emotional range into Sam, and does it well while remaining understated,” Taylor-Kent says.
“A triumphant combination of complex sci-fi storytelling and thrillingly evolved stealth-action”
IGN: 9/10
“Platypus semen,” Simon Cardy writes to kick off IGN’s Death Stranding 2 review, beginning a list of the many absurd and indulgent images and ideas leveraged in Kojima’s latest telling. “I think we should encourage such wild creativity, and be excited that someone is willing to show us things we’d never even thought of seeing,” Cardy says. “When viewed this way, Death Stranding 2 stands as an almighty achievement.”
In short, Cardy says that Death Stranding 2 doubles down on everything that worked well in the original, expanding on the first game’s suite of combat and delivery tools to serve up a sequel imbued with a greater “playfulness.” Likewise, the story hits harder by digging deeper into the themes of the original.
“The original Death Stranding challenged our ability to truly connect as humans in a digital age—a stark reality when faced with the pandemic it pre-empted by mere months,” Cardy says. “But On the Beach asks questions about the issues posed in that original text. It’s self-analytical, but rarely gazes at its navel, delivering a knockout story that works on many levels.”
“Even with its shortcomings, it is a story I will continue to think about for some time”
Game Informer: 8.75/10
Kyle Hilliard, a self-described “lover of Hideo Kojima bulls***,” writes in Game Informer’s review that, while “mechanically, the sequel is absolutely an upgrade over the first,” it was Death Stranding 2’s story where he “was sometimes left cold.”
“Save for a few moments, I was rarely surprised and often left wanting more,” Hilliard says. “Mostly, I stared ahead stone-faced while characters explained everything with detailed monologues at varying degrees of performance quality.”
DS2’s gameplay has its own frustrations, Hilliard says, noting that—at its heart—Death Stranding is a series about doing fetch quests, and doing fetch quests “just feels bad” when you’re “stuck in the middle of nowhere without the ability to charge your battery.”
I’ll confess that the ratio of complaints to praises here leaves me a little confused about the score, but there might be something about GI’s review mathematics that escapes me. Ultimately, Hilliard says it’s a game where he’ll “happily take the misses alongside the hits.”
“A sprawling story that oscillates between serious societal reflection and total absurdity in the same breath”
Digital Trends: 4/5
Giovanni Colantonio at Digital Trends calls Death Stranding 2 “gonzo storytelling that’s happy to sit on the fence between brilliant and moronic.” The first Death Stranding, he says, was a COVID-19 game without even meaning to be. Death Stranding 2 is, instead, about its fallout: the fraught geopolitics and interpersonal dynamics of a world fractured and reconnected.
Gameplay-wise, Colantonio says “the most surprising thing about it is that it’s a straight sequel,” which “aims to pave over some of the less intentional friction to better focus on the real challenges.” He expects that the amount of Metal Gear DNA bleeding over into DS2 will drive some to “lament a strange series losing even just a bit of its edge,” but more “will welcome what’s ultimately an adventure that’s easier to enjoy.”
“Still beautifully odd by triple-A standards”
Eurogamer: 4/5
For Eurogamer, reviewer Lewis Gordon says Death Stranding 2 is, like other reviewers above, a linear expansion that cranks up all the first game’s numbers and streamlines its scratchier bits. “And yet,” Gordon says, “in seeking to give players more tools, more guns, more enemies, and, fundamentally, more ways to express themselves aggressively, something of Death Stranding’s radically slow, radically non-violent design ethos has been lost.”
But even if a bit of Death Stranding’s unique vibe has been diluted in its more approachable gameplay, Gordon says it’s still extremely Kojima. “This big, absurd game is, in many ways, the ultimate synthesis of the writer-director’s idiosyncrasies and obsessions while containing, amid the noise, perhaps his clearest message yet,” Gordon says. “The world may be a mess but its problems cannot be solved alone by communicating over the internet.”
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