One such person is Sam Bridges, a porter who has already completed an epic journey across the former United States, linking remote cities and shelters together onto the chiral network, restoring connectivity and community to the human race. A year after he completed his mission, Sam is living in seclusion with his adopted daughter Lou when he is asked to bring Mexico onto the same network. His success in Mexico opens a portal, a "plate gate," leading to Australia. But his mission to bring the new continent back into contact with the rest of humanity is disrupted by devastating reversals and the arrival of new threats.
Death Stranding was released in 2019 as the first game by noted video game designer Hideo Kojima after his well-publicised split from Konami, after disagreements over the direction of the Metal Gear Solid franchise. A strange game about live, death, love, family and rock-climbing, the game was an acquired taste, with those who locked into its headspace loving it but others left baffled.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, is something that I don't think anyone was expecting from Kojima. It's a considerably simpler, more straightforward game than its forebear. Gone are the 20-minute cutscene TED Talks on the nature of reality, the metaphysical rules of how the game world works and characters with weird codenames talking about things you won't understand until a lot later in the game. Instead, Death Stranding 2 gets you into the action faster and cheerfully boils down the plot to, "linking cities together like last time, only now in Australia, and with monorails for some reason."
That's not to say that Death Stranding 2 drops all the weirdness and obtuseness from the game, but the denser plot elements are pushed far into the back end of the game in favour of focusing on what the first game did best: delivering parcels to people in desperate need of help.
The basic gameplay loop has Sam travelling around the open world, this time considerably larger than that of the first game, stopping at key settlements. These are divided between large cities on the edge of the map, big distribution centres at key points in the world and lots of individual small shelters, inhabited by individuals or small groups. Each settlement has goods that need to be delivered elsewhere, sometimes easy jobs with small amounts of cargo to a nearby location, sometimes a very large amount of extremely fragile cargo that needs to be taken across most of the map without breaking. Sam has a reputation with each settlement, and maximising his reputation allows him to claim more resources and build more equipment at each location. How fast he accomplishes each job and the status of the cargo in question can see him level up his reputation faster.
Traversing the world is possible on foot, using a variety of small vehicles, or using a larger truck. As with the first game, using the truck is by far the most efficient process (due to its large carrying capacity) but is stymied by a battery-limited range and mountainous terrain. You can build structures in the open world, including recharge points and even entire new shelters, and you can also build roads, which allow you to travel without using your battery. Roads are very resource-intensive to build, however. New to this sequel is that you can also build monorails, which can carry far vaster amounts of cargo and resources (not to mention you and your vehicle), but only between set locations. You can also now reactivate automated mines, which can be used to generate enormous quantities of resources.
Hardcore porters may prefer to travel on foot, using ziplines to traverse crevasses or go up and down mountains, but the game is relatively forging for the truckers, even more than the first game, with even the tallest mountain in the game being almost completely climbable on wheels.
The main story has Sam following directions on which location to visit next, usually involving taking a dangerous path through unexplored territory, dealing with bandits, the supernatural BTs or natural hazards along the way. The biggest change in Death Stranding 2 from the prior game is combat. In the first game, combat was to be avoided if at all possible, and nonlethal weaponry was encouraged since dead humans turn into ticking antimatter bombs which can blow up parts of the landscape (or cause total annihilation of the game world altogether). In the sequel, Sam now has access to stun-capable versions of machine guns and, somehow, explosive grenade launchers, able to knock enemies out or destroy BTs with the same weapons and never be in any danger of killing anyone. This feels a bit silly, removing a core gameplay element from the first game, but since the sequel throws a ton more combat at you than the first game, maybe it was unavoidable. The human and BT enemies, both of which now come in greater varieties, are now joined by strange, teleport-capable mechs, which might be more formidable foes if you didn't have access to missile launchers and grenades which render them trivial threats at best.
A story-focused playthrough of the game should take most players around 40 hours, maybe a bit longer if you decide to fix up a few roads and monorails, and unlock the hidden settlements on the map. Like the first game, the plot mostly revolves around Sam dealing with other characters (some new, some returning from the first game, and some who appear to be new but are actually characters from the first game in disguise), getting missions and updates from them and travelling to new locations. Sam seems far more taciturn in this game than the first one, to the point that you can go hours at a time without hearing Norman Reedus speak, which is a bit odd.
The biggest change to the gameplay loop is the addition of a mothership. The DHV Magellan is a huge mobile base which Sam has access to for most of the game, and can use for fast travel back to previously-visited cities, distro centres and even some shelters. If you're heading into new territory, you can only do that under your own power, but in areas linked by the network, the Magellan can remove a lot of repetitive makework from the game. You can even cleverly use it to carry an absolutely massive amount of resources (far more than any truck) to speed up construction efforts, which is a much-appreciated move. However, using the Magellan does prevent you from earning maximum reputation points on deliveries, so if you want to max out Sam's rep, you need to do it the hard way. The Magellan threads the needle of being a useful new tool without making the game too trivial. The way every single character always calls it "DHV Magellan" without fail instead of just Magellan is also curiously entertaining.
Death Stranding 2 benefits from a fair bit of humour throughout. Some of the missions are ridiculous, and undertaking missions for the enigmatic "Pizza Chef" results in a very funny cutscene. At one point, one of your companion characters gravely warns you that a very long cutscene is about to arrive. One returning character from the first game makes their arrival known via a full-on song-and-dance number (one ponders if Kojima was inspired by Alan Wake 2 here). The principle bad guy likes to use a sound-based weapon in combat that resembles a guitar, meaning he has to shred like a maniac to blow things up. One boss fight randomly turns into a Tekken-style 3D beat 'em up halfway through complete with health bars and special moves. Death Stranding 2 is notably less po-faced than the first game.
Whether Death Stranding 2 is as good as the first game is another question. It's bigger and, comparing like-for-like (solo or "connected" mode, where other players' structures may appear in your game world), a longer game than its forebear, with a much better-designed map, though maybe losing some of the tighter focus from the first game. It's definitely more straightforward, more combat-heavy and less weird, but that weirdness made the first game stand out from the crowd more. It feels like Death Stranding 2 is trying to be more conventional than the first game. That's only not a letdown because the first game was so oddball that the second game can only be more conventional in comparison. Compared to almost every other game out there, Death Stranding 2 still has a uniquely off-kilter atmosphere unlike anything else around (helped by its emotional soundtrack courtesy of Low Roar and Woodkid). Maybe more disappointing is that the second game uses a lot of copy-pasted assets from the first game, just punched up to 4K standards, with the shelters, distro centres and city entrances all being exactly the same as in the first game. Given it took three-and-a-half years to make the first game from scratch, one may ponder why it took six years to make the sequel given how much material is reused from its forebear.
Still, there's nothing else really around like this franchise, and the second game certainly benefits from being less obtuse than the first one (even if a total newcomer is still not going to have a clue what the hell is going on), with a much more satisfying, all-out epic action finale. Death Stranding 2 (****½) is an interesting game blending the survival horror, open world action adventure and crafting genres into something that can be quite compelling. The game is available now on PlayStation 5 and PC.
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