2025-08-03

Death Stranding 2

I don’t love Death Stranding 1, I just tolerate it. But that’s better than any other Kojima Productions game since Metal Gear Solid 4. Feels bad to think I’ve resented their output for longer than I’ve known them. Death Stranding showed promise, but the melodramatic character stories got really exhausting. But the setting and gameplay are very unique and I loved exploring it. So, it wasn’t a no-brainer to pick up a PS5 for the sequel, but I’m glad I did, because it’s really good.

If you have problems with Death Stranding 1’s gameplay loop, pacing, or overall story, yeah it’s all the same here. That said, it does improve the gameplay, has a much more lighthearted tone, and keeps the story more straightforward. They’ve addressed all the little problems with the first game, without changing the identity. It’s not trying to appeal to a wider audience, and I’m glad because big AAA sequels rarely do that.

It takes a few hours to get there, but you get a crew of weird friends who talk to you about stuff OTHER than lore exposition, and there’s frequent scenes just about small character growth moments. That’s the biggest departure from the first game, where characters would traumadump at you without warning, and make no further attempt to win you over. New characters in Death Stranding 2 do still have these insane backstories, but those usually come after getting to know them for a bit. It feels more earned.

Gameplay improvements are smaller: all your progress is reset so you have to re-unlock ziplines and stuff, but everything is upgraded slightly. There are new tools and guns, which are all at least fun to try once or twice. The world map is also much cooler, it’s traversable without loading zones, has more verticality and biome diversity. Areas are obviously crafted to create gameplay challenges, like mountain ridges or chokepoints set up in valleys. Routing decisions are more impactful, though it’s still easy to plow through underprepared. Some lategame optional deliveries were definitely hard to LLL rank, but the main game was pretty unchallenging, even on the hardest difficulty.

New to the world are mines, which will generate resources for you, and monorails that connect them to cities. They’re more helpful than normal ziplines since you can ship cargo and vehicles on it, I used them a lot to juggle around optional deliveries. Of course, you also have the DHV Magellan, where you can just fast travel cargo to their destination, but that gets you a bad rank. This is a good compromise to let you fast travel with equipment and vehicles, though it’s easy to accidentally mess up a delivery.

The side content has more variety, too. There are lots of completely optional shelters to connect, sometimes only discoverable by finding random cargo in the world. VR missions are back too, and less of an afterthought.

Everything in Death Stranding 2 is a big improvement from the first game, it’s really easy to recommend playing it if you’re already happy with Death Stranding 1. I can’t imagine anyone liking 1 and, in good faith, disliking 2. And if you didn’t like 1, but still liked the gameplay, then I would encourage you to try the sequel. For anyone else, it’s not meant to be for you, and that’s okay. Death Stranding is now a series, and has an identity, and is firmly separated from expectations of being a Metal Gear successor.

That sounds like a 2/3 score to me, it knows what it’s good at and gives you a lot of that. Maybe not worth buying a PS5 for, though. Now I gotta figure out what to do with this stupid hunk of white plastic.