Man, I have been loving Death Stranding 2. It’s my game of the year currently! I have been real excited to write about it too. Slight problem though, I haven’t actually finished the game yet… Normally, I like to finish a game before reviewing it. I just feel it’s more responsible to experience a product completely before reviewing it or giving your take on it. But I also like playing games at my own pace, especially with Death Stranding! It took me a long while to finish the original despite how much I loved it. At the same time though, I really want to talk about it here on the blog! So feel free to take this review with a grain of salt but I’m going to go ahead and talk about my experience with Death Stranding 2 and why I’ve been loving it so far!

Death Stranding 2 is a game by legendary game developer Hideo Kojima, a fact I’m sure most people who have heard about this game are well aware of given how much Kojima loves to promote his stuff and how very “Kojima” the game itself is. Which is to say the game is weird. Something it shares with the original Death Stranding too! In fact, it’s kind of surprising how weird the game still is.

For those who don’t know, the original Death Stranding was met with some mixed reception at launch. It didn’t get reviews calling it bad exactly but the reviews were far from glowing, which people were expected given this was the big game Kojima had been hyping up for so long, the first game from his brand new solo studio after parting ways with Konami! It was expected to make a big splash so it was shocking to see how many people weren’t feeling the title when it launched. There were a couple things that contributed to this though. The main thing was a lot of people weren’t sure what to expect from the game. Kojima loves to keep his games in the shadows, often times giving very vague and weird teasers. It’s something he loves to do and often times it works wonders for him. Especially with games like Metal Gear Solid V and Silent Hills, both games that were originally revealed as different games. However, those were both games in existing franchises, people knew what to expect from them. Death Stranding on the other hand was something entirely new and according to Kojima himself, was going to be a genre defining experience. So when the game launched and it was a delivery game about community and players helping each other out without actually playing together, people were a little blindsided.

It was honestly upsetting to see how polarizing the game was for someone like me who really enjoyed the game! Even though I also understood where people were coming from. Beyond just being surprised by how the game played, there are aspects of the original that understandably turned people away. Things like the combat, finicky driving, repetitive missions and all that were very much flaws with the game and not just people not clicking with the game play style.

And while the game did eventually find fans and win over some of its detractors, I was still super surprised when Kojima announced the second game from his new studio would be a sequel! I would have completely understood if he felt like simply moving on from Death Stranding after the original response to it but nope, Kojima clearly had something to prove with this sequel. He wanted to prove that this game play style and genre could work and didn’t have to be something that only a few people enjoyed.

With that in mind, Death Stranding 2 is the kind of sequel that doesn’t try and reinvent itself. Rather it refines and improves on everything the original game set out to do!

Now before I get into the review proper I’ll go ahead and say this, this review is going to mainly focus on the game play of Death Stranding 2 and not so much the story. This is mainly because I haven’t finished the game and it’s pretty hard to comment on a story I don’t know the end of! That and the game is still pretty new so it would be best to avoid spoilers since I want this review to try and get people to give this game a go, especially if said people passed on the original! What I will say about the story is this, Death Stranding 2 takes place less than a year after the original game and sees Sam, the main character, going around Australia in an attempt to connect everyone there together the same way he did America in the first game! With that out of the way, let’s talk about that game play!

Just like the original, Death Stranding 2 is all about making deliveries and traveling across a vast land connecting people. The core game play is very much the same but like I was saying, now it is more refined for a far more enjoyable and less repetitive experience. The first big change in this regard is that you unlock more tools and structures a lot faster this time around! They aren’t slowly fed to you the same way they were in the original which is good since this game has many more structures this time around. I felt like I unlocked most of what the first game had to offer fairly quickly. From proper weapons to different boot types to zip lines! The game gives you these things more quickly than the original so it can make way for some of the newer features. Before getting to those, though, lets talk the more refined way deliveries and orders are handled.

While Death Stranding 2 handles deliveries in very much the same way as the original, there are a few key differences that really improve things this time around! First, most facilities don’t have nearly as many orders from the get go. For someone like me who likes to finish all the orders from a facility before moving on to the next, this was a very welcome change. Not only that, repeating orders works differently now too. In the original, you could repeat orders back to back as long as you wanted, coming back to the same facility to grab the same order you just finished to do it again. Now, orders have a cool down and take time before you can repeat them again! I like this since it keeps players from grinding up facility levels and keeps them moving rather than staying in one loop of repeat deliveries. Now that may seem like a bad thing at first, like grinding facility levels is going to take much longer. However, in Death Stranding 2, I’ve found that facility levels go up much faster! Without really trying and grinding for any of them, I have most facilities up to three or four stars. And while I have yet to get any up to the max of five stars, I can’t imagine it’ll be nearly as hard as it was in the original game. Once again, this is a change I feel was made to make sure players are moving and continuing the game instead of just hanging around in one area for an extended period of time. Plus, this’ll help players unlock even more features that much faster! Which is always a good motivator to keep playing in any game.

That being said, grinding facilities wasn’t the only thing that kept players in one area in the first game. There was also building structures and gathering resources for that! In the original game, I made sure to build every single road way. Getting resources for those road builders was a long and usually annoying process but always felt amazing to complete. So I was both excited and a little worried when I saw these road ways make a return in Death Stranding 2. On one hand I get to help so many players all over again by helping to build these roads! On the other hand, I have to get all those materials again… It was a very bitter sweet moment. However, after playing for awhile, this soon turned into just a sweet moment when I realized how material gathering has changed!

In the first game, the best method of getting more materials was leveling up facilities. Each time you got up to a new star, they’d give you more materials and let you store more inside said facility. While that is still very much the case in Death Stranding 2, they have now introduced a brand new way to get materials. Mines!

Throughout Australia, there are different mining structures that you can rebuild. Only a couple of which are required to progress while most are optional. Once rebuilt though, you can spend some of your chiral to make quite a lot of materials! What kind of materials you get depends on the mine in question. For example, the first mine you fix will give you ceramics! Given that chiral is pretty plentiful throughout the world, these mines give a very reliable way of getting materials and don’t require you to grind a ton in order to finish those roads.

This easier method of getting resources is extra important this time around since you won’t just be needing lots of resources for the roads, you’ll also be wanting to fix up the monorail lines! Tied to a fair amount of the mines, in fact, are monorail lines. These rail lines often travel to different areas that the roads don’t go down making them pretty important to fix up along with fixing up the roads. Not only that, they are pretty perfect for transferring materials around given how much you can load up on to these rail lines. Sam can of course ride on them too and bring along not only any gear he has but also any vehicles as well! However, this isn’t fast travel or anything like that. You are along for the ride! No skipping the trip by holding a button or pressing pause, you have to watch the whole thing. While I’m sure a lot of people will complain about basically just having to sit there and watch all this for literal minutes, I honestly understand the choice. Using the monorail is super convenient and can make certain large orders a breeze. If you could easily transport all that cargo and get there insanely fast, it would be a no brainer to use it. There has to be some kind of limitation in place and having that limitation be a long wait seems fitting for me given the kind of game this is. So yeah, it is kind of annoying, but I hope they never let you skip the animation of the ride!

All that being said, Death Stranding 2 does have a fast travel system and much like everything else I’ve brought up about the game, it’s better than the original game’s fast travel too!

In the original Death Stranding you fast travel between certain facilities by speaking with Fragile. She had the ability to jump between places and bring Sam along with her! This was a feature I almost never used though. The draw back of this system was that Fragile could bring only Sam with her. Meaning all the gear you currently had, and your deliveries, had to be left behind. To me, I always preferred to just drive to wherever I needed to go and pick up some orders I probably already did for the way there. So while I don’t think the feature was useless exactly, it was one I almost never used. Which is why I am really happy to say that Death Stranding 2‘s fast travel is one that I have used so much more already!

There actually are a couple of methods to fast travel in Death Stranding 2 but the first one you’ll be getting, and the most useful one in my opinion, is moving around with the DHV Magellan. The Magellan is basically your home base, something you didn’t really have in the first game. In that game you’d often rest at different facilities to progress the story from time to time. And while you can still do that, you’ll always have a permanent place to rest with the Magellan. Not only that, you can have the Magellan travel around to different points on the map whether or not you’re in it too. But the most important part of all this is the fact that you can travel with the Magellan without having to leave your equipment or deliveries behind! This had made moving around the map and transferring materials so much easier which is really nice given how big the map feels. And while you can complete deliveries this way, you will have your grade on that order docked by using the Magellan. Which makes sense given how easy most orders would be if you could simply teleport back and forth with the press of a button.

We’re not done with improvements from the first game yet though! The next one I want to talk about is a pretty important one. And it’s about the game’s combat! Combat wasn’t exactly bad in the original Death Stranding but it wasn’t exactly fun either. And that was partly by design! More often than not, you want to be stealthy and sneak around rather than facing anyone head on. And the most common places to run into combat are at the enemy camps, in both the original and the sequel. And I am very happy to say that they’ve improved both the combat and the camps in Death Stranding 2!

In both games, there are camps of armed enemies looking to steal your cargo. Generally they keep to themselves in their own camps and can be avoided for the most part. But some orders will task you with going into these camps and getting some lost cargo back. In the original game, I very rarely ever did these orders. I’d usually do them once and then never again. Going through the enemy camps always felt like a slog. The stealth was really slow and the camps always felt way too big, making them very hard to completely clear out without ever being caught. So I was really happy to see that Death Stranding 2 made these camps and how they work, much more enjoyable.

First, enemy camps aren’t nearly as packed as they were in the first game. There are still plenty of guards around but it no longer feels impossible to stealth around all of them. Not only that, the layout of the camps I’ve taken on so far have made much more sense when it comes to taking them on quietly. It’s still a challenge, don’t get me wrong, but I can form a plan much more easily by looking at the guards around and how they move. In the first game, it felt like such a chore to wait around for the right moment each time. Second, you’re given more tools to take on these camps early on. The game actually starts you out with a stun gun that can knock out most early game enemies with a single shot! Given that you had to use your bare hands for a lot of the early game encounters in the first game, this was a great change! Especially since enemies start being able to work around that stun gun so it’s not going to make everything easy from the get go. And lastly, taking out camps completely feels much more rewarding this time around!

When you’d clear a camp in the original, you’d have sometime to come and go as you pleased before the enemies would return in full force. This made taking out camps not feel so great given that all your work would be undone after some in game time had passed. This is not how it works in the sequel! In Death Stranding 2 when you fully take down a camp, you will be told that camp’s threat level has decreased. What this means is, when enemies do return to the camp, there will be less of them than there were before! Making repeat trips much easier and giving more of a reason to take on each camp you come across. That being said, they will not remained in the weakened state forever. If you leave a camp alone for awhile, it’ll slowly grow back up to it’s full strength again. I feel like this is a much better system than the original game! Not only is it far more rewarding to take out a camp but camps can still be a threat again if left unattended to. Because of this, I am not really bothered by the fact that a lot of the camps are put in more troubling places, like over road ways. Because if I really want to make that road safer, all I have to do is beat the camp and then it’ll remain relatively safe for much longer. Plus if I want to keep it safe, I can simply take on the two or three guards that reappear after I lowered its threat level. This also means that I no longer groan whenever there’s an order that involves going to a camp. If I wanted to, I could take out the camp before even taking the order and be confident that I’ll be able to handle it even if enemies come back. And this is all on top of the combat feeling better!

While I didn’t hate the shooting of the original game, I totally understand why some people did. A lot of times it just didn’t feel good. And even then there weren’t many options when it came to the combat. Right off the bat, you are given far more options in Death Stranding 2 on top of the shooting feeling better! Like I mentioned before, you’re given a stun gun at the start of the game. This takes up a new equipment slot, the side arm holster! You’ll only have the stun gun for that holster for a bit, but eventually you’ll be unlocking new pistols to slot in there. From basic pistols, to grenade launching ones, to even silenced tranquilizing ones! Not only that, other weaponry has seen some changes too. Like having shotguns that can fire grenades and what not. Not to mention the introduction of a sniper rifle! With all these options, it’s also good to know that shooting itself feels a lot tighter too. It feels like the game is assisting a little more this time around than it was in the original which I think is for the best. I will say, melee combat hasn’t really changed too much either beyond also getting more options! Like using stun rods and such.

And while I didn’t have too many issues with the shooting in the original so I’m probably not the best person to comment on the improvements, I do feel like there was more care taken this time when it came to the shooting and combat in general. Combat is no longer something I dread. While I still avoid it since I’d rather not risk any cargo I’m carrying from being hurt, I don’t instantly reload a save the moment I get into combat like I would in the original.

With all that being said, there is still far more I am loving about this game! But I’d mostly be repeating myself from the post I did talking about why I loved the original game! Like I said up top, Death Stranding 2 isn’t reinventing the series, it’s the kind of sequel that aims to improve on the original, to fix up what people had problems with while keeping and improving on what people already loved about it. And I think that is perfect!

There is so much I love about Death Stranding, so much that’s unique about it. But there was also a lot of things holding it back for most people. So it makes me very happy to see the sequel not only listening to the feedback from the original but also being rewarded for doing so. Death Stranding 2 has been seeing far more glowing reviews than the original game, showing just how great the original game always was and how much it and its concept can shine when you sand off those rougher edges. The game is still very much a Kojima game too. It’s got all his amazing weirdness still fully intact while also being far more approachable for a wider audience.

So I am really hoping more people give this game a chance, especially if they weren’t fans of the original. Even just half way through and I think this is my game of the year. And if that changes, I’ll be sure to make a follow up review!

But those are just my thoughts! What are some of yours? Did you play the original Death Stranding? Are you thinking of giving the sequel a try? I’d love to hear your thoughts so don’t be shy!

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