In the quintessential folk protest song “Blowin’ in the Wind” — considered by many as one of the greatest English-language tracks of all time — singer-songwriter Bob Dylan famously opined: “How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man?” Of course, the then-21-year-old Dylan was being rhetorical and talking about something else entirely. But I found myself reflecting on that line — somewhat literally — as I traversed the endless expanse of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach.
Death Stranding 2: On The Beach
Rs 4,999
What Is Good?
- Striking visual world
- Expansive, ambitious scope
- Flexible mission approach
- Deeper combat options
- Customisable vehicles
What Is Bad?
- Repetitive gameplay loop
- Tedious traversal mechanics
- Sparse, disconnected story
- Inventory-heavy progression
- Overreliance on player grind
As the name reveals, the new PlayStation 5 game — written, directed and designed by celebrated auteur Hideo Kojima — is a direct follow-up to Death Stranding. That game debuted in late 2019, four months prior to the global lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and its themes and narrative felt prescient in retrospect, serving as a stark comparison to the isolated life we all lived in that period. Even more so in a country like India, given that the inhabitants of Death Stranding rely on “porters” to risk their lives and make vital deliveries. Sounds eerily similar. Somehow, without ever experiencing India’s brutal and exploitative hyperlocal gig economy culture, Kojima delivered an exacting representation of the industry’s ills and pitfalls.
Funnily enough, Death Stranding 2 shares another facet with that world it could’ve done without. As with India’s struggling delivery workers who were labelled COVID “heroes”, the game’s protagonist, Sam Bridges (Norman Reedus), too, is labelled a hero by everyone around him. Everywhere you go, people keep telling Sam how amazing he is and how he’s doing a great job linking up the world. The issue is moralistic in the former, but narrative in the latter case. Set aside the worthiness of his actions — on that count, Sam has nothing on his real-life counterparts — if you need to hype up your hero so often, all that does is that it displays a lack of confidence in what you’re showing. Kojima feels the audience wouldn’t believe Sam is a hero if he doesn’t communicate it via words often enough.
All Walk and Not Enough Talk
The bigger issue, though, ultimately, is the gameplay itself. To return to my opening literal Dylan lyric parallel, Sam must walk road after road. (To be precise, there are no roads — building them is actually part of Sam’s job too. Death Stranding 2 loves to make you work for it, so you’ll end up walking the same route repeatedly, in a bid to gather the resources you need to make those roads.) For what it’s worth, you do get access to vehicles, but none of them go fast enough to ever make travelling feel not like a chore. The end result is a game that’s purposefully and intentionally slow. Death Stranding 2 wants you to come down to its pace and function on its terms.
And I would’ve no qualms with that, were it rewarding elsewhere.
But the story is threadbare and just doesn’t give you enough to sink into. And because you’re spending so much time out in the wild, travelling back and forth between one area and another, the story cutscenes feel like few and far between. (This is a good time to bring up the fact that I, naturally, haven’t finished the main story. The end-game content is estimated to arrive after 30 hours, but it will no doubt take me much longer given the game’s pacing. Sony explicitly asked reviewers to call it out, and moreover, pressed us to not issue a score to our Death Stranding 2 review if we couldn’t get to the end of the tale. That’s a slippery slope request, in my opinion.)
To me, it feels like Death Stranding 2 has opted for the ill-suited pick when it comes to the available options in the audio-visual entertainment bouquet. It’s a game that would function better as a movie. (Though even that wouldn’t solve the writing problems. I’m curious to see how the planned A24 film adaptation of the first game — in the works for a 2027 release — deals with that.) Maybe it’s a result of Kojima’s background, or maybe it’s exactly what he wants it to be.
Same Stranding, but in New Lands
Death Stranding 2 arrives on a planet Earth that has more or less forgotten the lessons of the pandemic. But the game’s world — the sequel is set 11 months later — is still very much reeling from its own titular catastrophe. The invisible creatures of varying sizes, dubbed Beached Things, still roam the land. If you come into contact with them, it’ll cause a “voidout” — essentially an atom bomb-level explosion. Last time around, Sam went west across the post-apocalyptic remains of the United States of America, linking the remaining remote colonies and helping to salvage what is now called the United Cities of America. Along the way, Sam developed a bond with Lou, a premature baby he carried, and left active porter service at the conclusion of Death Stranding to live off the grid.
But his isolated existence is interrupted by the arrival of old friend Fragile (Léa Seydoux), who presses him to take a new assignment: head south into Mexico. Why? To do more of the same — expand the network and tie the remote areas that are suffering without access to crucial technology. Of course, this means having to leave behind baby Lou, now out of the pod and living her best life. That’s just the beginning of the Death Stranding 2 journey, though. As those who’ve seen a trailer or two likely already know, Kojima’s successor to the 2019 original takes Sam on a much grander mission. While the UCA is now fine and dandy, the rest of the world is not. Following Mexico, Sam and Fragile — along with new guy Tarman (Mad Max director George Miller) — make a push into Australia.
Getting There Is Half the Hassle
There’s no change to the Death Stranding 2 gameplay down under. You’re still walking from place to place, delivering vital tech, lost cargo, and all sorts of associated items that are valuable to the inhabitants. Yes, you do have access to vehicles — some can carry a lot more than Sam can on his own — and you can customise them as well. (In keeping with the game’s everything-is-manual ethos, you must drive your vehicle back into your ship’s garage each time or you risk abandoning it in the wild, where it could go into disrepair thanks to environmental factors. I found this especially annoying after reaching Australia. While your ship automatically transfers to the new forward location whenever you link up a new location, your vehicle — in case you’d taken one out and were unable to get it to the new base — is left behind and must be manually retrieved. Ugh.)
To help your vehicles move faster or cross into unexplored areas, you can bring back roads and bridges, and go deep enough into the game, you can construct a full-on monorail system, allowing you to transport a lot of resources from one place to another in a slightly more seamless fashion. (Death Stranding 2 uses these as incentives to get you to complete side missions. The more you tick off, the more resources you get access to that you need to build roads and the assorted stuff.)
But there will always be places where vehicles can’t go. And annoyingly, on-foot traversal isn’t always intuitive. With the help of the odradek — the sensor attached to Sam’s backpack that can scan the environment — Death Stranding 2 allows you to see the land in a series of blue, yellow and red markers, representing safe and unsafe landing points for Sam’s feet. The game opens with Sam walking across hills, ascending and descending on cliffs. So, when a mission presented a series of tall obstacles between me and my checkpoint, I tried to recreate that feeling of walking across cliff edges. But it proved to be a nightmare. That’s because Death Stranding 2 doesn’t make it easy — you can never tell what can be climbed and what cannot. Those coloured markers that appear after scanning can never be fully relied upon.
In Death Stranding 2, You Are What You Deliver
Interestingly, unlike the original that stressed stealth over everything, Death Stranding 2 allows you to engage in open, direct combat. (Yes, you can still avoid enemy encounters altogether in some missions, though in others, you’ll need to perform silent takedowns to grab what you need and fulfil primary objectives.) There’s a greater variety of weapons you can deploy too — depending on how loud or quiet you prefer to be. Naturally, when it comes to combat, humans are more interesting to deal with. Save for specific missions, BTs are largely passive and not fun to deal with. Chuck a couple of blood grenades — a concoction that’s usually most effective against them — from distance and you can take care of most except for the boss level ones.
How you approach each mission — stealth vs all-out — determines how Sam fares in the game. The character’s attributes are drawn from how you deliver packages and the actions you take along your journey. If you prefer to slink across the wasteland to your target, your stealth score will naturally increase much faster than, say, your combat score. That said, you can self-determine Sam’s capabilities to an extent. Levelling up also grants you points, which you can use in the Death Stranding 2 skill tree that’s divided across combat, stealth, porter, and servicemanship. That could mean improving your scanner, granting weapon aim assistance, or helping you with your cargo, among many other choices.
Weight the Real Enemy, the Burden the Point
But let’s be honest — it’s not combat and building roads that will occupy most of your time and energy. It’s inventory management. As before, the core gameplay mechanism rests on making deliveries, which involves navigating terrain while balancing the weight of the cargo. On some level, Kojima seems to be making a meta point about the art form in general. Most video games, since time immemorial, allow you to “carry” dozens of items — be it coins, weapons, trinkets, and whatnot of all shapes and sizes — without impacting the character’s movement. You can retrieve any of these objects at any given point and effortlessly “store” them back into giant, invisible pockets. It’s accepted as video game logic, though, yes, it’s no doubt entirely impractical and nonsensical.
In Death Stranding, as in the 2019 original, you must strategise what you wish to carry and what is prudent to leave behind. Carry a lot and you will be slowed down, or worse, can get spotted even in tall grass — thanks to the humongous size of the cargo — when you’re trying to hide from enemies. Carry too much and you risk not only falling over but also damaging the precious cargo you’re meant to deliver. Damage to the contents of the cargo reduces the points you get for delivery, and too much damage can result in the cargo breaking into pieces and an unsuccessful delivery.
All these cargo weight restrictions are a drag on the gameplay. You’re forced to essentially retrace steps, to revisit places you’ve been previously, to get stuff you need for the thing you’re trying to build. Building materials like metals, ceramics and special alloys are sparsely available, scattered across, and “generated” as you complete more missions, which in turn results in even more runs. Vehicles do help in this regard, as they can carry a lot more and take that physical load off Sam’s back, but vehicles have their own recharging requirements in Death Stranding 2, so battery life is another variable you must keep in mind.
Big Questions, Blurry Answers
If the gameplay is going to be monotonous and repetitive, then that just puts all the pressure on the story. Except in Death Stranding 2, you spend hours between each minuscule cutscene that links together the barebones narrative. It doesn’t help that the story feels a little disjointed in places, as you go from one chapter to another, with the emotions of the previous one not always carrying over into the next. There are errors of judgment elsewhere. For instance, the game’s biggest emotional moment happens offscreen and is communicated to the protagonist via a mix of narration and flashback. While it’s tied to Sam’s decisions, you don’t feel the impact of it as it doesn’t happen in front of you.
Put all those bits together, and what you’ve got with Death Stranding 2 is a — continuation of a — puzzling little thing. Kojima, the guy behind some of the most propulsive action-adventure titles in history, has spent the past decade of his storied career on a couple of curious ventures. The two Death Stranding titles seem to actively push back at core video game elements and the seams of what constitutes “action” and “adventure”. Almost as if Kojima wishes to question where the video gaming industry has led itself. And though the questions might be worth raising, I don’t believe the answers being delivered are close to being fully crystallised gems.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is released on Thursday, June 26 on PlayStation 5 worldwide.
Akhil Arora is an OpenCritic “top critic” and former The Game Awards juror who has been reporting on video games since 2015. He has written for NDTV and SlashFilm.
