Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (2025)

The first Death Stranding was a surprise slam dunk for me. I picked it up out of curiosity while working my way through the Metal Gear Solid games and it captivated me with its bleak apocalyptic world and unorthodox yet oddly satisfying gameplay. I consider it among my all time favorites now, in spite of its glaring flaws. So my wishlist for the sequel was simply that I wanted fun new environments to deliver my little packages in and another entertaining story to keep me chugging along all the while. I can't help but feel Death Stranding 2: On the Beach kind of missed the mark here.

This game is big. Well, maybe not that big put alongside some of the other massive open world games we have these days. But it's still very big. Naturally a sequel is going to aim to be bigger than its predecessor. But one of the key things about the first game is how intentional the design of the environment was. You were free to explore, sure, but it was designed such that most players would end up naturally funneled through certain passages, which allowed devs to target a particular experience. The journey to Wind Farm is notorious (in a good way, I think!) because of the early game difficulty spike it provides.

This sequel aimed to be so much larger in physical scope that it left behind this idea of crafting specific experiences in exchange for theoretical freedom to approach a destination from virtually any direction. The result is a world that feels huge but is often boring to traverse and worse, feels flat. In a series where the primary gameplay loop is walking over and through natural obstacles, it feels like a catastrophic failure to have so much flat terrain to traverse. It keeps the player from interacting with the core walking mechanics. It's less interesting to look at, in spite of the impressive graphical fidelity on display. Also, it provides too little challenge.

In fact much of this game has something of a difficulty balance problem. I started my playthrough on Brutal, which at the time was the hardest difficulty, but it didn't take long to notice that I no longer needed to give much attention to the actual traversal. Where before it was a game of planning routes, weighing how much cargo I could handle without losing balance, and carefully maneuvering over the unfriendly terrain, I found instead that most of the time the most direct way to a goal was in fact also the best one. I rarely ever had to decide to leave a package behind because Sam couldn't handle more weight and I'd spend sometimes 10 minutes at a time holding up on my joystick with minor adjustments to get around the occasional rock before hitting my destination successfully. The sights were gorgeous, but man did I want to feel like I was doing something.

Now to be fair, eventually you have to climb the snowy mountain, which did help the back end of the game feel more exciting. But I couldn't help but notice that this was exactly the same thing the first game did. It felt a lot less novel the second time around. But hey, I was glad to get something more engaging regardless.

The tedium of area traversal is where the combat encounters should shine. They do indeed offer a change of pace to typical delivery gameplay and I appreciate them for that. The enemy camp infiltration missions actually feel pretty good. Stealth is enjoyable and the eventual rush from getting caught and chased by tens of soldiers is great. The game clearly wanted to shift focus a bit more onto combat, which is driven home by the overwhelming quantity of weapon types. The problem is that the repetitive BT bosses from the first game are back in spades and feel somehow like even bigger damage sponges. Every single BT miniboss (they can show up randomly in the field, mind you) also has a one shot kill move (even on casual difficulty) that doesn't provide nearly enough warning or opportunity to dodge beforehand due to the ever-present tar under Sam's feet inhibiting his movement. While hunting for my platinum trophy I grew accustomed to anticipating when a delivery would "surprise" me with a miniboss and just cranked down the difficulty to get it over with, turning it back up afterwards.

The first game offered a cast of lovable oddballs as they tried to gain a foothold in a bleak world. It became overly convoluted near the end and fumbled its landing somewhat as a result but I had a good time with it and love the foundation it set down for the game's setting. On the Beach must have really loved that plot, because it seems hellbent on aping most of its trajectory. Most of the returning cast feel like shadows of their former selves, in my opinion, and while the new characters are a lot of fun, the game does a shockingly poor job of tying up all the loose strands it dangles in front of the player. The credits rolling elicited more of a "That's it?" from me than any feeling of conclusion. It's tough to articulate without really tearing the whole thing apart, which would take forever, but suffice to say I think this game is totally unsure of what it actually wanted to focus on. There are themes of processing grief, an odd love subplot, a sprinkle of 'cycle of vengeance', and some other random stuff that doesn't quite fit. It's all just tossed together and just doesn't work.

So, to quote the game's own tagline, "Should we have connected?"

I can't say I truly know. The story doesn't seem all that concerned with this topic, so that's a dead end. I think the experience was ultimately worth having, but I can't say I'm not disappointed. New mechanics like chiral creatures and natural disasters also felt underbaked, which leaves me feeling like this didn't add much that I actually appreciated. The platinum trophy was a pretty tedious journey too, which really dragged this down even further for me. When I crave more Death Stranding, I think I'll just go play the first one again.

P.S.: The Coffin Board is an excellent addition though and I wish I could have that in the first game.

4.5/5

Death Stranding 2 takes almost everything from the first game and makes it better. The graphics look incredible, there are new toys to use for deliveries, new types of enemies, new mechanics I don't want to spoil here that don't get introduced until almost halfway through the game! Two big things that were downgraded in my opinion this time around was the story, and the diversity of the environment. The story was a continuation of the first, but with the training wheels taken off. It's wild how someone can come up with this massive, vast story with an incredible vision but at the same time name a character who is trapped in a doll "dollman". It's as if he puts all his creativity into the world building, but runs out by the time it comes to naming the characters. As in typical Kojima fashion as well, you get drip fed the story throughout the game until the very end where you get almost full length movie cutscenes that explain (kind of?) everything.

The game is still great, and the moment to moment gameplay is addicting as hell. I would put on a movie, podcast, or sporting event and just go around building roads, ziplines, other forms of transportation for hours. I'd almost argue a third of my playtime was doing just that. The game does let you go back into the world and do more deliveries and other side quests after finishing the main story, which you'll definitely want to do as there is so much content to this game. I think I only maxed out relationships with 3 or 4 bases throughout my play time, despite the higher a relationship the better gear you will get. Unfortunately though some of that can make the end game too easy.

There's a heavier focus on combat this time around, and much less focus on the BTs. They are not nearly as intimidating as they were in the first game. You also very quickly get so many options for dispatching the various enemies (sniper rifle OP) that the only 2 or 3 times I did was either from getting caught in the terrain via a glitch, or something dumb that I did. This is not a difficult game by any means, but still a very enjoyable one.

Death Stranding 2 doubles down on everything and comes out the other side significantly worse than its predecessor. The final stretch is as psychotic as the first stretch is engaging, but these strong bookends don't make up for the rest of the game. The added emphasis on combat is absolutely baffling; the illusion of rugged exploration is traduced by easily-accessible pathways, and the story goes fucking nowhere for 40 hours of a 50 hour game.

Kojima retreats into previous ideas without really iterating on (or MGS2 exploding) them in any meaningful way. After the fiftieth hour of watching Sam staring blankly at expositing theme-dispensers, I started to question why I ever liked this guy in the first place.

I don't know how to finish this. DS2 is a confounding game, and I still don't think it needs to exist, but it does, and I'm glad. I think.

Let me preface by saying that DS1 caught me completely off guard, as it did for many people, I presume. It's not the same feeling here.

After a short intro, we get in the flow of what feels like more missions from DS1. Some of them are really boring, and you get bombarded by tools you don't really need but are fun to use and ooze with style (shout out to the BT pokeball). I was a bit disappointed by the enemy diversity for a game that's supposedly more oriented toward action. Sure, we get introduced to the Ghost mechs faction, but they mostly feel like human characters in suits except for the elite ones. It would probably have been better if they didn't use guns.

But then from time to time you get some wonderful moments where you need to be more careful, or you need to prepare for extreme conditions of all kinds. This is where the game really shines, the weather system is a wonder with its sandstorms, clouds, fires and some more .... out there atmospheric disturbances. I'm not usually very impressed by graphics, but it's impossible to play this game without realizing that Sony cooked really hard with this engine and that DS2 is probably one of the most visually impressive games out there with Avatar. The first Nirvana mission especially is really one of those moments where you have to sit and realize how far gaming tech has come.

Last but not least, the story, and here it's definitely more digest, probably because the most complex topics are already introduced in DS1, and for sure it doesn't seem as inventive because it's the same world, the same lore, and the overall narrative structure of the game feels maybe a bit too close. But damn, the cast and cutscenes make it so charming. Even the dialog for the side missions with some of the NPCs are really cool (big up for the Musician and the Animal Shelter staff). I got pretty burned out by side stuff mid-game though and tunneled through the second part and was rewarded by the most epic ending sequence ever.

I'd say that I disagree with the take that if you didn't enjoy DS1 you might still like DS2. Sure the pace is a bit less "slow burny" mostly because you get vehicules very early, but it's still the same elements that make it outstanding, creative direction, super immersive graphics, soundtrack that makes it very chill to just sit back and deliver packages on a sunday morning. And most of all, some really intense highs that make the game memorable. I'm just really glad that there are still games out there that manage to get such a big budget for amazing cutscenes that are artistically amazing. And if I have to drive through Australia outback for 30 hours to get there, it's well worth it in my opinion.

I didn't had a good time with this one.

I liked the first DS a lot, it felt unique and bizarre. But this one is just more of the same. Kojima is paying homage to himself, but instead of feeling like playful nods, it feels like this 'great auteur' is running out of ideas."

Read my review of Death Stranding 2: On The Beach on GamerFocus (in spanish).

It seems like I'm really going against the critical consensus on this one.