I didn’t expect a review code to overshadow a console launch, but here I am, 100 hours into Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, obsessively driving from point to point in the Australian outback. There’s little to play for beyond the improved grade of my delivery and the promise of upgraded infrastructure, but regardless, I am determined to keep on keeping on while my Switch 2 gathers dust.
Kojima Productions’ latest postmodern odyssey begins in Mexico before heading to Australia, where Sam Porter Bridges — played with stoic brilliance by Norman Reedus — charts a path across the shattered antipodean continent, delivering parcels to isolated bunker towns while weaving out of the way of road-crossing Wombats, Armed Survivalists and Beached Things, afterlife tar beasts with an umbilical connection to the other side.
Along the way, you’ll bathe in hot springs, fight massive worm robots, and contribute materials towards monorails to ease the flow of cargo, because, and I’m not sure if you know this, but Australia is quite large. Yet despite the sheer scale of its setting, Death Stranding 2 is much better at onboarding than its predecessor, which tended to divide players and stop them from cresting the hillside into post-apocalyptic delivery driver Valhalla.
In Death Stranding 2, you get access to vehicles and roads much quicker alongside an expanded offensive arsenal, including rifles, launchers and a boomerang powered by blood. There’s still threat looming at every turn, including all-new earthquakes and inclement weather events, but it’s more manageable to work through this time, which makes sense, given that the protagonist has already done this once before. Often, my worst enemy was the stray rock that I’d crash my pickup into while vibing a bit too hard to the Music Player, which is stocked with earworms from Caroline Polachek and Daichi Miura.
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Further bolstering this pleasant acclimatisation process is the addition of a skill tree in Death Stranding 2, which opens up as you grow the Australian network for suspicious benefactors APAS, and provides you with welcome upgrades like emergency vehicle charging systems and a longer window for other players to like the structures and signs you can place in Death Stranding 2’s MMO-lite open world.
As expected, the ability to share Australia with scores of real players and create infrastructure together is the unique lynchpin of this superb sequel. As well as the bridges, ladders and ziplines that dominated the landscape in the first game, we have Cargo Catapults, fast-travel stations and my favourite, Jump Ramps, which launch Sam and his vehicles into the sky. Optional button presses allow you to perform distance-extending backflips, SSX Tricky-style.
The risk vs reward of helping other players with structure and elimination requests has been balanced carefully so that it doesn’t typically interrupt your delivery flow, meaning that it’s pretty easy to take a second to send that shotgun you didn’t need to another world and make somebody’s day. This sense of greater open-world cohesion is something that pervades Death Stranding 2. It is a far more well-rounded and polished game, with astonishingly mocapped animations and impressive collision detection, even when you’re riding tar currents on a coffin skateboard. There are moments where a midnight base clearance can feel as clean and satisfying as, dare I say it, The Phantom Pain.
Perhaps the boldest addition to the game is the DHV Magellan, a flying fortress run by a crew of famous faces that Sam can use to fast-travel around the map (when it’s not stuck in the mud for narrative reasons). The Magellan is where you’ll become acquainted with Death Stranding 2’s celebrity ensemble cast, including Captain Tarman, played by George Miller, and Shioli Kutsuna’s Rainy, a pregnant pharmakon who can manipulate the weather (and your tear ducts, with her deeply moving backstory). Lea Seydoux’s Fragile is back alongside franchise villain Higgs, who has morphed into even more of a zealous nihilist following the events of the first game. Higgs’s ability to jumpscare a mission with a brilliantly challenging boss battle provides Troy Baker’s character with ample screentime, and the actor is in incredible form here, running the gamut of emotions across Death Stranding 2’s thirty-to-sixty-hour campaign, depending on how you play it.
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But beyond chiral crystals and backpack-busting loads of alloys, it’s these emotions that Death Stranding 2 so deftly trades in. I can’t get into the weeds for obvious reasons, but the way the DHV Magellan solidifies as an isola of hope for misfit souls with quotidian and supernatural problems is persistently tear-jerking – and compounded by the introduction of Elle Fanning’s Tomorrow. This mysteriously powerful vision is exhumed from a tar-laden sarcophagus and encounters the ruined landscape with endearing naivete.
Death Stranding 2 does well to pair its big-beat blockbuster action sequences with a quiet and profound undercurrent of personal turmoil for protagonist Sam, whose tough shell is yet to fully crack following the events of the first game. Kojima and co.’s writing goes long on the fleeting satisfaction so painfully attached to success, neocolonialism and the enduring impossibility of grief. Fatih Akin’s Dollman hangs from your belt throughout the adventure and offers welcome perspective, comic relief and encouragement as Sam navigates devastation and euphoria — somehow always at the right time, when you’re streaming with tears or overcome with bitter anger at the events of the last cutscene.
Under the (Otter) hood, there’s also the matter of how Death Stranding 2 looks. I worked through Kojima’s latest on a chunky review unit PS5, arguably the oldest possible version of the console, and was blown away by the visual fidelity and silky performance. From shimmery backpack covers to moonlit vistas, the Decima engine is pushed to its very limits here. Encounters are replete with complicated animations and clever enemy AI, but it’s rare to see anything artefact-y or interruptive. When Woodkid’s sensational soundtrack fills your ears with a leitmotif as you trudge into a new biome (don’t worry about all the snow in Australia…), the frisson is soul-stirring.
Death Stranding 2 is a confident follow-up that answers a lot of design questions that were left hanging by the first game. It also boasts a haymaker of a puzzle box story with an End of Evangelion-esque climax. It is robust, all-encompassing and more than a bit meaningful. Kojima’s terribly big and thoughtful swing does well to investigate the ugly side of overconnection, conjuring meaningful conclusions for a real world doused in brain rot.
