I’ve been fortunate enough to sink hour upon hour into ‘Death Stranding’ over the last month as I’ve been home from University, I finished the game last Thursday and obtained my platinum today after relentless grinding. That being said, I wanted to write a critique about the game, having devoted neigh on 100 hours, having explored every nook and cranny of the post stranding America, encountering countless BTs along the way and delivering for distro centres, preppers and alike. I feel confident having experienced the majority of what the game has to offer. So, here’s a normie’s review of Kojima’s latest epic, ‘Death Stranding’.
To begin, the story. From a narrative standpoint ‘Death Stranding’ has a simple objective, rebuild America; however, admittedly it becomes slightly more convoluted nearing its finale with plot twists and the story waffling about the true antagonist, is it Higgs? Die-hardman? Cliff? Amelie? The game clears itself up at the end with a two-hour long cutscene; yes, that one, you know the one I’m talking about. While this felt like it over explained the core narrative, it didn’t feel dragged out. I like to think this is Kojima’s way of drawing parallels to Amelie’s predicament, the sequence is prolonged and no matter the direction you run the situation seems endless; similar to how Amelie describes feeling and hence explains her role in bringing the sixth stranding. Overall the story wasn’t anything to write home about, I like Kojima but I’m not a huge fanboy so I’m not about to over praise something just because he orchestrated the experience; it was fun, arguably predictable, but not ground-breaking.
The characters and the connections you form to me is the true incentive to play ‘Death Stranding’, while the gameplay has been called repetitive I personally never really got bored of the loop, I enjoyed pushing Sam to carry as much cargo as inhumanely possible; it was entertaining enough to keep me going throughout the game. But like I said, the characters are the true driving force behind this game, they have their own motivations and each backstory is made unique. My favourites include Cliff, Deadman and Higgs. Cliff while having disputedly the most awesome entrance was quite a lacklustre villain; I was more scared of his minions than of him, but his super cell moments were some of my favourite. I feel like everyone likes Deadman, so I won’t really talk about him, his shower espionage cutscene got a laugh and reminded me of the Fury scene in Captain America Winter Solider. Higgs absolutely stole the show though, without a doubt one of my favourite villains to date, he’s charismatic, powerful and his meta comments where he breaks the fourth wall were some of the best cutscenes; Plus Troy Baker is always a win for me.
The contextual animations were Sam leans into an incline as he scurries along were fluid and the environments in general were varied enough to avoid becoming stale however I do have a few grievances with the game. The slopes have a weird affect on the camera sometimes when descending and vehicles can’t really decide if they want to go up or bump all over the place. Plus, the product placement just took me out of the immersion, having a post stranding America where Norman Reedus’ The Ride is on every sliding shower door and an endless supply of monster energy felt shoehorned. The amount of cutscenes for any interaction gets tiring too, it reminded me of RDR2 with the looting, for the first time it’s like “Oh that’s a cool animation” but come the hundredth time you just end up avoiding it because it’s too time consuming. The set areas for catchers also got to me, I get its so that you can’t cause a void out in a plot area, but it just got old being dragged to the same locations time and time again. All this being said they’re not game breaking criticisms, Lou got annoying whenever Sam took a tumble, so I physically found myself muffling my controller to drown out the cries, but like I said, not game breaking.
All in all, a solid game and a really enjoyable experience, even now sitting here looking at my PlayStation home screen I have the urge to load the game and finish building all the roads, traverse uncharted areas and in general just live in the world this game creates even after getting my platinum. I think a good way to end this would be to add some of my endgame stats. I finished the game on 46 hours played, got the platinum at 91 hours, as of present I have completed 336 premium deliveries, drank a whopping amount of 66,609ml of Monster Energy, taken 21 showers, worn out 10 pairs of boots, defeated 115 BTs, received 148,917 likes and lastly got the Porter Grade of 318, The Great Deliverer.
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