Reviewed By Luke Mavin
Hideo Kojima is someone I have admired for as long as I can remember. I adored the Metal Gear franchise until 5 and I enjoyed some of his other outings such as Zone of the Enders too. I love his bonkers form of storytelling that spawns a thousand theory and conspiracy videos. I was heartbroken by the whole MGS 5 debacle, I remember many late nights just watching trailers and breakdowns trying to spot any story clues I could but when the game came out it was hollow, its heart and soul had been kicked from the project before he could close the loop on his iconic franchise and that's without even mentioning his revival of Silent Hill which had everyone gripped after the incredible PT. After months of outrage, Kojima swaggered on stage during Sony’s E3 conference and gave us our first look at Death Stranding and in typical Kojima fashion, it was a whole bunch of nonsense but looked incredible.
In the following 3 years I found myself falling in and out of love with the idea of the game for numerous reasons but I wanted to believe in Kojima, he hadn’t steered me wrong before. So when Death Stranding finally launched a mere 3 years after its announcement I dived in and I was underwhelmed, I found it meandering and honestly boring, I really liked the story beats I got and the main characters I encountered but everything in between I just found cumbersome and getting to listen to Low Roar while hiking through the admittedly beautiful world wasn’t enough for me, I needed more. I felt that if they cut the game down to mostly just the story beats it would have benefitted the game greatly. But rewind to October 2020 and in my attempt to coerce my Game4All podcast co-host Jordan to finally play Nier: Automata I promised in return I’d finish Death Stranding, so here goes nothing, Welcome to Eat Sleep Game, My name is Luke and I have been playing Death Stranding.
Visuals:
Kojima has an almost unnatural ability to have one of the most visually stunning games at any given time, with character models that look as great as any of Kojima Productions peers even if they sometimes look a little uncanny and slightly plasticy. Despite all of Kojima's Characters being portrayed by noteworthy actors Like Norman Reedus and Lea Sadoux they are all somehow instantly recognisable as Kojima characters. Each and every character has been incredibly designed from the ancient Egyptian styling of Higgs, and the perhaps not so subtle, stitched together Deadman to each of the BTs you can encounter all being awe striking making each boss encounter feel epic from their scale and intimidating design. Even Sam, who is the most bland of the character designs still has a great level of attention to detail from the way he wears his hair depending on whether you choose to don a hat or not for example. I also really appreciated each upgrade to an item, weapon or reverse trike has an updated design to reflect the upgrade, such as the long distance trike having battery packs where you would normally store cargo or upgraded boots looking more heavy duty. Kojima not only puts a lot of thought into his stories but into character design too and it really shines through here. All this being said Death Stranding’s short development time does peer through the cracks at times most notably when talking to a hologram, despite the fuzzy interference put over the top it is still very clear that not much detail has been put into these characters and the holographics are a way of hiding this, it may only be small but it was pretty noticeable to me.
The world while being pretty sparse can be incredibly beautiful, from vast open fields framed with flowing rivers and grand tumbling waterfalls to snow coated peaks and dilapidated, crumbling structures. However my biggest complaint of Death Strandings world is that it is so empty, I know there was a cataclysmic event but the world looks too clean, I expected to see a more Horizon style environment with ruins cluttering a lot of the environment and yet there is barely a trace of any kind of civilization at all. Despite the snowy peaks and volcanic areas, Death Stranding's world can get very samey again due to the lack of anything in these albeit stunning environments. Again this could be down to the short development time but it really feels like there is something missing, there is so much talk of the destruction caused by both the Death Stranding and terrorist attacks but you hardly ever see this on your travels. As a result the game world lacks any character of its own. There is a lot of story that can be told through the environment and Death Stranding distinctly lacks this.
Audio:
For the main cast V/O is pretty great. Performances from the likes of Tommie Earl Jenkins, Lea Saduox, Troy Baker and Mads Miklleson take the often over the top and melodramatic dialogue and turn it into gold, the same unfortunately cannot be said for Norman Reedus, as much as I love the guy he is at his best as an important side character he is just so monotone and honestly dull as Sam, he makes it very difficult to care about the character or his journey especially when he is interacting with the charisma levels of Higgs or Heartman. The sound effects are pretty great, everything from the sound of Sam wielding through a body of water or waist high snow to gunshots and a small rockslide are all of good quality 90% of the time. I do however take some issue with the use of music in Death Stranding, it feels like Kojima saw the way music was used in Red Dead Redemption 2 during pivotal journeys and liked them so much he put 100 of the bloody things in his game. While in RDR2 they carried a lot of weight, in Death Stranding they feel random a lot of the time, with music quing in for no real reason, often halfway to a location and ending long before you reach the destination, I even had it a few times where the song seemed to come in too late and got cut off when I reached a destination before I was meant to. To me music would have been much more effective if it was some sort of collectible like it was in MGS5 and Sam could be seen selecting a song for his travels as if they feel like a last minute addition. Otherwise music is used pretty well during cutscenes to accompany whatever situation is unfolding well even if that means it gets a little too melodramatic at points.
Story:
*Sighs* Right so in Death Stranding you take control of Sam Porter Bridges, a Porter or delivery boy who ends up working for Bridges and is called Sam...right. He is tasked by Bridges and his dying mother who is the last president of the United Cities of America and head of Bridges to bring America together by delivering different items to people across the land not only aiding them but also bringing them all onto the Chiral network which will enable them to share information, resources and more. However since the Death Stranding, the world is plagued by BTs (basically stranded souls) luckily for us Sam has DOOMs which enables him to sense said BT’s who like to make delivering a little tense at points. Sam inherits a BB (a baby in a bottle) that can enhance his DOOMs to help him or us see the BTs that he could previously only sense (in hindsight it's not clear if he can see them or if it's just the player but that's besides the point). It is Sam’s job to travel across America making deliveries and bringing everyone online and bringing his sister back home to take over Bridges from their dying (probably) mother and lead a new connected America, I think.
Death Stranding is a very difficult game to make sense of in a few sentences and while I by no means think that it is Kojima's best work it is still a pretty good story when it all comes together, mostly. I say mostly because as I have hinted at I feel like this game needed more time in the oven, there are a number of things in the story that make sense and link well but there are also a number of things in the story just come out of nowhere and do not add up like certain characters actually being a different character that has world altering powers that feels like a complete left turn when revealed because unlike other reveals which are well seeded in the story there is not a hint of foreshadowing for this, it feels like there are scenes missing at points. It doesn't help that for about half of the game very little gets a proper explanation, with a lot happening and just being shrugged off like the flashbacks for example, they turn out to be incredibly important to the overarching plot and yet they come and go without seeming important at the time despite how utterly bizarre they should be to everyone within the ingame logic.
The writing is very hit or miss, often a good bit of dialogue is ruined by over-explaining or reiterating the same thing over and over. Yes I get it. I need to check out my cufflinks! This is no more evident than the game spoiling what could be an interesting plot point, firstly a package is given to Sam by hand from what is CLEARLY Troy Baker's Higgs and then the game just straight up tells you that said package is a bomb. It would have been so much cooler if the game gave you none of this information until you had met with Fragile but as is, it just feels like such a wasted chance at making the often bland and repetitive deliveries so much more interesting. As said despite being mostly saved by great acting a lot of the time the dialogue feels like it has been lifted straight out of a TV movie or daytime TV drama and not a good one. often being overly melodramatic and again this is impart due to certain storylines feeling like there are big chunks missing. Some characters can jump from rationality to histeria before you've caught up with what is actually being spoken about. Death Stranding is however genuinely full of great and interesting characters from Mama who is linked with a BT who is her miscarried child to Heartman who dies every 21 minutes in an attempt to find his deceased wife and child and join them, not to mention Higgs and Fragie’s rivalry and backstory being one of the highlights of Death Stranding but the game criminally underused each and every character apart from Higgs who you expect to see little of being the antagonist which honestly helps to build his aura. As a result, a lot of the time emotional moments just don't resonate with me because we don't spend much time with the people these moments are attached to. For a game about bringing people together we don't spend long enough with people to connect with them outside of the core characters.
Another example of Death Strandings poor writing is the games over reliance on telling you about important events or situations rather than showing you, from the ludicrous number of emails you receive during the game and while a lot of them are just a lot of nothing a fair few of them have important hints as to what you need to do next or some clever reveals all of which can be missed because Death Stranding expects you to spend an inordinate amount of time doing nothing but reading some pretty dull emails. Or for instance how much more impactful would learning about the bombing of middle knot city be if it was through a cutscene and seeing all of the chaos and destruction instead of only hearing Deadman talking about it. There is so much more beyond what Death Stranding shows you and it is lost either in lengthy dialogue with little explanations or hidden away amidst the dozens of emails you are expected to sift through.
THE biggest crime of Death Stranding however is the pacing, dear particle of god the pacing is horrendous, yes it is true that it takes around 7 hours to actually progress the story beyond the opening set up and then its 30 odd hours of being drip fed bits and pieces of the narrative and character stories until you hit the 40 hour mark and get to the final third which has all the story you have been waiting for but it’s over in around 4 or 5 hours. There was genuinely a point during my playthrough where I was further into the game than I had gotten on my previous 2 attempts and I was actually excited to see where the story took me next and what would unfold and I shit you not the entire day following I got no story, just hours of meandering and plodding delivery boy dullness, delivering packages to some of Kojima's friends and not pushing the narrative forward at all. It was infuriating, Genuinely this game could be half the length and it would be so much of an improvement but as is so much of the story doesn’t make sense for so long because the pacing is soooo terrible by the time you get to the next story beat you've forgotten what the last one was and why you are in the middle of a snow storm with a baby strapped to your chest.
Gameplay:
Gameplay is tricky for me to define, in that I really do like a number of things that Death Stranding does but the lack of diversity and substance to keep these things interesting makes a number of them go from interesting concepts to meandering and often meaningless filler. Building suffers the most in this regard as there are a good number of differing structures that in isolation are pretty useful. Post Boxes allow you to store and share items and lost cargo with other players and they with you but I never found that I was either carrying enough or in desperate need of something that was inside one of these postboxes to bother with them. Watchtowers give you the ability to scan and survey the surrounding area and highlight points of interest from collectables and lost cargo to enemies and locations and these watchtowers were the most useless structure alongside the safehouses as I never found a real need for either throughout my playthrough. Conversely Generators and zip lines were some of the more useful of these, generators were especially of use when i was on a long journey and needed a quick recharge for my reverse trike or exoskeleton to get me through the rest of my journey and the zipline made what could be a long and boring trek, a short and often a beautiful trip sailing through, past and over the picture-esque world of Death Stranding. Timefall shelters are meant to give some respite when your journey finds you stuck in a downpour but honestly the only use I found for these was the container repair spray that would coat you once your under the shelter however i found that no matter how many times i skipped time or how long i waited the timefall would never let up so i never rarely felt the need to build one of these myself. Bridges and Roads are probably the most frustrating as they are the 2 most important and useful structures but they both take so many materials it can take too long to find and in the time spent searching I most of the time had found an alternative way to my destination. On the whole despite having some usefulness building is pretty pointless, the majority are just not needed for you to progress and once you have connected an area to the Chiral network other players have built all that you could ever need. I genuinely believe that the building mechanic could have been better served had it been more intrinsically tied to helping people in the area and the more you help and the stronger their connections got the more the surrounding area would be rebuilt but as is the mechanic as a whole feels like filler and it's a shame more wasn’t done with it.
Death Standings main mechanic outside of walking is balance and it becomes tiresome pretty quickly. I fully understand the idea behind this but it just feels really poorly implemented to me, overencumberance is such an annoying mechanic on its own and while I do like how it makes you really think about what you will need to take with you it also leads to me often dropping other mechanics such as building, altogether. Sam’s constant weight shifting and stumbling around gets infuriating in a very short amount of time especially when there seems to be no reason for it, i could be walking along a flat bit of land with no obstructions in the way and Sam would wildly lose his balance and stumble over like like he's had way too much to drink. This again makes Death Stranding feel somewhat undercooked, there are good ideas here but they cancel out other mechanics and needed to be more thoughtful.
All that being said despite its meandering nature, traversal is one big puzzle in Death Stranding, I quite like the waypointing mechanic, it makes waypointing that more interesting trying to find the quickest route while having to take into account the surrounding areas and safety, instead of the standard placing a marker and being led to it. That being said, I really wish that your previous travels didn't still show on the map, it makes it look so messy and makes plotting your next journey that bit more difficult. This is also a mechanic that while being a good idea feels pretty half baked because you can't really see the terrain on the map all that well so i often found i would lead myself to un insurmountable mountain and have to reroute on the fly and eventually resorted to just placing that standard marker on my destination and working the rest out as and when**.** Vehicles can be a god send, a great break from plodding around the map, a god send that is when they aren’t trying to buck you like a mechanical bull or getting stuck on the smallest bit of debris. While they can be a lot of fun they handle a lot like the mako from Mass Effect 1 often veering off with the slightest touch.
Combat on the other hand is so interesting, a dead body will cause a massive cataclysmic explosion known as a void out so guns or any other kind of lethal force is off of the table, other than hand to hand combat, rope (or strands) are your best friend, using them in different ways to incapacitate your enemies be it sneaking up behind them and choking them out or eventually being able to tie them up from a distance with the Bola gun, i really like the thought put into finding a way around incapacitating enemies without being fatal. I also like how with a slight modification similar tactics can be used on BTs, this approach to combat keeps things interesting for me opposed to the simpler option of just shooting everything many other games do take. The give and take of having to use your blood as a weapon against BTs is a clever one having to both defeat the enemy but take care that you don't defeat yourself in doing so. BT boss fights are a highlight of the game, they feel so different to most other games, the lack of direct comat the way you have to clamber and climb to a vantage point to take your shot before the BT catches or attacks. The spectacle of the encounter, the setup beforehand Kojima knows how to set a boss fight scene better than almost anyone in the game today. It's just a shame that the other BT encounters feel so limp in comparison. The sections where you have to sneak and tiptoe around BTs very quickly goes from tense to frustrating because they are just in the way and this goes doubly when you eventually gain the ability to defeat BTs without having to engage in their monstrous forms, you unlock the ability to cut their cords with your cufflinks and while this does test your guts as you have to get very close to a BT to do so it is also pretty overpowered sure you might get caught before cutting a cord but I found there was rarely any difficulty to circumnavigate BTs nor really in defeating them should i get caught which makes them feel far less intimidating.
When there is no other option but to get into it with the Tusken Raider like MULEs who are rouge porters, hand to hand combat feels pretty good, there is a good weight to all of the attacks and it feels pretty scrappy as you'd realistically expect from someone like Sam, eventually you will gain automatic weapons but again using lethal force is a bad idea so the non-lethal weaponry is you friend. However I found combat far more interesting when guns were not involved, especially in terms of using the Bola gun to Tie up enemies rather than using a glorified bean bag gun to incapacitate foes, it just doesn't feel right having Sam take hold of a more traditional fire arm when everything else to this point has been more thoughtful.
There are so many small changes I want this game to make, to make its repetitive gameplay loop feel more rewarding. Some of these include making the porter grade simpler to understand and giving you more tangible upgrades, genuinely just lift the same mechanic from Persona 5 and stick it in here. I do not care about being able to give more likes in a 5 second period but I do care about increased carry capacity. As is the Porter grade means very little as do each point on the star, Cargo condition and Delivery time make complete sense, as does delivery volume being how much you carry, but i am still not clear on what the bridge link section is or does when upgraded and why is one point literally labeled miscellaneous? Each of these points should be tangible goals to work towards; they should be clear and give you clear rewards in return for putting the time into each section of the star. I do appreciate being rewarded for how you actually are playing rather than playing a certain way to increase the rewards but it needs to be clearer what it is you are doing well, miscellaneous tell me nothing.
Another change as said would be to put more importance put into building, for instance if all the extra deliveries you do were to help acquire materials for the region's base to redevelop the roads and what not, instead of being solely based on your convenience. This in turn would also give the side missions more importance as the more stars you get the stronger the network gets and the more then gets rebuilt making getting from point to point much easier. And on a similar note this would also make actually getting those 5 stars on each location more worthwhile, I cannot put into words how frustrating it was to put in the effort to get 5 stars on the first UCA base only to be rewarded with a star on my overalls, i genuinely wanted and kept getting the urge to 5 star each base i came by but that first one stung me so badly that i didn’t want to waste my time, that first 5 stars should give you something great to encourage you to keep pushing with the rest but instead i was left burned and resorted to only picking up lost cargo if it was on my way. Death Stranding wants and encourages you to do all you can to help those around you but the game gives so little an incentive if it hasn’t got it hooks into you, i don’t care about likes, i don’t get what they do beyond increase your porter rank which means very little, I don't care about interacting with all of Kojima’s friends, I don't care about a novelty otter hat when the other rewards have burned me.
Also I don't need a mini cutscene for everything, for example the Odradek popping up to let me know I have to be careful because there are BTs around, I'm positive that I would notice without the overly dramatic slow motion for the 100th time or getting on and off of a trike or picking up ANYTHING it just makes the game feel that more padded out for me. I get it for the first time you are interacting with an object to show its importance but it genuinely put me off interacting with so much because it just wasted time. Why can Sam take a phone call and keep moving?
And one final thing, each distribution center you wander into, states that it is home to thousands of people, so where are they all? I would have loved it if each of these buildings were treated like vaults from fallout and had different and interesting people and maybe even quest givers to interact with and lore to be unearthed about each building and area, this again feels like a sacrifice of the short time Death Stranding spent in development. This could have made the empty world make more sense had you seen all of the population hiding underground, and would have made your efforts so much more rewarding had they resurfaced when the area had been renovated being able to see the people, families and communities that you are potentially saving could have made so much difference in the big empty, vapid world of Death Stranding.
Performance:
I can't fault Death Stranding Performance wise aside from some small amount of environmental pop in, a few patches of poor or unloaded textures and the very very occasional loading pause. It ran pretty well, granted this may have been helped by the fact I was playing on the PS5 but either way it was a pretty solid playthrough. Although I did have to restart the game after getting stuck on some rocks for a few minutes while being pulled in by a BT.
Conclusion:
Death Stranding is a pretty hollow game with delusions of grandeur, it talks a big game but never follows through on its promise of a grand journey, just a meandering unfulfilling story with underutilized and underdeveloped characters that deserved more attention. Up until that damned 40 hour mark where the story is finally coerced out of its little cave and all of Jake's delicious spaghetti is out of the can (go check out the Eat Sleep Game podcast episode 1 if you didn't get that reference). There is so much i really like about Death Stranding but it feels like i have to fight the game so hard to get to those points, be it the interesting characters, the approach to combat and subsequent boss fights or even a little of the damned story that ultimately when i do get what I have been waiting for, its unfulfilling. As i've mentioned if this game was half the length it would help sooo much. I love Kojima and his style of storytelling but i wish someone would tell him that his linear storytelling just does not fit an open world, his strengths are with grand narratives, interesting and wildly out there characters but not with world building, the world of Death Stranding is big and certainly beautiful but it is little more, I truly believe had Death Stranding been an open area style game such as The Last of us or God of War where you help people in an area then move onto the next it would have benefitted the story so much more than the open world it has.
Imagine if you will a more linear game where you go from city to city and each of those cities slowly gets rebuilt the more you progress the story in the area and the more you further help NPCs with their side questing and then when you finally reach the other side of America and have to travel all the way back for the end game the world opens up, becomes open world and your grand RDR2 journey back becomes more straight forward the more you helped the people in each city and the more of the city is rebuilt not only showing people working together once again but giving you a tangible reward for all of your work and giving you a open world to fulfil all of your delivery boy dreams in INSTEAD OF TRAVELING FROM ONE END OF THE COUNTRY ONLY TO FIND THAT YOU HAVE TO TRAVEL ALL THE WAY BACK TO THE BEGINING AND FINDING THAT EVERYTHING YOU BUILT HAS BEEN RESET BECAUSE OF THE STUPID TIMERAIN MAKING ALL THE TIME YOU PUT INTO BUILDING ROADS AND STRUCTURES TO MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER POINTLESS. This would also give more time to the underused characters as they could all be located in different cities, giving them a full chapter to explore their backstory and understand them in much greater detail than the negligibly short amount of time we do currently, not to mention making the story much more digestible and cohesive as it will be given to you consistently.
Death Stranding is the most infuriating game i have ever played, not in that it is difficult nor even a wholly bad game, in fact it's the opposite, now i have rolled credits i have a much deeper appreciation of the games story, general gameplay and especially its characters. The reason it is so frustrating is because it feels like I am having to fight against the boring, repetitive fetch questing and deliveries that other than meeting a different character, have no real bearing on the story, nor do they offer any kind of challenge. Death Stranding can take some very cool concepts like spooky enemies you can't see or inventory and balance management and make them tedious through mindless repetition to the point of not caring. There is so little motivating me in the long stretches between story beats that I couldn't care less about what it was I am delivering or which of Kojima's friends it was too. I just wanted to progress the story and make sense of why I was doing this.
Despite all that i enjoyed about the game and my love for the classic Kojima style story caked in deeper meaning and relatable throughlines especially in the current pandemic i do not know a single person i would recommend this game to, i would recommend watching some kind of abridged playthrough with all the cutscenes boss fights and key gameplay sections but i cannot recommend that anyone play a game that takes 7 hours to get going and then a further 40 to get really interesting. Which is a shame because when it does finally get interesting Death Stranding is the all of the game I hoped it would be.
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