So I no-lifed the shit out of Death Stranding. Loved it, hope that the rumors I've heard about Kojima wanting a sequel are true. This is unlike any other game I've ever played, and considering that it's basically an unexplored genre, its shockingly well-considered in its game design. Mostly. If this is a new franchise, I feel it's important to talk about the areas where it could be better.
Most of what I'm going to talk about here is mechanical, but there will be some light spoilers for late game scenarios and structures, so proceed at risk.
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I love BTs as enemies, I don't like the full ten second animation of the odradek unfurling every time I go near one. This animation happened once while I was falling down a hill, so I couldn't steady myself and my cargo broke, so it can be a straight up detriment to play. Also, the road skirts around the edges of BT territory often, and having that animation play every time gets annoying when making as many trips as I have, especially as there isn't any real danger. It's not like the animation is a loading screen; when you don't have BB in later sections, the game seamlessly transitions into these BT areas.
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There's a lot of minor QoL things I'd like to see added to inventory management. Having to go to separate screens for Recycling, Private Locker, and Shared Locker just adds unnecessary button presses and cutscene skips to what should be a simple process. Equipping the power skeleton should just unequip items from my legs and put them on my back or the floor. Menus for Fabrication and the Garage would be much more convenient as tabs in the Order Preparation screen, rather than a linear series of menus when you take an order. It'd be nice to be able to see deliveries available at a location from the map or another menu instead of having to physically be there. Being able to refill blood bags and grenades like you can for guns for a resource cost would remove a lot of menu hopping. And I'm sure there's more I'm forgetting.
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The private room seems to exist more to show off how hot Norman Reedus is than function like a menu. That's fine, his pecs are really hot, but we don't need three seperate cutscenes to see him take a shower. You can make it just one. It would have also been nice to have an auto-skip option for cutscenes we've already seen. A drop down menu for all the room's features would have been a nice option as well.
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A lot of material management feels clunky. Building the road involved a lot of paper math to figure out exactly how many measurements of ceramics I'd need. If I needed 1050, for example, I'd pull out an 800, a 240, and a 40 unit of ceramics, which wastes 30 ceramics. You can only put them in as a whole, not individual amounts like you can with chiral crystals. Personally, I would have preferred grabbing a large amount of the biggest material units, and being able to put exact amounts into structures with the unit weight scaling proportionally and container size changing at breakpoints.
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I wish there was a buildable ramp or stairs. This isn't even a real complaint, I just really want one. The road is great, but it's a bit inefficient is some places, and I just wanna build my own path in said few places without having to use ziplines. Kojima pls.
I'm sure there's more, but that's enough complaining about a good video game for one day. My only major narrative complaint that I'll list here is this:
How fucking DARE Kojima not use those five dudes posing in the sky. I know the theory that they're the prior EEs, but is a crime against the arts to have something so fucking cool and NOT have it be central to a major moment in the story. Goddamn it. Kojima. Fucking why? I'm so butthurt over this. Fuck.
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