4/5 ★ – PhatBaby's review of Death Stranding 2: On The Beach.

This whole game was the "oh my god... I get it" moment that I was waiting for from the first Death Stranding. It's almost like Hideo saw us ripping little zingers about strand-like games, monster energy sponsorships, and Princess Beach and was like, alright, listen here, you little shits. I'm fucking cooking in my sterile white lab over here. And so he made this to prove the last game wasn't just a collection of scribbles on the walls of the padded white cell of a man driven mad by watching Curzon Collection Blu-rays on a black and white CRT for seven years. He really managed to elaborate on what the ultimate vision for Death Stranding was in this. Not ALL of it is perfect. I think there are still core issues with what Death Stranding is as a concept and how it blends with Kojima doing his funky lil' Kojima stuff, but ultimately, this is the refined, primo version of what he was clearly striving for in the original. It just gets out of the way of itself a lot more. There's still FAR too much over-explaining and needless dialogue, and every time you accept a delivery, you still get some fucking dude blowing up your phone waffling about every concept, potential hazard and piece of gear you could possibly ever use for that one mission. But the missions themselves are a lot more freeform. It feels like MGS5 meets Death Stranding, and that's exactly how it should feel. It puts the choice of how you tackle stuff in your hands and lets you go hog wild. And it makes the moment-to-moment delivery aspects so goddamn fun. You get into such a rhythm at the mid-point, where you're acquiring new, really cool tech pretty much constantly, and then zooming around, testing things out, climbing snowy mountains, carving through sandstorms. It's such a joy to just sit and play, and the fact they managed to reach that point after the first game was so repetitive is a testament to Kojima listening to complaints, honing in on what worked and then striving to make something that can find the balance between having enough friction to feel like your deliveries are arduous while simultaneously being frictionless enough to make them rewarding. And writing-wise, I genuinely think Kojima hits highs he never has before. The story itself is, well, whatever. It's still backloaded to high hell, meaning nothing whatsoever is happening through the mid portion outside of the characters just repeating five different conversation topics, and then suddenly every plot beat is crammed into the last five hours. And when you do hit the story zone, you realise Kojima is so used to spelling out every idea in huge exposition dumps that he's completely confused the idea of a small tease to the grander story with just telling you things in subtext. Bro will spell out every plot twist, to the letter, 20 hours before it happens, then pretend the reveal is a huge deal when you just assumed you were supposed to already know that. Every time you think, wow, that reveal was really restrained and smart from Kojima, it's because he thinks that was a cute little tease and he'll explain it in a fifteen-minute lore dump 9 chapters later. Plus, there's a lot here that, in modern Kojima fashion, probably could've just been cut. Neil Vana aura farms just as good as Mads did, but did his storyline really need to be as prominent and drawn out as it was? Could you have probably revealed that in a way that didn't eat up so much time? I dunno, maybe you really fucked with that stuff, but his whole storyline and what it reveals fell flat for me. But the actual writing and character work for most of the cast is really damn good. Kojima manages to dig deep and pull out the charm and heart in a world that used to feel so damn sterile and cold. I actually like most of these goofy geezers now. One character comes back and it made me be like, bro, what the actual fuck happened to you between games? Why are you nice with it like that now? But mainly, the entire emotional arc surrounding Norman Reedus and his no-longer-jarred baby is honestly some of the best stuff Kojima has ever written. That shit got me in a way I didn't think his general vibe of larger-than-life, quasi-anime military commentary could, and even if I kinda hate Sam as a character, everytime we reached those scenes, I was tearing up. The entire thing just feels way more realised and refined, from the gameplay being really engaging, to the writing actually focusing on characters over concepts, and how it finally feels like this world is less random and more lived in. But the main issue it faces outside of the general, expectedly weird Kojima story choices is that, much like the original, it's stuck being two different games that never really click together like they should. One half is the delivery stuff, and it's excellent. Just using different gear to deliver parcels, fighting the terrain and the environment, and figuring out how to most efficiently reach a location. This shit is so simultaneously cosy and stressful in all the right ways. But it's constantly bashing heads with being Kojima's spiritual sequel to Metal Gear. And, as you can expect, that Metal Gear spiritual sequel is damn good too. The human-focused stealth encounters in this are absolute gold-standard Kojima espionage gameplay, and when the parameters are right, the spectacle of fighting giant BTs is cranked up to another notch. But mixing them together just never feels as seamless as Kojima and his team think it does. Whoever decided that BT fights should always take place in giant, movement-slowing tar pits needs to chill the fuck out, especially because the systems of dodging attacks and lugging around cargo in mud are so unbelievably at odds with each other. It's annoying getting into the swing of delivering packages just to run headfirst into a lengthy ass cutscene or the game deciding you can't teleport the spaceship that you use to store ALL your shit while travelling throughout the game because the story demands it. Then there's Doll Man just yapping in my ear every five seconds while I use my sniper rifle because "it's not silenced ya know!" Neither side meshes quite right. It creates a game that's pushing and pulling you between experiences, and you can never quite get into one for long enough before the other one kicks you out of it and tells you to play it that way instead. But then, on the other side, you get passed it because, while they might not mesh, they're both really damn good games individually. It's just that cross-section where things don't feel quite right, and it becomes annoying. When I played Death Stranding 1, I enjoyed it, but I left feeling like that sense of annoyance wrestled all the good parts down. This time, the good parts wound up wrestling down the sense of annoyance instead. This is a pure example of why Kojima has such a following. When all his weird choices and his eccentricities are balanced out enough to reveal WHY he implemented them, and you realise there's intention behind the chaos. That you're getting a peek inside this dude's mind, and it's filled with raw passion for both the gameplay and the story. Folks complain he makes movies now, but here he is, making a damn fun game alongside his feature length Norman Reedus sci-fi postman drama. So I'll forgive him for the one point during this when I was having fun delivering parcels just for Doll Man to say "there's a long cutscene coming," leading to me literally leaving, making mac and cheese and coming back to watch my duly appointed 35-minute short film filled with pointless, over-explained exposition and nuance-devoid reveals that I called tens of hours ago. Because you always know he's gonna hit you with some really damn creative gameplay ideas right after and make something that, genuinely, nobody else could make. There's no one else doing it like my guy Hideo, and there are few games as outwardly interesting as Death Stranding, so I'm so glad he got the chance to prove that there was method to his madness when he first envisioned it.