Death Stranding Video Game Review (About In Description)
1Damaged goods.
After the past three years of cryptic and confusing teaser trailers, the question on everyone’s lips has been, “What exactly is Death Stranding?” Well, now we know, and the answer is… complicated. The first game from famed designer Hideo Kojima since his dramatic departure from publisher Konami and his long-running Metal Gear franchise is a boldly inventive slab of sci-fi, fastidiously crafted to host to some of the most breathtaking sights I’ve ever witnessed in any medium – video game or otherwise. It’s also a cross-country crawl that frequently finds itself mired in an exhausting amount of inventory management, backtracking, one-note mission design, and unprecedentedly arduous travel. It’s evident that Kojima and his team at Kojima Productions have worked extremely hard to build Death Stranding, but it’s also painfully clear that they expect us to match their determination in order to fully enjoy it.
The “Death Stranding” in question is the name given to a cataclysmic event that only small pockets of humanity, the Monster Energy Drink corporation, and an apparently universally accepted Facebook-style social status system have survived. Since the Death Stranding, natural wildlife has been wiped out and rain has transformed into “Timefall”, a deadly form of precipitation that instantly ages everything it touches. Lurking within each downpour are the BTs (“Beached Things”), paranormal entities who prey indiscriminately on survivors, leaving society confined to the safety of subterranean shelters.
You are Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus), a post-apocalyptic postman with a ghost-detecting baby strapped to his chest named BB who, like most infants, is as adorable as he is insufferable. Sam’s quest is certainly a compelling one; to reconnect the isolated remnants of civilisation by completing an endurance-testing sequence of delivery jobs from one city to the next, earning the trust of their citizens, and bringing them back online in the government’s “Chiral Network” as he makes his pilgrimage west across North America.
Sam is allied in his pursuit by a quirky cast of characters with quirkier names like Heartman and Die-hardman, and opposed by Troy Baker’s wonderfully maniacal villain Higgs, who has an appetite for both licking faces and chewing scenery. Sam has additional motivation to undertake his epic expedition: his sister Amelie is held hostage by Higgs on America’s westernmost edge, a destination appropriately called Edge Knot City.
A long list of quality of life improvements certainly makes the PS5 Director’s Cut the most feature-rich and accessible version of Death Stranding. If you’re yet to experience its gorgeous vistas and general sci-fi weirdness and you’re not turned off at the thought of a 40-hour fetch quest, then this is the best way to enjoy its fiction with the least amount of friction. However, by giving us powerful new cargo-moving tools that allow us to forgo heavily burdened hikes in favour of walking the path of least resistance, it diminishes frustration at the cost of any sense of hard-earned gratification. This may be called a “Director’s Cut,” but I can’t help but feel that, for better or worse, the PS4 original perhaps more closely resembles the director’s vision. - Tristan Ogilvie, September 23, 2021
If Death Stranding sounds like a series of glorified fetch quests, it’s because that’s exactly what it is.
It’s definitely an intriguing story setup, but if you think that playing the role of a courier makes it sound as though Death Stranding could be one continent-spanning series of glorified fetch quests, it’s because that’s exactly what it is. The vast majority of its 70 main story missions are structured in the same way as the optional side missions we’ve all run in countless other open-world games. With the exception of certain tutorial missions which introduce the basics of the combat system, boss fights, and a handful of other combat-oriented diversions, advancing the plot in Death Stranding amounts to taking item X from location A to location B, over and over again. Sounds pretty repetitive, right? Well, the good news is that there are also side missions in Death Stranding. The bad news is that these side missions are also fetch quests, undertaken mainly to unlock additional items or customisation options.
The Walking Dread
What makes the repetitive objectives somewhat bearable is that the scorched landscape of Death Stranding is staggering in scale and rich in detail, to the point that initially I wanted to slow down and pore over every inch. And it’s just as well, because I wasn’t really given any say in the matter; the opening hours are so ploddingly paced that it makes the whole thing seem like a personal attack on the speedrunning community.