"Death Stranding" Review - Strand and Deliver

Available for: Playstation 4, Microsoft Windows

Reviewed for: Playstation 4

Death Stranding is something of a landmark title, that's for sure. Surrounded by mysterious marketing and the promise that comes with director Hideo Kojima's legacy, it's safe to say that this was the most widely anticipated game of 2019, as well as the game about which the general public knew the least about. When the game finally released in November, to say that Death Stranding was divisive would be an understatement, with some professional critics giving it a 10/10 and calling it an absolute masterpiece and others giving it scores in the 3's and referring to it as "irredeemable garbage." For the first time in a very long time, it's safe to say that the professional critic reviews were as divided as the general user reviews. Well, now, after about a month of play time (with a break in the middle to play the games that came out in the aftermath), I've finally completed this landmark title and am ready to share my thoughts.
A quick note before we begin, however, on Kojima's legacy. See, unlike most people who were hyped for Death Stranding, I have no nostalgia tied to Mr. Kojima. The only game in his iconic Metal Gear Solid franchise that I've played was 2015's The Phantom Pain. With that in mind, it should be obvious to you that my opinions of Death Stranding will neither be positively tainted due to positive nostalgia, nor negatively tainted because it doesn't match my positive nostalgia. I always like to make this kind of note when I review a title such as this so that you have my exact context in mind.
Without further ado, plug in your baby, ready your urine grenades, and allow me to tell you what makes Death Stranding good, bad, and ultimately redeemable in the end.

Where to even begin with the paragraph on story...well, I guess it might be best to start here: Death Stranding takes place in a post-apocalyptic USA except not really because the city names are all made up and the actual scenery was filmed in Iceland. This apocalypse happened because one day ghosts appeared and exploded and then every human who died created another ghost who then exploded, etc, etc, etc. The first of these explosions, the event that started everything, came to be known as "The Death Stranding." Following this event, the earth was forever changed. Suddenly, human beings, who theorized about the nature of death and the afterlife through millions upon millions of religions and philosophical ideas suddenly had a concrete answer to all their questions about death: When you die, you explode and become a ghost, and every living thing has their own afterlife, or "beach". Beyond the philosophical changes to the world, the very weather was also changed. Following the Death Stranding, the rain and snow began to serve as a pseudo-time-travel mechanism, as anything touched by the rain/snow suddenly has time fast-forwarded for it. Also, if you strap a living baby (called a "Bridge Baby" or BB) born from a "still" mother, you can sense the ghosts that reside in the world....Also also, there's a whole group of people who are obsessed with delivering packages and will literally kill you for the chance to deliver your cargo!
Are you confused yet? Well, not every question gets answered, but most of them do. I'll say that I can buy the pseudo-science the game puts out to try and explain some of these things, and even though it's all absolute bulls**t, it's at least interesting bulls**t. But even with that, this game's story is so strange that you'll probably need to read the in-game encyclopedia of interviews and data for hours upon hours upon hours in order to have no questions. What we're given is sufficient, but Kojima does leave a lot of the smaller particulars up to the player to look up.
You know what? For all I've said about this game's story, I haven't said a word about the story as it pertains to you, the player. You play as Sam Porter Bridges (or Sam Strand, depending on who you ask), a courier who delivers packages to isolated settlements in this world. See, in this post apocalyptic world, there's no way for people to interact with people outside of their immediate settlement without using a highly-skilled courier who can make his way across borderline-prehistoric terrain. After meeting with the woman who raised him (who also so happens to be the President of the United States, because this is still a Kojima game) and hearing her dying wish, Sam reluctantly agrees to make his way across the country to link the isolated settlements that remain into one connected network drawn together by some kind of pseudoscience phenomenon similar to the internet. And then the game happens for like ten hours, and then all of a sudden there's a terrorist named "Higgs" who leads a group of people who cause BT explosions (or "voidouts") in an effort to effectively wipe out humanity.  And then the game happens for like five more hours, and then all of a sudden Sam gets swept up into an alternate dimension where he ends up on a World War I battlefield and has to shoot Mads Mikkelson who leads a bunch of burning soldiers  created out of black tar. Then the game happens for some more time and things get even crazier, and it all comes to a head in one of the most absolutely biblical-in-scope endings I've ever experienced in a game! Make no mistake, dear reader, when this game is being the story that Kojima wanted to tell, it's not just brilliant, it's brilliant in a way that is truly inspired. Kojima truly shows his visionary side with the story in Death Stranding. Now, you may have noticed that I've been saying things such as "and then the game happens" over and over when describing how the story goes. Thing is, I think most people are in agreement about the story. However, it's the gameplay where people start to disagree.

For context, I played Death Stranding on easy mode, so it's more than likely that I had a significantly easier time of it than other critics, so just keep that in mind. Like the story, the gameplay also proves that Kojima is a visionary...albeit a self-indulgent one. See, the gameplay in Death Stranding is walking simulator gameplay in the rawest sense of the phrase. As a courier, Sam's job is to deliver packages, sometimes several of them at a time, so gameplay basically involves transporting cargo from one area to another without damaging it too much. But on its own, that wouldn't be very challenging, so the walking is...uber-realistic. This is a game in which you can trip on a rock if you're running too carelessly and have your cargo stacked too high. This is a game in which if you have more cargo on the left side of your suit than on the right side, you'll need to constantly press R2 in order to balance yourself more to the right to keep from tipping over. In case it hasn't become evident, the moment-to-moment gameplay tends to be a little fiddly. The obvious comparison to make is to Red Dead Redemption 2, but while I can see the similarities, I don't exactly think it's fair. Death Stranding is less fiddly than Red Dead Redemption 2 by a long shot, and playing it is far less of a hassle...but it's still a hassle to some degree. See, you aren't just carrying the cargo you're transporting...you also have to carry all of your weapons and equipment in the same way that you carry your cargo. The more cargo you have on you, the harder it is to walk and the more fiddly the controls will be, but sometimes you have to overload yourself in order to make it to your destination in one piece. Each order you take on has cargo of different weights. Sometimes you're carrying one 5kg package, other times you're carrying a total of 80kg worth of cargo (which is about the weight at which walking starts to become difficult). In addition to this, you'll need to decide what supplies and weapons you might need for the journey before you head out. In terms of supplies, you can carry ladders, climbing anchors, construction packages that can create generators/bridges/etc, exoskeletons that can make certain terrains easier to traverse, etc. In terms of weapons, you can carry nonlethal (because lest we forget, if a person dies they turn into an exploding ghost) guns like rubber bullet assault rifles and rope guns to handle human enemies or hermatic weapons (weapons that use ammo coated in Sam's blood...and I could be misspelling that, but the font size in this game is...very small) to handle the BTs ("Beached Things," the ghosts). You can just carry your cargo if you'd like, but you'll absolutely come across a gap in the terrain that you could've used a ladder to cross, a group of terrorists set on either stealing your packages or murdering you, or a giant swath of area crawling with BTs. So the name of the game is using the few tools at your disposal (such as your map, a weather radar that you end up getting later on, etc) to try and predict the challenges you'll face on the way to your destination and balancing preparing for these challenges with not overloading yourself too much...well...that's how the game should've been, but this interpretation of the gameplay isn't emphasized very much.
Really, the emphasis of gameplay is on keeping your cargo undamaged. This takes a couple of forms. Sometimes your cargo is fragile. Sometimes it isn't in air-tight containers, meaning you can't submerge it in water and you therefore need to stack it on you accordingly. Sometimes your cargo is explosive, which means that it can take a beating when carried by foot but not so much when exposed to the subtle vibrations of vehicle transfer. Sometimes your cargo can't survive outside of a fridge for too long, meaning that you have a time limit for delivery. Sometimes your cargo has more than one of these quirks. But it's not just the state of the cargo that contributes to this gameplay model. Remember how I mentioned the fiddliness of the gameplay earlier? Well, the more you stumble and fall, the more your cargo gets damaged, and given how you're overloaded more often than not, it can become something of a challenge when the terrain has a lot of rapid elevation change and rocks. Beyond that, there's also the supernatural side of Death Stranding. See, the BTs only appear in rainy/snowy areas...you know, the areas that rapidly age everything the rain/snow touches? I don't know why the mail services of the apocalypse couldn't coat, say, a tarp to cover the cargo in the same material that the protective raincoat Sam wears, but I digress. When you enter a rainy/snowy area, your cargo gets exposed to the timefall and starts to deteriorate at a rapid degree, and that's in addition to the damage that will get inflicted if you're captured by BTs. Now, despite everything I've listed as being out to get you and your cargo, I never once failed a single cargo transfer. I don't know, maybe it was because I was on easy mode, maybe it was because I happened to prepare better than the average person, but whatever the reason, though the game was challenging, I never failed. However...without spoiling specific story events....there are 14 chapters in the game, and the cargo-centric gameplay is only present for about 6 of them (and not all at once). So, despite the cargo idea being the central gameplay conceit, it doesn't take up the majority of time. With that in mind, I'd say that Death Stranding would've been better as a more straightforward walking simulator. Though I didn't hate my time in the cargo side of the gameplay, I did find myself groaning before missions most of the time. See, I think this game would've been better if it had more emphasis on preparedness. For instance, I'd say that I'd prefer a gameplay model that features no fiddly walking controls, but has a set amount of cargo space. You could carry up to the maximum space (maybe there would be upgrades available) with no penalties to gameplay, but certain missions would allow for less free space. Then, perhaps there'd be better radars for weather, terrorist activity, and terrain challenges that would allow you to think more tactically about the route you were going to take and the supplies you'd take in addition to your cargo. I'm taking points off for the fact that I groaned before just about each cargo-based mission, but the rest of my commentary can be considered suggestions for Death Stranding 2.
Now, I've mentioned supplies like ladders and climbing anchors, but it's worth noting that you're not the only person leaving these structures around the game map. When you start the game, you're put on a server with a couple of other players who you never see, but you can see and interact with the items they leave behind. If another player leaves a ladder reaching across a gap, you can use that ladder as well and award it "likes" for its usefulness. Similarly, if you leave something like a climbing anchor at the top of a cliff, other players who happen across this cliff can use your contribution to make it down the cliff as easily as you did, and you'll be awarded likes as well. There's really no purpose to these likes other than to show appreciation and feel like you've helped someone, but it works really well in that regard! At one point late in the game, I happened to be trekking back across some previously-explored country when I stumbled across a bridge I forgot that I'd built. I saw that it had over 5,000 likes and my day was made simply because this little contribution I'd made and forgotten about had that kind of impact on other people's games. Hell, some people have taken to playing the game with the express purpose of leaving shortcuts around the world for new and struggling players. Though it wasn't a necessary addition, I'd say that the multiplayer components of Death Stranding are in the same camp as the ones in Dark Souls or Journey in that they do add to the experience in some meaningful way!
The last bit I want to talk about in terms of gameplay is the rare combat encounter. At first, your means of defending yourself are pretty limited, with fresh players basically having to rely on only their fists and pieces of cargo if they can afford to damage them. However, as the game progresses, you gradually unlock weapons of increasingly better variety. I've already touched on the types of weapons, so I won't repeat myself, and instead I'll move onto combat itself. It's clunky-yet-inoffensive...except at the start of BT encounters, but I'll get to that. Aiming doesn't quite feel as natural as it should, and even when you're using a grenade launcher, none of the weapons really feel like they have any weight to them...however, the human enemies you encounter are pretty easy to take down, so this doesn't have much tangible impact on the experience. Ultimately most of the combat is just there for the sake of being there, but there have been worse-implemented "for the sake of it" combat systems in the past. Unfortunately, where the combat really does start to suffer is during BT encounters, as I already hinted at. From the second your BB alerts you that there are BTs nearby, you're thrust into stealth gameplay. Now, you'd think that Kojima, who basically created stealth action as a genre, would be able to make this work...but it kinda doesn't. See, you can't see the BTs at all times. You only have a hot/cold meter that points towards the nearest one, and occasionally you'll see a blurry silhouette of the BTs around you. This takes away your sense of control, which is absolutely crucial for effective stealth gameplay. So unless you're super-careful or have about a bajillion hermatic weapons on your, chances are good you're going to get detected in these encounters. When you're detected, the BT starts coming for you slowly, and if it catches up to you, you have to fight off a bunch of tar people who try to drag you down. If you succeed in shaking these people off and reaching the end of the newly-created tar area, then you're no longer detected, but you're still surrounded by BTs. If you fail at shaking these people off, they'll drag you beneath the tar, removing nearly all your cargo in the process, and they'll drag you miles away from where you were. When you're back above the tar, you'll find yourself in a completely tar-filled version of the area you were just in, and you'll need to defeat a boss BT. This will usually be an absolutely gigantic whale or an absolutely gigantic lion (or a couple of them, as the game progresses). If you defeat the boss, then all the BTs in the area suddenly disappear. Though these bosses are absolutely phenomenal as a spectacle, they don't pose any challenge, and your only real reward for beating them is not having to deal with BTs anymore for the time being. While encountering human enemies sometimes adds a bit of adrenaline to the Death Stranding experience, encountering BTs just slows everything to a halt to the point that I eventually just started running through BT areas as fast as I possibly could.

That brings us to the technical side of things. Given how many systems are all at work at the same time at any moment in the game, how much money this game cost to make, and how long Kojima Productions has been working on it, it stands to reason that a game such as Death Stranding had better be a technical juggernaut...and thankfully, it is! Death Stranding is perhaps the most technically solid 3D AAA game I've played in recent memory. When it comes to just the look of the game, Death Stranding can once again be compared to Red Dead Redemption 2. The framerate never drops, the texture never pops in, the range at which you can see if you're standing on an elevated plane is astounding, the graphics are nearly photorealistic, and there are no loading screens at any point during exploration. Similarly to last year's Rockstar hit, Death Stranding's game world is an absolute technical masterpiece, only Kojima managed to pull it off without extreme crunch periods and (supposedly) without working his staff for a hundred hours a week. The difference between the two game worlds is that Death Stranding is actually a series of three large blocks of open world instead of one giant map, but it's still a darn impressive technical feat on the part of Kojima productions. Everything I've been talking about in terms of the technical side thus far has been about the game's overall look, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. I may have mentioned before that this is a game in which you can trip on a rock if you're running too fast and too carelessly. Well, there are thousands upon thousands of rocks scattered across the floor of the map, an insanely realistic amount of them. What this means is that there are thousands upon thousands of game objects that could easily cause bugs if not programmed exactly right and if the player character isn't programmed to account for multiple angles of tripping. Yet, in spite of this, I never encountered any such bugs. The programming on display here is tight as hell, and if you don't believe me, keep in mind that rocks are just one type of game object that appears frequently and directly impacts gameplay. Beyond this, animations are also varied and smooth, the soundtrack is just as contemplative or just as epic as it needs to be at any moment, the character models are all realistic without crossing too far into the uncanny valley a-la David Cage, and the sound design is friggin top notch. I simply defy you to hear a thunderclap within Death Stranding without taking your headphones off to make sure it wasn't a real one. In every conceivable way, Death Stranding is simply, as I've already stated, a technical juggernaut.

Folks, when I finished Death Stranding, I said to myself "this would've been a 10/10 if Kojima hadn't been so self-indulgent." Many critics of this game have said that Kojima kept getting gameplay ideas and nobody had the courage to tell him "no." I can see that. Though I enjoyed my time with this game more than a lot of folks seemingly did, I can say with certainty that it would've been greatly helped by cutting back a lot of the systems and just letting the core gameplay loop consist of either an emphasis on preparedness or a relaxing trek across beautiful landscapes. As I've made a point of saying, when Death Stranding focuses on telling Kojima's visionary tale, it's an absolutely perfect experience...but when the gameplay starts up, it doesn't quite hit as well. I think that if Kojima had found a way to balance the first couple of chapters the same way he balanced the last couple, this game would've been an unbeatable Game of the Year and an easy 10 out of 10. At this point, I believe that if you were going to play Death Stranding, you probably already would have, but just in case you're the kind of reader that I like to think I'm a help to, I'll say this: If you can bear with Death Stranding, then you'll find yourself richly rewarded with a story unparalleled by most science fiction properties of today.

Let us review:
Groaned before each mission in a couple chapters - 1.0
Annoying BT combat - 0.5

The final score for Death Stranding is...




8.5/10 - Great
Great work, Kojima Productions, great work