Death Stranding is my favorite game of all time. However, I firmly believe this game is not for everyone and is also not perfect.
At it's core, Death Stranding is a game about delivering packages and bringing people together. It's a social-exploration game. But, it's also a horror game, a 3rd person war shooter, and a stealth-action game. Death Stranding is Kojima's attempt at creating something new, and also making every game Konami didn't let him finish, to both the games benefit and detriment.
Ultimately, most of the time Death Stranding feels like Kojima picked up the bones of PT/Silent Hills and MGSV and a third mysterious new game and tried to make it all work. Isolated, each of these elements work. When the game introduces itself, it's this survival horror game where Sam must deliver packages and face The Horrors of the abyss. And it's really cool. But then 1/3 in, the game goes "Well now you're literally in WW1. Go crazy." and suddenly the focus is about being a weird MGS, and abandons the horror elements by letting you fight the horrors very effectively. Then 1/3 later the game decides to be it's own thing and let's itself be Death Stranding. All with this underlying gameplay about connecting others. Alone, each of these portions work quite well. However, playing the game out feels quite jarring. The game tells you "Avoid BT's, don't shoot people" then later you're told "Actively kill BT's, shoot people." In the latter half I found myself missing the mystery and general horror of the BTs, and the actual threat they faced. Yet, I still found myself heavily enjoying the game overall. The point is, when this game chooses to be itself, it is very good, but most of the time it is remnants of something else and feels half-baked.
This all works for Kojima's meta narrative, which is about him leaving Konami and starting over. He sets up a game that puts you through what could have been Silent Hills, back through something vaguely Metal Gear, and then shows you something entirely new. So I get why he did it. But I don't entirely think he should have, since the actual story tells this underlying narrative quite well.
Regardless, there are other things outside of the core gameplay that are worth touching on.
The games overall presentation is very, very solid. Yes, it's very movie-game, but it works out quite well. Since most of the game has you walking, the presentation is very important, so going for the Generic Sony Movie Game route works well since you always have something nice to look at. The licensed music choices are very solid, the atmosphere is fantastic, and the overall world looks very good and is insanely engaging to traverse. Which is good, because most of this game is traversal.
The story, on the other hand, is a mixed bag. While MGS2 and 3 are very well written critiques of war and culture, Death Stranding comes to be far more personal. This isn't the pitfall though. The pitfall is how it's written. Most of the worldbuilding is sent through major exposition dumps from DefiningCharacterTrait-Man and the dumps are so heavy in load it becomes hard to process what's being said to you, and most of the time it feels like Kojima doesn't even know what he's talking about. I have a very intimate understanding of this game and I still can't concretely tell you what the fuck an "Extinction Entity" is, because I don't think Kojima does either. Most of these exposition dumps don't even need to be in the game. The whole point of the Death Stranding (the event) is that nobody properly knows what it is, and so having a character explain jargon to you makes the game more confusing and kills the overall mystery and tone. And if something isn't explained to you by mouth, you'll have to read pages and pages of shit via the in-game logs.
This isn't to say the writing is bad, because it isn't. For the first time I firmly believe Kojima has written a good female character. Really, most of the characters are very well rounded. Sure, there are a few ExpositionDump-Man's, but Sam, Higgs, and Fragile are all very interesting, likeable, and well written. When this game chooses to show you things rather than just outright tell, it does so very well, and is very memorable. All 3 of those characters arcs are very interesting to watch play out. Sam, as the main character, gets the most notable growth and the game shows this change in a very kosher way through BB. BB and Sam's dynamic is very fun, I'll probably touch on that later.
Though, other character don't exactly get much time to fully flesh out. For instance, Mama (yes, that's literally her name), has an arc, that is mildly interesting, but the game halts itself to focus on it and feels somewhat forced, and doesn't add much to the overarching story. There's also Mads Mikkelson's character, who's role is half as important as the game wants you to think, who feels weirdly forced into the narrative. While he is integral to the plot, his presence feels very out of left field and the game has to develop his character very quickly to make him work as a central character. It becomes hard to understand why he's doing the things he's doing, but I also give his character a pass because he's cool as shit and is very fun to see in action, and once you get past his rough introduction he becomes a very solid component to the story.
The pacing is also pretty bad, the game will go for multiple hour stretches telling you nothing then dump 30 minute cutscenes back to back, but that isn't super important to me because that's the shit I came for.
There are other things worth mentioning, the Kojima-isms, the inventory management, the symbolism, but as of writing this its 4:00AM and I have better things to do. I'll probably edit this review later, but I think I've talked about everything worth talking about.
This game is special to me, it's very different, its very fun, but it's also very polarizing and very rough. It's probably a 7/10 objectively, but as the saying goes, a 7/10 can be better than any 10/10 you've played.
In short, if you like MGS and want to play this because Kojima made MGS, you will either like it or not. If you like MGS for the narrative, you'll probably like this a lot. If you like MGS for its gameplay, then you probably won't like this as much.
At it's core, Death Stranding is a game about delivering packages and bringing people together. It's a social-exploration game. But, it's also a horror game, a 3rd person war shooter, and a stealth-action game. Death Stranding is Kojima's attempt at creating something new, and also making every game Konami didn't let him finish, to both the games benefit and detriment.
Ultimately, most of the time Death Stranding feels like Kojima picked up the bones of PT/Silent Hills and MGSV and a third mysterious new game and tried to make it all work. Isolated, each of these elements work. When the game introduces itself, it's this survival horror game where Sam must deliver packages and face The Horrors of the abyss. And it's really cool. But then 1/3 in, the game goes "Well now you're literally in WW1. Go crazy." and suddenly the focus is about being a weird MGS, and abandons the horror elements by letting you fight the horrors very effectively. Then 1/3 later the game decides to be it's own thing and let's itself be Death Stranding. All with this underlying gameplay about connecting others. Alone, each of these portions work quite well. However, playing the game out feels quite jarring. The game tells you "Avoid BT's, don't shoot people" then later you're told "Actively kill BT's, shoot people." In the latter half I found myself missing the mystery and general horror of the BTs, and the actual threat they faced. Yet, I still found myself heavily enjoying the game overall. The point is, when this game chooses to be itself, it is very good, but most of the time it is remnants of something else and feels half-baked.
This all works for Kojima's meta narrative, which is about him leaving Konami and starting over. He sets up a game that puts you through what could have been Silent Hills, back through something vaguely Metal Gear, and then shows you something entirely new. So I get why he did it. But I don't entirely think he should have, since the actual story tells this underlying narrative quite well.
Regardless, there are other things outside of the core gameplay that are worth touching on.
The games overall presentation is very, very solid. Yes, it's very movie-game, but it works out quite well. Since most of the game has you walking, the presentation is very important, so going for the Generic Sony Movie Game route works well since you always have something nice to look at. The licensed music choices are very solid, the atmosphere is fantastic, and the overall world looks very good and is insanely engaging to traverse. Which is good, because most of this game is traversal.
The story, on the other hand, is a mixed bag. While MGS2 and 3 are very well written critiques of war and culture, Death Stranding comes to be far more personal. This isn't the pitfall though. The pitfall is how it's written. Most of the worldbuilding is sent through major exposition dumps from DefiningCharacterTrait-Man and the dumps are so heavy in load it becomes hard to process what's being said to you, and most of the time it feels like Kojima doesn't even know what he's talking about. I have a very intimate understanding of this game and I still can't concretely tell you what the fuck an "Extinction Entity" is, because I don't think Kojima does either. Most of these exposition dumps don't even need to be in the game. The whole point of the Death Stranding (the event) is that nobody properly knows what it is, and so having a character explain jargon to you makes the game more confusing and kills the overall mystery and tone. And if something isn't explained to you by mouth, you'll have to read pages and pages of shit via the in-game logs.
This isn't to say the writing is bad, because it isn't. For the first time I firmly believe Kojima has written a good female character. Really, most of the characters are very well rounded. Sure, there are a few ExpositionDump-Man's, but Sam, Higgs, and Fragile are all very interesting, likeable, and well written. When this game chooses to show you things rather than just outright tell, it does so very well, and is very memorable. All 3 of those characters arcs are very interesting to watch play out. Sam, as the main character, gets the most notable growth and the game shows this change in a very kosher way through BB. BB and Sam's dynamic is very fun, I'll probably touch on that later.
Though, other character don't exactly get much time to fully flesh out. For instance, Mama (yes, that's literally her name), has an arc, that is mildly interesting, but the game halts itself to focus on it and feels somewhat forced, and doesn't add much to the overarching story. There's also Mads Mikkelson's character, who's role is half as important as the game wants you to think, who feels weirdly forced into the narrative. While he is integral to the plot, his presence feels very out of left field and the game has to develop his character very quickly to make him work as a central character. It becomes hard to understand why he's doing the things he's doing, but I also give his character a pass because he's cool as shit and is very fun to see in action, and once you get past his rough introduction he becomes a very solid component to the story.
The pacing is also pretty bad, the game will go for multiple hour stretches telling you nothing then dump 30 minute cutscenes back to back, but that isn't super important to me because that's the shit I came for.
There are other things worth mentioning, the Kojima-isms, the inventory management, the symbolism, but as of writing this its 4:00AM and I have better things to do. I'll probably edit this review later, but I think I've talked about everything worth talking about.
This game is special to me, it's very different, its very fun, but it's also very polarizing and very rough. It's probably a 7/10 objectively, but as the saying goes, a 7/10 can be better than any 10/10 you've played.
In short, if you like MGS and want to play this because Kojima made MGS, you will either like it or not. If you like MGS for the narrative, you'll probably like this a lot. If you like MGS for its gameplay, then you probably won't like this as much.