'Death Stranding 2' doesn't really try to win over the haters

Do you remember how you felt about Death Stranding all the way back in 2019? I know it's hard to retrieve memories from before COVID at this point, but your feelings on that game will go a long way towards determining how you feel about Death Stranding 2, launching this week on PS5.

Put simply, Death Stranding 2 is not interested in winning over the many people who didn't vibe with the first game. After playing the first 30 hours, I can safely report that this is still (mostly) a game about being a post-apocalyptic gig worker who has to juggle his time between planning transit infrastructure and soothing a crying baby on his chest. There was always a possibility, however slight, that director Hideo Kojima and his team at Kojima Productions would opt to reconsider and revise Death Stranding after the first game's mixed reception, but instead, DS2 would rather build on what was already there.

The result, at least after the portion of it that I've played, is a bigger, prettier, funnier, and more endearing game than the uneven 2019 original. But be warned: If you didn't like what was on offer before, you won't like what's on offer now.

I don't know if the story is great, but at least it's there

It was very rare for this many people to appear on screen together in the first game. Credit: Kojima Productions

There is one area where DS2 strives to differentiate itself from its predecessor, and that's the part where it actually has a story with characters who are present most of the time. The first game opened with about four hours of incredibly dry exposition, which led into several dozen hours of nothing, before another seven or eight hours of more boring cutscenes to close it out. Its narrative pacing, much like Kojima's last two Metal Gear games in Peace Walker and The Phantom Pain, left a lot to be desired. There were just too many long stretches where very little happened, and also following in the footsteps of Phantom Pain, the few things that did happen weren't especially interesting.

I can't holistically analyze the story in the sequel without having finished it, but after 30 hours, it's at least present. It helps a lot that protagonist Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus) gets access early on to the DHV Magellan, a ship that can fast travel between visited settlements and acts as a home base for the few interesting characters from Death Stranding, such as Léa Seydoux's Fragile, as well as the sequel's menagerie of new weirdos.

Tomorrow's got some stuff going on. Credit: Kojima Productions

Fragile is actually a fairly omnipresent character this time around, rather than the strange woman who made a few cameo appearances in the first game. The Magellan's captain Tarman, who has the face of Mad Max series director George Miller, is a fairly delightful old guy with a pet cat that may or may not be a demon of some sort. There's also Dollman, a former human who now lives inside the body of a doll for some reason. Dollman rides on Sam's belt and chimes in during gameplay with helpful tips and emotional support. He's a kind soul and I love him.

The cast, at least at the point of the game I've gotten to, is also rounded out by Elle Fanning's Tomorrow, a mysterious otherworldly woman who hates wearing shoes, though that particular trait is surprisingly not fodder for a bunch of creepy Tarantino foot shots, as one might suspect. Shioli Kutsuna's Rainy also brings a lot of levity to the proceedings as a fun-loving pregnant woman with the ability to create life-giving rain and a penchant for peppering Sam with irrelevant trivia questions.

Sam sees and interacts with these people face-to-face far more often than he did with the first game's far more scattered (and, frankly, uninteresting) cast of characters. Not for nothing, the story also seems to be weaving some threads together about the dangers of global connection and American cultural hegemony, but I can't say for sure if the game ever pays any of that off yet. Knowing Kojima, I'd say there's about a 50/50 chance it either goes to amazing places, or winds up being nothing.

Sad delivery hikes have never been better

Floating carriers are more useful than before. Credit: Kojima Productions

I can't talk too much about the plot of DS2, but I can talk a lot more about the few dozen hours I've spent walking from points A to B to C and beyond in its sizable open world. Missions are still largely structured like package deliveries, and the core gameplay still revolves around planning a route to your destination, keeping in mind how you're not only going to get Sam there, but how you're going to get the package there. Like the first game, a great deal of the moment-to-moment action here involves walking on foot with a bunch of heavy crap in your backpack, but plenty of missions also incentivize the use of vehicles, monorails, highways, ziplines, and more to cross unfriendly terrain.

When it hits, it still hits as hard as ever. Death Stranding's signature aesthetic touch of spooling up some sad indie song (complete with an on-screen artist credit) as you crest a hill with your destination in sight is back in full force in DS2, happening roughly 15 times in the first 30 hours of gameplay. Hikes are still as meditative as ever, and I find a lot of enjoyment in gameplay where the core tension often comes down to choosing whether or not you should try fording a stream or scaling a ridge.

Oh yeah, there are sandstorms now. Credit: Kojima Productions

Of course, there are higher-stakes missions, and this is another area where DS2 stands apart from the original. Combat, especially against human enemies, is much less tacked-on and avoidable here. Bandit camps are littered around the landscape and you will regularly (though not necessarily frequently) have to find ways through them to progress. To compensate for combat being a bigger part of the game, it's also a lot more manageable. You're given a wide variety of very effective non-lethal guns and stealth tools in the first 10 hours this time.

The core shooting and stealth mechanics haven't changed that much, but where I found combat in the first Death Stranding to be burdensome and annoying, I find it to be a fun source of variety whenever the game asks me to do it. Infiltrating bases as stealthily as I can (until one guy sees me and I go Rambo mode on everyone else) has consistently been enjoyable and rewarding. I like that this game demands that the player engage with every part of its design rather than making combat a weird afterthought like it was before.

This is also more fun than before. Credit: Kojima Productions

Aside from those small changes, this really is an iterative take on Death Stranding. Everything that worked in the original, like the core design loop and ability to build out a transit network using the assistance of other players online, is still here and works as elegantly as before. On top of that, Death Stranding 2 has more characters, more opportunities to spend time with those characters, and a wider variety of problems to solve (and more ways to solve them) than the original game did.

This has been enough for me after 30 hours, but if you just couldn't deal with what Death Stranding was trying to be in 2019 (and there were plenty of good reasons to feel that way), you probably won't find much to enjoy about the sequel in 2025.