Death Stranding 2 isn't just a sequel it's an experience that challenges your patience, emotions, and expectations. From its stunning, desolate landscapes to its quiet moments of connection, it pulls you into a world that feels both alien and strangely familiar. It's a game that asks you to slow down, to reflect, and to sit with its weirdness, all while dragging you through a story full of loneliness, hope, and surreal twists.

In this critique, I'll break down what Death Stranding 2 does well, where it stumbles, and why it remains such a polarizing experience. Whether you found yourself mesmerized or frustrated or a bit of both—there's no denying the ambition behind it. Let's take a closer look at this strange, beautiful journey and see if it's really worth taking.

"We'll Always Be Connected" - Tommorow

In the first death stranding we were heavily focusing on the theme of isolation and loneliness where we travel through a broken America with our purpose being to reconnect everyone. As is with the Metal Gear Solid series this franchise seems to follow a simmilar approach of choosing a specific theme being present in the game and heavily focusing the narrative around it. This time around it's grief and processing through it.

Death Stranding 2 continues the innovative asynchronous multiplayer from the first game, allowing players to leave behind structures, messages, and resources for others. This system fosters a unique sense of community and shared struggle, making every bridge built or ladder placed feel like a small act of kindness in a harsh world.

The game starts off with Sam and Lou being on a mountaintop having finished a delivery, we see some time has passed as Lou has grown older. We trace back our steps to their hideout which is hidden by holograms of BTs.

As we hang around with Lou we have a stranger entering the premises. As Sam prepares for the worst we find out it's an old friend. Fragile. Fragile explains to us the audience that Sam was hiding from the UCA as he was supposed to get rid of Lou in the first game as she was planned to be decommissioned. She tells us that she has formed a new delivery company and that the UCA is no more and by helping her we could figure out a way to stop living in hiding with Lou.

Here you get to "make a choice" but dissapoingly the choice of refusing only loops back to the start of the cutscene.

As Sam accepts and goes around connecting Mexico for Fragile he encounters some odd mech enemies coming back home after making all the neccessary connections. At this point Fragile tells that they were attacked and that Sam should hurry home.

Here we are introduced to the motivator of this game. Lou's death.

As the exposition gives us time to process what has happened we slowly get an idea of where the game is headed. Fragile has offered Sam to work under her independantly of any goverement as a way for her to help him to overcome Lou's death.

Sam begrudngigly accepts and we are more or less through the prologue. Our new task is now to connect the entire continent of Australia, picking up some odd characters here and there. The one who is funding this mission is some mysterious benefactor disconnected from the goverment of UCA (Which sort of does not exist but is rather under a different organisation right now, where all porters were replaced by robots.)

There is quite a lot of story to cover and it's very convoluted to explain so I will only focus on the most important parts/characters.

As the first couple of hours of connecting Australia we see that the core gameplay has not changed too much. Still Sam is quite slow, the terrain is of course there to make it as hard as possible for us. Certain improvements were made to vehicles compared to the first game, vehicles feel much better and much more applicable to most of the terrain.

The important mention here is that Sam still has Lou at this point in his BB container, which I personally disregarded as just the usual Kojima weirdness. Also Sam has now a new companion which is in around 23 fps compared to the rest of the world which was quite cool to see. Simmilarly to the Spiderman SpiderVerse movies. Dollman is our new friend which was quite a better addition and makes much more sense if you think about the theme of the game. Dollman gives company to Sam throughout the whole game unlike Death Stranding 1 where we were essentially "alone" with Lou throughout the whole game.

The terrain feels quite diverse: snowy steep mountains, dry areas like deserts, tropical areas with animals to capture and bring to shelters. Also we see quite a lot of things parallel in real life this time around as well. Forest fires, earthquakes triggering avalanche, rockfall and various different weather conditions. This gives quite a lot more of a feel of catastrophe to the state of the world is in.

As the story goes on we meet and recruit new characters like Rainy and Tommorow. As we go along we see a familiar face from the previous game has come back to haunt us: Higgs. I really like Higgs and what Kojima and his team has done to his character this time around is very cool Higgs is now a Robot with an Electric guitar as his weapon. Where his sweep picking generates flames and electricity.

Higgs reveales to us that he killed Lou and came back from the dead exclusively to haunt Sam and Fragile.

We keep onward connecting the rest of Australia until the games last act which I will touch on in a later section.

So for some time I was thinking that Kojima Productions has develeoped their own engine, like they did in Konami with the Fox Engine which is something I highly appreciate in times of poorly optimised games.

Now what I found out after the games release that this engine is made by Guerilla Games the people that made the Horizon games. I unfortunately did not play those games as they never piqued my interest but I only have the best things to say about this Engine.

The pure photorealism that's achieved by Death Stranding 2 is just breathtaking. Every single screenshot you make inside of a cutscene or ingame could pretty much be used as a wallpaper. The performance of the engine is quite crazy as well as I played this on my PS5 slim and the framerate at no point slipped below 60fps.

The fluidity of everything, animations phyics, falling down and having all your packages bounce around is just crazy. I am aware that this version of the engine used for Death Stranding 2 is an improved version, but it's really great to see custom-made engines by companies that can afford it. I do like games made in "mainstream" engines like UE5 or Unity but what big companies often overlook is the performance and I am quite interested how will Metal Gear Solid Delta perform once it's released, since Silent Hill 2 while looking extremely photorealistic had quite a few issues on PC.

So I tried picking up tickets in Milan for Death Stranding 2 Orchestral tour as I really liked the idea of it, but I was unfortunately too slow and didn't manage to grab a ticket. Now after listening to the soundtrack I have a couple of things to say about it.

Kojima has largely popularised bands and songs he features in his games and his tastes in music are quite wide, but you can tell he is quite an indie fan when it comes to music. This can be an acquired taste for some people since music is quite memorable if done right and completely forgettable and unimportant if done wrong. Who can forget songs like Snake eater or The Man who sold the world from the MGS games.

There are quite a few notable tracks here as well as tracks I didn't manage to notice that well, so I think the Orchestral tour is going to be a huge success and I hope more of these Videogame tours happen. The notable songs you can find on my spotify playlist below. My personal favorite is definetely Minus Sixty One and To the Wilder (Both the regular version and the version with Elle Fanning). And the return from the band from the previous game Low Roar is quite a nice addition and an ode to the band since the singer has died in 2022 and the Band seems to have stopped recording.

Here we have another reoccuring thing from the previous game where Sam is transported to a different reality. In the previous game it was acted by Mads Mikkelsen but here we have another great performance by Luca Marinelli.

What I'd also like to mention is Kojimas naming of his characters. This is also a very prominent thing in most of these games and it's always especially corny for most of the names. Here our boss enemy is called Neil Vana (Nirvana, even Dollman makes a joke about it in the game).

Throughout the game we can see some nods from Kojima to his legacy in terms of the Metal Gear series. Neil looks eerily simmilar to Snake, where internet memes have called him Stranded Snake which seems quite appropriate.

As the story reveals us simmilarly to the Mads Mikkelsen reveal, Neil is also sort of a "good guy". He was essentially a human trafficker for the UCA and was not very happy about what the UCA made him do. His redemption comes in the form of trying to save Sams Wife and Child which we meet in this game. So the UCA needed Sams child to execute the BB project since apparently the best BB for making this project work and creating the chiral network would be with the BB from a repatriate. Sams wife asks of Neil to help her escape to mexico which unfortunately does not go through as they are caught escaping the building where she worked at. Neil is killed and so is Sams wife.

The fights play out mostly the same as in the first game and what is always interesting here is the design of the city where you are fighting Neil as it's quite a lot of eye candy every time.

Let's talk about the final act now. Essentially at the end we get quite a few weird scenes like Die Hardman which was presumed missing, showing up again and having a dance scene in the middle of quite an important part. Essentially after connecting all of Australia it's revelead that the patriots were behind after all. They were controlling Higgs and the ghost mechs all the time as well as the entire crew of DHV Magellan!

And it's revealed that it's the evangelion Instrumentality project!

Again I see these things above as inspirations for the plot twist. Essentially the idea of the new President was to make people not have to travel again ever in their life. Essentially letting robots control all deliveries and having people as more of a collective conscioussnes while the robots preserve the other species left on earth. Essentially letting people stay alive but not as an Apex predator but as a collective entity. It's a plot twist that offers an idea but does not expand too much on it as it's quite easily resolved with Die Hardmans help. I would've preffered one thing being the focus the entire game and not this type of plot twist. However I found it quite ridiculous that DHV Magellan in a manner of Tom Marvolo Riddle being I am Lord Voldemort in Harry potters means Die-Hardmans Vessel. In the words of the president at this scene: "You can't possibly be serious".

The real end of the game starts with Higgs regaining control and him being behind everything. He was using the President all this time to achieve his goal of enacting the final Death Stranding!

This is another classic Kojima move, where the twist actually happens after the first twist. In any case we move on forward to one of the coolest ending segments. Where we again see 2 nods to metal gear and snake, and a very cool guitar hero type of bossfight against Higgs. The game resolves in our favor where the Death Stranding event is again stopped. The final twist in the hat is that Tommorow is actually Lou and she was guarded by Neil Vana and Fragile has died a long time ago and was with us throughout the game essentially already dead unknown to her until the final act.

The last fight with Higgs is quite a spectacle, where we are transported to a different reality where we fight Higgs in a Metal Gear Solid 4 type of fight in its weirdness. Sam and Higgs battle it out with guitars, shredding and sweeping their way through each others health bars.

At the end we are teased of Tommorow with hands on her neck from Fragile a cigarrete in hand dressed in porter gear standing in front of the beach gate. I wonder, what will Kojima have in store for us in a couple of years?

If you liked the talk consider donating, also big recommendations for the PS5 disk version you can find on Amazon: Death Stranding 2