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Death Stranding 2 review: Beautiful, frustrating, and absolutely essential [1]

['Grant St. Clair']

Date: 2025-06-26

When I first floated the idea of writing this review, one of my friends, in all their infinite wisdom, reminded me that there's no shame in knowing what I like. But you know what? I'm still frustrated. I'm frustrated that Hideo Kojima, for all his pretentiousness, for his deeply strange understanding of storytelling, for all his bad habits like renting out entire theaters just so A-list celebrities can sit around and heap praise on him, can still back every single bit of that up by producing one of the best games I've ever played.

I shouldn't like Kojima, but he's one of the few true auteurs left in the triple-A space, so what choice do I have? Like its predecessor, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is a sprawling, beautiful beast, capturing the same vibe as the original while doing what all good sequels should do: taking a mechanical step up.

The terrain is no longer just inhospitable, it's actively shifting, with dynamic weather and larger events like bush fires and earthquakes constantly coming to bear against you. The enemies in your way are no longer just annoying, they're bolstered with powerful mechanized forces provided by the delightfully scenery-chewing main villain. The deliveries aren't just grueling, they're more crushing than ever, but you have an arsenal of new tools to mitigate the increased pressure from all sides and help you be the best Norman Reedus you can be. Almost everything can be customized with far more granularity to fit the task, with your suit pattern holding nearly as much importance as the array of gadgets mixed and matched onto your trusty pickup truck.

Kojima has a reputation for clairvoyance that dates back to 2001's Metal Gear Solid 2, which, in a sense, sat the player down and directly warned them of the wave of politically fueled misinformation that has come to pass over the following decades. Death Stranding was a story about the COVID pandemic months before it happened. In a similar sense, Death Stranding 2 feels like a direct examination of the rise of AI.

The UCA that Sam worked so hard to build in the first game has become a large, mechanized, automated entity, governed by privately owned AI instead of the humans he left in charge. While the mission is on its surface the same as the previous game, connecting chunk after chunk of this strange, beautiful post-apocalyptic world, you get the sense that you're feeding some ravenous creature more than anything else. It's this sense of uneasiness, encouraged by the game's tagline, Should We Have Connected? — that permeates much of the game's far more emotional story. The typical Kojima exposition dumps are still here, but the looming, soulless threat on one side means the human factor is dialed up to match. It's rare for Kojima-written characters to feel like actual humans, but believe it or not, it happens in Death Stranding 2.

Death Stranding 2 is not a game for everyone, but no art worth anything is for everyone. It's for me, though, and broke through to my top 5 all-timers long before the credits rolled. It's slow, it's frustrating, it's downright byzantine at times, but when you finally crest your last hill, greeted with the sight of your destination while Low Roar slides unobtrusively into the background, you get what it's all about. Of course we should have connected. Humans need connections to live, after all, but machines don't. The people in charge may be colossal, looming titan-sized over our collective consciousness, but that's no reason to forget your neighbor.

[END]
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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/06/26/death-stranding-2-review-beautiful-frustrating-and-absolutely-essential.html

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