Death Stranding 2: On The Beach review – the postman rings twice

Hideo Kojima, creator of Metal Gear, returns with a sequel to one of the strangest big budget games ever, but while this one is even weirder it’s also a lot more fun.

If you find Hideo Kojima games to be pretentious and frustrating, that’s not you being a philistine, that’s how he likes people to respond to his games. The creator of Metal Gear is one of the very few game creators in the world that gets to make whatever he wants, no matter how bizarre, with a massive budget, and whether you enjoy his games or not it’s hard not to respect him for that alone.

Given his obvious talent it’s a shame his whole career has been almost nothing but Metal Gear titles and even when he left Konami, to form his own studio, his games have continued to riff on similar ideas, from the original Death Stranding to the upcoming Physint.

Death Stranding 2 is a surprisingly straightforward sequel, which may seem a strange way to describe a game with a talking puppet and a woman with her hand on backwards, but it is a peculiar mix of the surreal and the mundane. Like all of Kojima’s games, it won’t be for everyone but, as he himself pointed out, the more you try to appeal to everyone the less likely it is you’ll make anything interesting.

If you didn’t play the original Death Stranding, we’re not sure there’s any way to explain it to you succinctly. The sequel barely even tries to, going out of its way to avoid any straight answers. The gist of it though, is that spirits from the afterlife – its gateway represented as a beach – have started appearing everywhere and when they touch a dead body they explode in a nuclear-like blast.

At the start of the first game, humanity was heading for extinction, but this was averted by… having your character Sam (played by Norman Reedus) deliver parcels across very rocky terrain, that looked exactly like Iceland even though it was meant to be the US. As the sequel starts, he’s in retirement with his adopted toddler. Her backstory is far too complicated to explain but suffice it to say she’s a sort of chosen one, with special supernatural abilities.

We’re not being facetious about any of this. The primary activity in both games is delivering post and trying not to fall over, although your actual goal is to connect all the cities in the country together in an internet-like network that allows you to 3D print anything you like, by using magic particles in the air. In the first game you were connecting up the US and in the second it’s Mexico.

You get done with that in the first few hours though, which activates a magic gateway to Australia, with the theory being that if you connect all of that up then another gateway will open to somewhere else, and so on (sea and air travel is impossible, for reasons).

What surprised us about Death Stranding 2 is that structurally it’s very similar to the original. Although in the first game you were predominantly just walking from place to place, the sequel, once you get to Australia, puts more emphasis on driving and fast travel. The vehicles you drive are infuriatingly slow though and while you can find abandoned parcels on the floor, which adds a new element of discovery, the main gameplay mechanic, of trying to make sure you don’t fall over, is bizarrely prosaic.

Beyond the occasional earthquake or flash flood, there aren’t really any new gameplay elements and the delivery concept is both repetitive and surprisingly easy most of the time. However, the combat has a lot more variety, in terms of enemies, weapons, and gadgets, even if it’s still a pretty straightforward third person shooter. The stealth is also surprisingly shallow, to the point where you can’t even move bodies – although your focus is usually on escaping rather than infiltrating.

The little flashbacks when you plug-in the baby you keep in a high-tech papoose (we told you, don’t ask) are the same but different, and you still have a series of showdowns with the secondary protagonist and his goons in a dream-like fantasy world, except this time instead of Mads Mikkelsen it’s Luca Marinelli cosplaying as Solid Snake.

There’s also a Cyborg Ninja stand-in and lots of fourth wall nods, but the fact that Kojima acknowledges it all doesn’t change the fact that for the majority of the time, Death Stranding 2 is just a bit too similar to its predecessor and still unnecessarily beholden to Metal Gear.

It is an incrementally better sequel though, with the combat being faster-paced and more enjoyable. You also have new countermeasures against the ghost-like entities called BTs, such as a boomerang soaked in your own blood (because Sam has magic blood or something). There’re also what amounts to a skill tree, which is filled with unusual and useful abilities.

Unfortunately, Sam is a fairly unresponsive character to control, with a slow turning circle, and the UI is very fiddly, particularly when swapping weapons. The BTs delight in knocking you off balance (because so much of the game is based around not dropping or breaking your parcels) so the game can feel very clumsy at times – in more ways than one.

The ability to create new infrastructures as you go, including roads, bridges, and ziplines remains, although it’s not the story missions that encourage it but instead the ability to interact with other people’s games and use their creations if they happen to appear in yours. More obviously than before, this is inspired by Dark Souls, with a similar sense of other players experiencing the game at the same time as you but only having a limited reach into your world.

That plays into the main themes of the game, which were apparently inspired by Covid and Brexit, and includes the dangers and benefits of using the internet. Subtlety is not one of Kojima’s fortes and while it’s interesting how the gameplay itself mirrors the same ideas, a lot of these subjects were already explored in the original, especially as the characters that are clearly speaking with Kojima’s voice seem a bit too uncritical of the modern online world.

The fact that you so rarely meet anyone real in the game also seems unnecessarily repetitive. Delivering a parcel almost always just ends up with you talking to a hologram, despite their being no reason for such shyness in terms of the game’s plot. The first location you visit is said to have over 120,000 people living there, but all you ever see is a warehouse and a hologram. Perhaps Kojima is pushing the dead internet theory but whatever the case, he’s made this point before.

The story also flirts with questions of colonialism and the power of corporations, but it’s handled quite superficially, despite the set-up of the plot being well suited to the subject.

One disappointment about Death Stranding 1 is that it had absolutely nothing to say about the US and the sequel certainly isn’t interested in Australia in any way – especially as barely a handful of people have Aussie accents and most just look and talk like Americans (except when they’re one of Kojima’s showbiz friends, like the Scottish trio from Chvrches, who in the game are running a wildlife park).

It goes without saying, but the plot is absolute nonsense. There’s no grounding to anything, no rules that aren’t instantly broken whenever Kojima feels like it, and you just start to tune out the absurdity of it all – which isn’t a problem per se, but it is a shame. Although all the stuff about babies being born to brain dead mothers does veer into tastelessness, as the game tries to make a serious point about the exploitation of women while simultaneously trying to justify its nonsensical background lore.

As usual, the script is a mix of the profound and the silly, but despite that there are some nice little sequences, such as one when the characters are discussing the inevitability of change, and life and death. There are many cut scenes, as you would imagine, but by modern standards they’re not unusually long.

The dialogue is still occasionally awkward, with lines that don’t seem to have been translated quite right, but it’s generally decent. Although the way everyone constantly says ‘DHV Magellan’ – the name of your mobile submarine base – without ever trying to shorten it, and usually while pronouncing the name wrong, becomes steadily more infuriating the longer the game goes on.

The open world design isn’t necessarily the best (the segue from one biome to another is very abrupt and the idea that the map represents the whole of Australia is just absurd) but the graphics can be astonishing. Things like rocks and mountains look photorealistic and the way deep snow moves as you walk through it feels astonishingly real.

The facial animation is also exemplary, in what is a very good advert for the PlayStation 5 – especially as there’s not a hint of slowdown even on a base console. The attention to detail and craftmanship is amazing, such as one random stop off that led to a wonderfully choreographed, and quite lengthy, cut scene about a karate pizza chef, which most people who play the game are probably never got to see.

And yet despite it all, as a sequel, Death Stranding 2 does seem slightly redundant. In terms of gameplay and thematic storytelling it’s mostly covering old ground and while it’s definitely more entertaining than its predecessor it’s also not very different.

We’re not sure the world or Kojima really needed a second Death Stranding but now that it’s here it’s unquestionably a better game. Like all of his work, it’s filled with missed opportunities but if this is the game he wanted to make then we salute that. Outside of the world of indie gaming, very few games are made because one person had an idea they were passionate about, but Death Stranding 2 is definitely that.

Formats: PlayStation 5
Price: £69.99
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Developer: Kojima Productions
Release Date: 26th June 2025
Age Rating: 18

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