After the recent announcement of Death Stranding 2s release date, I’ve decided to release this piece I’ve been holding for a while. Death Stranding is a weird game that we need to talk about. I must be doing something wrong because I just don’t get it, I’ve been a big Kojima fan and I’m conflicted. 

Since it came out in 2019, I’ve tried to play it on several occasions and I just got bored. The occasional  cutscenes, radio messages and songs couldn’t keep me playing. It is one of the few games, where its not for me. Mechanically there’s nothing wrong with the game, my problem is the its whole gameplay loop. 

The game was a letdown still. I find it has the quirks, characters, story, mechanics, strange world and details of a Kojima game, but it feels wasted. I find I’m waiting for it to all come together to be a classic Kojima and it just doesn’t. I’m waiting for the game to have proper MGS stealth and gameplay. You’re waiting to see these cities your delivering  but just see reused assets. Maybe the gameplay will evolve into something more delivering packages. Hopefully the story will pickup and these characters will become interesting and heavily story focused.

You wonder if this game was made short on time and that’s why its like it is. A large open world with reused assets and a simple gameplay loop. For me one of the worst things to happen to Kojima was going open world. MGSV had really good gameplay but the story was bad. Death Stranding should’ve never been open world either, it really detracts from the story. 

Another issue is the games engine. The Decima engine can make games look really good but struggles with a lot of other stuff. In Death Stranding and the Horizon games, it struggles to stealth correctly. It relies on you going into tall grass. You can’t hide behind trees or logs and it’s frustrating.

This game reminds me a lot of MGSV, where all the ingredients are there for a great game but don’t all come together. The story feels very barebones and instead you get an open world. Unlike Death Stranding, MGSV had really good gameplay that kept you playing it, this doesn’t. I put 20 hours into the game and still can’t find the wow moments people are talking about. One thing people will say is you went into it with different expectations, which isn’t true. This was marketed as Kojima’s next great adventure with a deep story and great characters. There’s games out there that wont meet my expectations but they are still enjoyable. I just did a review on the Rainbow Six: Vegas games, and they had their moments, didn’t meet my expectations, but still enjoyable.