From the
Giant Bomb review released today.
- Early on, this is a pain in the ass. You're constantly trying to navigate over rough terrain and through heavy patches of time rain and all you can do is hug the R2/L2 buttons to try to balance yourself.
- When you finally get vehicles, using them mostly sucks because you're constantly driving into rocks. When you finally get highways you can build, it starts to feel a little like American Truck Simulator...if you had to craft the truck and the roads yourself. And then the game just kind of gives up on that infrastructure stuff and sends you off to the mountains to criss-cross huge, snow-deluged peaks that take a very long time to get around. And then it asks you to do that a bunch more until the game is essentially over.
- I have several issues with Death Stranding, and one of them is pacing. This is a very lumpy game. The opening hours are a slog of endless, precarious walking and a near-constant deluge of new systems being presented to you. Then it just kind of settles into a rhythm of deliveries and discovering new places to deliver to, mostly putting the story on the back-burner until you finish the extremely long third chapter. After that, the A Hideo Kojima Production part of the game suddenly wakes up and you find yourself inundated with more cutscenes and character exposition than you'll ever know what to do with.
- The last hour and change of the game is basically one long run-on sentence that tries to tie up every remaining loose end where you don't really do anything at all except listen to it ramble on.
- To be absolutely clear: these parts of the game are never all that fun. They are not broken or really even difficult; they're merely an oft-tedious distraction. They're the thing you do that's most analogous to Kojima's previous works, but the fights are never very memorable. Whenever a BT section or boss fight cropped up, I often found myself annoyed that my delivery missions were being sidelined, and that is
not something I expected to say about a game like this
- What is surprising is just how flat the vast majority of it all falls. In the Metal Gear series, Kojima's goofy tangents and bats*** character monologues felt, to me at least, like amusing digressions set against the series' action cinema bravado. That stuff doesn't come off as well in what is essentially his version of an Andrei Tarkovsky movie. Nothing is allowed to be all that mysterious, and the game constantly tips its hand regarding things that might be considered twists or surprises. Whether it's through monologues, in-game emails and interviews, or someone just flatly stating the premise of what's going on out loud as obviously as possible, very little in Death Stranding is allowed to exist without overwhelming explanation.
- Frustratingly, I kept waiting for Death Stranding to offer
something to say, something to justify the amount of breath spent explaining its most obvious metaphors and motivations. Unfortunately, it never gets there. Its early game musings on human connectedness and the need to bring people together never evolves over the 50 hours you'll spend playing it. The things it says at the beginning are pretty much the same things it's saying at the end, and none of those things are all that deep.
- At least now we know what the hell Death Stranding is: a disappointment.
2/5