In this game, you play as a delivery man who has to reconnect America again and find out what’s going on with his strange sister before the earth is destroyed. You also have to take a shower with Guillermo del Toro.
I’m not going to spend too much time explaining the story of this game. Just experience it yourself. It’s a mess, but a fun mess.
It took me 71 hours to complete Death Stranding on the very hard difficulty. The game isn’t that hard, so play it on very hard difficulty, to get the best and right experience.
The story is pretty wild and bizarre, and even if I got a suspicion about who the protagonist was, I didn’t completely understand all the talk about the beach since my mind got numb towards the end of the game that must have lasted 2 hours or so. It’s a long, long, ending, too long, and I ended up hating my sister! She’s so boring, and she just talks and talks. I hate people who talk too much. I like silence!
I spent a lot of time building roads. I never finished it, but I built around 80% of the roads. So that was sort of fun. But I didn’t like the BTs or the mules. They disturbed me when I was in the zone delivering packages and building roads.
You can say the same thing about the war scenario when you meet Mads Mikkelsen, who’s the best character and actor in the whole game. Well, that shouldn’t come as a surprise, does it? He is the heart of the story, and he will always be one of my favorite actors. But when you meet him time after time, it doesn’t feel right going back in time. I’m not going to say more than that. He’s pretty scary, and the first time you fight him is intense and difficult. But then I understood how to beat him, but it took many tries. After that, I didn’t have many problems defeating him since you will fight him several times during the game.
Is this a game for everybody? No. The game can feel like a mess sometimes, and I have to say that I missed what I experienced during the first 10 hours of the game without vehicles. It was fun to use ladders and ropes. But when you get vehicles to drive around with, I never needed a ladder again. I just drove around with the truck everywhere and driving places you shouldn’t be able to traverse. But I was a master with my truck. But it also destroyed so much of the immersion the game creates before the stupid vehicles show up. I hated the vehicles. It’s so much fun just walking and climbing and getting tired. But the map is pretty big, so that wasn’t an option in the end.
There’s much to like here, and vice versa. You will get a new gaming experience that never feels too hard, but I never found the mules in the game to be important, except for when you had to steal some metals and stuff to build the roads. The first encounters with the BTs are intense, but when you get the cutter, they never create the same fear again.
I played the game on PC, and I used the Xbox controller. I had some strange problems with the controller. A lot of times when I pressed a button, the button got pressed two times which created problems for me under important action moments, and it drove me nuts. I see that many PC players are still having problems with this issue. Fish like this shouldn’t happen! And I know they say that the game is a good PC port, but no it isn’t. The people who have tested the game haven’t built the roads it seems. The game runs fine without the roads, but when you start building the roads, the fps drops a lot, especially when you fill up the truck with packages. So this is far from a great PC port.
I wasn’t a big fan of the controls on the tricycle. It feels so clunky when you touch some rocks and drive sideways up the mountains. It feels stiff and unnatural. But when you are on foot, the controls are great when you stumble around like a drunken idiot.
Death Stranding deserves a sequel so Hideo Kojima can fix some of the issues the game has. I loved delivering packages in the mountains while taking in the view. I loved so much of the gameplay, but I didn’t like the mules and their camps at all, and I hated when BTs interrupted me too much when I was driving around in my cool truck singing Postman Pat. That took me out of my zone.