Death Stranding 2: Walking Less, Shooting Much More

Shortly before the release of Death Stranding 2 , Hideo Kojima expressed some concerns about the game. He was worried that it was being liked too much by those who had tried it and, in his opinion, things that everyone likes last less than those works that convince a few people right away and need time and discussion to be appreciated more. Following this logic, he would also make some last-minute changes.

Now, we don't know what these changes were, but we feel like saying that Kojima can rest easy: Death Stranding 2 will surely give rise to debates and comparisons , because it is a video game full of themes, contrasting atmospheres, exaggerations, baroque moments, excessive and timid choices, incredible landscapes, spectacular music, important themes, lyrical, emotional and beautiful moments, combined with giant monsters, guitar solos in the face of the apocalypse, depression, suicide, rebirth. It is a jar too full of things, and other times too empty, and you cannot remain indifferent.

But let's start from the beginning. Death Stranding 2 picks up more or less where we left off. Sam Porter lives hidden and happy with Lou, the little girl saved at the end of the first chapter who had been in the virtual womb that had accompanied him in his task of reuniting the United States. Obviously he will be needed again to continue connecting other countries to the chiral network, bringing packages and hope, so after a while we will be back on the road , with new technologies, new paths and new and old enemies.

Compared to the first chapter , it almost seems that Kojima has decided to listen to those who didn't want to walk too much and those who wanted to fight more . In fact, after a few hours, the game already offers very comfortable solutions to tackle the journey without risking great fatigue, first with a sort of three-wheeled motorcycle and then with a truck that over time can be equipped with an autonomous package recovery system, additional batteries and machine guns. And if you think that these vehicles will have a hard life in the most impervious terrains, you're wrong: there will almost always be a path wide enough to move. And often there will be too many ways to move , some particularly macabre and absurd, but we don't want to spoil anything.

And so, if in the first chapter the walks through the mountains between ladders and ropes were a must-have for the game's identity, here it will be the long crossings accompanied by music and the hum of electric motors in the silence of a desert illuminated by a magnificent sky.

Now, let's talk about the music : Low Roar, a real obsession of Kojima, are obviously back, but after the death of their frontman, Ryan Karazija, Woodkid's soundtrack was added, and he had to pick up the baton and did it admirably. His To the Wilder is a beautiful manifesto for the entire game and you'll find yourself humming it along with Lou's theme and Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head.

The only flaw of this beautiful world: the trailers promised us a more changeable world, subject to floods and earthquakes. And if all in all the former are occasionally felt when it rains, the so-called "varcosismi" are limited to a few jolts of the screen, without ever really impacting the spaces around us. Perhaps the only big flaw of the game.

But if you walk less, you shoot a lot more, a lot, a lot more . All the hesitations about avoiding conflicts here fall away completely and little by little we are not only made aware of an ever-growing arsenal , but we are expressly asked to use it in various missions where we have to recover objects or clear out the outlaws threatening an outpost. And so on with automatic rifles, machine guns, sniper rifles, grenades and so on.

In all of this , what is missing is that gloomy and crepuscular sense that characterized certain passages, especially those in which we found the shadows of the dead in the haunted fields ready to drag us into the tar. Sure, they are still there, but what fear can they have in me if I dart through the middle while an automatic cannon is making havoc of it, and I can calmly move on?

The only moments where we can remember how much they hurt are some specific fights or particularly infested areas that are very reminiscent of the first chapter, but with some adjustments that make everything a little more fun and dynamic.

And the story? Well, we are faced with Hideo Kojima , who with Death Stranding has pushed the accelerator on a layered, cryptic, metaphysical but also deliberately convoluted story, and therefore it is legitimate to expect a bit of everything. This time, it must be said, there are explanations, perhaps more than before, and you don't get to the end with the idea that too little has been said, on the contrary, perhaps Kojima says too much and says it, as always, in his own way, that is, exaggerating with a series of crossed scenes and counter-scenes, alternating points of view, beautiful and deliberately ridiculous moments, references to himself and to cinema, the tacky and the sublime. And in this desire to tell you everything that comes to mind, it ends up that topics worthy of taking more time are resolved very quickly.

And, above all, Kojima tells without balancing the parts of the story within the game. So after the beginning everything is quite linear and almost identical to the first for a long time . Then follow some steps forward in the plot, which remains dormant for a long time, then it reactivates, starts to run and finally unleashes in a very long finale full of fights, reversals, twists, tears and rock.

Not that we didn't know that Kojima lacks a certain measure, on the contrary, we like it that way, because it is in that exaggeration that we often find the things we like, but here we see that he hasn't had anyone who put a hand on his shoulder to tell him "even less".

The themes are also typical of his poetics: antimilitarism, his need for connections, his love for the human race , despite everything, the drive to face the future and its challenges with courage, together. But also mourning, depression, suicide, love for others, introversion, transhumanism, or rather, posthumanism, immigration, death and of course birth.

And then let's not forget that Death Stranding anticipated many themes of Covid and forced isolation , and obviously we're talking about it again.

If this seems like too many themes for one game, maybe your intuition isn't so wrong.

In this huge narrative-protein smoothie, it must be acknowledged that each character, despite a huge cast that ranges from George Miller to Luca Marinelli, passing through Elle Fanning and old acquaintances Léa Seydoux and Nicolas Winding Refn, manages to carve out a space to tell you something about themselves, to tell you about part of this world and make you grow fond of them a little. From the shy Rainy, the personification of introverts who from afar seem one way but who up close can be the sweetest people in the world, to Neil, a man full of pain and bad memories that we will have to face several times to understand why he is so obsessed with us (which is the same thing we did with the character of Mads Mikkelsen in the first game, but now there is Luca Marinelli , already ready for a film about Solid Snake, who insults you in Italian even if you have selected the English dubbing).

Yet, in this incredible cast, perhaps the least famous face stands out: Troy Baker, a very well-known name in video games, because he gives body and voice to Joel in The Last of Us, Samuel Drake in Uncharted and many other titles, who here brings back to the scene a Mephistophelian, charming, glamorous and desperate Higgs.

So? To go back to the beginning, we truly believe that Kojima can be happy, but that somehow, in search of an imperfection worthy of debate, he has largely disavowed some of the things that made Death Stranding particularly beautiful . We don't know if he did it to bend a little to the rules of the public, if he wanted to change direction or what else, but if after the first Metal Gear a second chapter arrived that put everything back into play in a provocative and current way, here we don't have a Metal Gear Solid 2 that tells us to turn off the television or that provokes us with new characters, but more something comfortable, that takes up what was good from the first game and smooths out all the edges and the more authorial choices, on which you want to spend hours if you loved the first one, but they will be hours with a different taste.

If we had to sum it all up: Death Stranding 2 is a mechanically more fluid game than its predecessor, but a globally less interesting, less courageous work , which suffers greatly from a narrative compressed in some key moments and too dilated in others. And then obviously there is all that way of telling things, in exaggerating in telling them, which this time could leave even its most ardent fans speechless.

But since in the end the question that matters is "ok, but did you like it?" we tell you that yes, at the end of the journey, having to add absurd moments, a few kilometers of boredom, beautiful landscapes, emotion, music, a few too many bullets fired and characters with whom we would have gladly lived our adventures forever, we can say that if Kojima, after having worked on the cinematic adaptation, wants to try to screw up a third chapter, we're in.