Death Stranding 2: On The Beach assumes two things about anyone jumping into Hideo Kojima’s new cinematic post-apocalyptic open-world delivery sim...err, sorry, I mean strand-type game. One: It assumes you have played the first game and (mostly) understood what happened. And two: It assumes you liked all of that and wanted more. A lot more. And if those two statements are accurate for you, and they were for me, Death Stranding 2 is likely going to be a weird, fun, somewhat uneven, and undoubtedly memorable 30- to 50-hour experience. I also have an assumption to share: If you didn’t like the OG game because you found it too long, strange, obtuse, or boring, you’ll absolutely hate Death Stranding 2: On The Beach.
To try and summarize the events of Death Stranding and the setup for Death Stranding 2 is very challenging. I know, because I’m struggling to do it now. Even Death Stranding 2, which includes a “recap” of the previous game, fails at summarizing what happened in it. But I’ll give it a shot!
Okay, so what the heck is Death Stranding 2 about?
Basically, the world of the living and the world of the dead have become intertwined, and that has nearly caused humanity to go extinct, primarily because of creepy ghost people stuck on Earth. Touch one of these “beached things,” aka BTs, and a big boom happens, killing anyone unlucky enough to be caught in the blast. Except for Sam Porter Bridges, the main character of the game, played by Norman Reedus. He’s a “repatriate” and can’t die. He just keeps coming back from the other side. This gives him special powers that make him the only person able to reconnect the remaining pockets of society via the Chiral Network, a super-fast version of the internet powered by the other side.
In the first game, with the help of a special baby in a pod, Sam was able to reconnect all of the United States. But he was betrayed by his adopted sister, who was actually a paranormal entity that was tasked with bringing about a new extinction event. Luckily, Sam convinced her to not use all the people he’d just connected to bring about the end of the world, defeated a dude named Higgs who was working alongside Sam’s sister to end everything, and ran away with that baby in the pod who is no longer trapped in the pod and is growing up into a healthy baby girl.
Got all that? I hope so, because I’m moving forward with the rest of this review.
Anyway, that’s where Death Stranding 2 picks up. Sam is living with the baby, now a toddler, and enjoying his quiet life of solitude in Mexico. But after a devastating event happens and Sam finds himself at his lowest point, a friend from the last game, Fragile (Léa Seydoux), shows up with a new mission for Sam: Connect all of Australia to the Chiral Network and hopefully save the country from destruction. And so, Sam begins a bigger journey across a massive open world filled with different biomes, cargo to deliver, animals to capture, and baddies to avoid or fight. All in pursuit of connecting up Australia and maybe, in the process, dealing with some trauma with the help of a small group of weirdos that form Sam’s found family.
To say there is a lot going on in Death Stranding 2 is an understatement. There are so many moving pieces in this sequel’s narrative that it quickly became hard to keep track of it all. Death Stranding 2 does include an in-game encyclopedia that you can reference whenever you need to, even during a cutscene, and that helps. But the real problem is that Death Stranding 2 has too many plot threads happening all at once, and it does a poor job of balancing them all or giving each one enough screen time. And this problem extends to characters, too.
Over the course of Death Stranding 2, we meet up with some old faces, including Fragile and Heartman, and meet some new people, including Tarman, Dollman, Rainy, and Tomorrow. (Stop laughing.) I enjoyed all of them and their interactions with each other. Sadly, all of these characters—with the exception of Dollman, who goes with you on your entire journey across Australia—feel underused and exist primarily in the game’s cutscenes, which aren’t as frequent or as long as you might expect for a Kojima game.
Death Stranding 2 makes a big deal about Sam not being alone. The members of his close-knit circle all tell Sam that he can lean on them during this terrible time in his life and use them for support on his journey to connect the continent, find peace, and even get some answers about that special baby in a pod. But those fuckers weren’t around much as I spent dozens of hours connecting Australia.
I won’t spoil the ending of the game, but so much of Death Stranding 2’s final act is dedicated to people unraveling a host of hidden identities, secret plans, and shocking betrayals. One great thing about Death Stranding 2’s closing hours is that, in the midst of all these twists and turns, you finally get to spend more time with all the characters. They even start to help Sam during gameplay, too.
However, with its overreliance on plot twists and big reveals, the final stretch feels less like an exciting conclusion to an epic story and more like someone writing a novel just realized they only have three blank pages left to wrap everything up. It’s messy. It’s weird. I’ll never forget the ending. There are at least three moments that are so bonkers, I wish the embargo I signed didn’t forbid me from even alluding to them as they are some of the wildest shit I’ve ever seen in a video game. But Death Stranding 2 just doesn’t nail its landing. Nor do I think it offers a satisfying answer to the question posed by much of the game’s marketing: Should we have connected? Ultimately, the answer the game seems to give is a big fat “Maybe.” It was a memorable but unsatisfying way to wrap up my 50-hour journey.
And yet, despite a messy finale and some frustrating narrative pacing issues, I still enjoyed my time with Death Stranding 2. Why? Because, dear reader, I fucking love delivering cargo.
Saving humanity with infrastructure and organization
Outside of Death Stranding 2’s cutscenes and character moments is the bulk of the game: Traversing a massive and gorgeously rendered digital Australia. Sometimes I did so by trekking across snowy mountains or flooded rivers on foot. Other times, I used a large van and traveled across highways that were rebuilt by me and other players online. And sometimes, I traveled in style via a network of monorails I’d helped create. Regardless of how I crossed Australia, I was almost always lugging around many different pieces of cargo on my back.
This is Death Stranding 2. This is what I spent 80 percent of my time doing. All the weirdness seen in the game’s marketing and trailers makes up a small percentage of the actual gameplay experience. Even the game’s creepy ghost monsters, BTs, can mostly be avoided by taking detours, being careful, and checking the weather via your in-game map.
I spent entire play sessions just traveling across Australia while ferrying supplies between walled-off cities and lonely outposts. I wouldn’t call it normal—as the world is dotted with holographic signs left by other players, and a man trapped in the body of a small wooden doll was my companion—but it was quiet. It was often very chill. Contemplative. I did a lot of thinking on these journeys, sometimes getting lost in my own thoughts about the world. Then I would slip on some wet rocks and watch all my carefully stacked and undamaged cargo fly off Sam and fall down a cliff or into a river, leading to some panicked running around as I tried to save it all.
That’s what makes delivering cargo so satisfying. When you pick up some packages to carry to a location, they aren’t simply dumped into a menu and never seen again until you drop them off. Instead, you have to stack them on Sam’s back. Each package makes you a bit heavier and throws your balance off. It is possible to restack your cargo or tie it down to help keep it from falling, but each trek is still a balancing act between getting to the next drop-off point quickly and getting there safely.
Throughout all these deliveries and hikes across the country, I interacted with other players via the return of Death Stranding’s asynchronous multiplayer. To be clear: At no point do you ever directly interact with another player in the game. You aren’t ever jumping into someone’s world and helping them pick up packages or fight nasty monsters. Instead, you interact with players by leaving behind messages and signs. Or building structures that make your life and their lives easier.
For example, I spent a few hours one weekend morning jamming out to Kojima’s wonderful selection of in-game music and installing ziplines across a range of snowy mountains. Some other players had already set up ziplines, but the network wasn’t complete. It was a long process, involving multiple trips to different locations via van and on foot. I had to gather up materials, avoid baddies, scale incredibly tall cliffs, and deal with cold weather that sapped my stamina and forced me to take rests.
By the time I was done, I had created a vast spiderweb of Chiral-network-powered ziplines that allowed me and other players to easily reach multiple delivery locations in minutes while also avoiding enemy mercs and monsters.
Every so often, I would get notifications in the left-hand corner of the screen letting me know that someone had used my ziplines or other structures I’d crafted. In Death Stranding 2, as with the last game, you can also “Like” or “Thumbs Up” everything players build and leave behind. Seeing those likes flood in when I built a useful shelter, zip, or even a section of road or monorail felt good.
I hate to admit that. It provides a similar feeling to when a viral tweet fills your feed with likes. But in Death Stranding 2, there are no angry comments, racist posts, or slurs. Just lots of likes. It’s a social network built around helping everyone out and being nice. In 2025, that’s a wonderful gift to give the world. Thank you, Kojima.
Inside Death Stranding 2 are two wolves…
The problem, though, is that Death Stranding 2: On The Beach isn’t just a really fun and satisfying delivery simulator that lets you build infrastructure and spread positivity on a chiral social network. It’s also a Kojima-directed game, so it contains sneaking around and combat as well as long speeches and confusing plot twists. In the first game, it felt like these two parts of the experience—the cargo sim and the weird Kojima stuff—worked well together.
Here, thanks to a bigger map that offers more ways to deliver packages and more ways to “connect” to other players, the cargo sim part of Death Stranding has become even more dominant. And it makes the Kojima-y stuff feel more out of place and unnecessary.
I don’t care that much about reconnecting Australia using a Q-Pid device to form a Plate Gate using built-up Chiralium as directed by an AI-powered supercomputer controlled by a private company that employs Fragile and Tarman while dodging a vengeful enemy from our past using the other side and the dead to his advantage. I just want to deliver more packages. Build more roads. Help more people. Get more likes.
Death Stranding 2’s ending seems to hint at a big change for any future sequel. And believe me, I want another game. I want a whole new world to explore while rebuilding local infrastructure and delivering boxes of cargo. I want to once again scramble down mountains on foot, managing my stamina and health. I want to slowly climb up a tall mountain, reach the top, leave a funny sign for others to like, and build a zipline to my next destination. I want to jump across rivers on a motorcycle using ramps built by players I’ll never meet. And I want to do all that while liking people’s creations and receiving little dopamine hits from their thumbs-up notifications.
But I’m not sure I want to go through another chapter in Death Stranding’s convoluted, messy, and often contradictory universe. Especially if the next game’s ending is as unsatisfying as Death Stranding 2’s finale.
Sure, the bizarre moments are amazing to watch on screen. So much money in Death Stranding 2’s development budget was put into some of the silliest and strangest ideas. And that’s all wonderful. I love it. But it doesn’t make up for the fact that so much of the game feels, ironically, disconnected from what you actually do in Death Stranding 2: On The Beach. Or that it all ends so poorly. But I guess I can always build more ziplines and roads and get the satisfaction of a job well done.
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