Death Stranding: The Anti-Metal Gear!?

I am a long time MGS fan. I adore most of Kojima's work- long cutscene, crazy conspiracy, innovative boss fight, if it has the Kojima stamp on it, I am guaranteed to love it. Yet, even I thought this game is insane when I first saw the trailer. My first thought is "only Sony would invest in a game like this". A triple A budgeted deliveryman simulator featuring an out-of-this-world-star-studded cast and a story so insanely creative, Kojima has to be high when he comes up with this idea. 

 

Graphics

The game is really gorgeous. Even though the game itself is supposedly set in America, it features a wide range of landscape that looks like they could be set in Iceland, on Mars or on some snowy mountains. Every location looks absolutely stunning no matter where you look, even on my base PS4 console. The characters all look like they are the permanent resident of Uncanny Valley, it's honestly quite amazing / creepy how photo-realistic everything looks. The game also doesn't shy away from really high production value long cutscenes. This makes me so happy inside, I genuinely peed a little. (And made a grenade out of it, don't ask.)

 

Gameplay

For such a high budget AAA game, the game sure isn't afraid of pushing players away. In a more conventional game, walking would have been a mindless act of pushing the thumbstick forward and reaching your destination, is usually a foregone conclusion. The bread and butter of the game will always be some sort of combat. Not this game. In this game, you assume the role of a "porter" a.k.a. a deliveryman. To put it simply, your job is to reunite America by delivering cargo. This setup made walking a very central challenge in this game. You must look at where you step or you'll risk falling and damaging your cargo. 

To complicate matters, every cargo is always visible and accounted for, and each cargo has a specific weights and dimensions. So if you didn't handle your cargo with love, there will be some really annoying physics related consequences. For example, stacking your cargo too high, taking on cargo beyond the weight limit or not stacking the cargo efficiently, all will results in Sam losing balance,  falling to the ground and damaging the cargo.

Then there are timefall, a rain that ages everything it touches. It will damage your cargo gradually. Once the cargo is completed ruined, it's game over, adding an unofficial deadline to your delivery schedule. Furthermore, on top of your deliverables, you must also carry weapons and blood bags to defend yourself against MULEs, terrorists, and BTs. These items will also add to your cargo stack. So planning your route and deciding what to bring will also be a major part of the challenge. 

Because of all these restriction, the delivery missions will start to feel burdensome pretty quickly. This is especially felt at the later stage of the game, where the story starts to pick up. You will find yourself really just want to reach the next story point, but are instead stuck with more of the same delivery missions. 

Encounters with human enemies can also be pretty basic and repetitive. If need be, you can totally knock out every MULE in a camp with just your knuckles. The introduction of tools like the Bola Gun will render the player pretty much invincible, even when going up against machine gun toting terrorists. 

Also, the mini-boss fight involving BTs can be quite repetitive. Just keep your distance and keep on tossing hematic grenade, winning is mostly just a matter of time. You don't even have to worry about running empty, because ammo will spawn automatically and be "donated" to you by other players.

Another game segment which feels out of place is the battlefield. Sure, the graphics looks really pretty, but the only way to win is to kill everyone and that too can get repetitive really fast. On the whole, the combat aspect of the game feels very much like an afterthought. 

If the review reads pretty negatively at this point, that's because it is. The game does demands a lot from the player, but the game will also reward players who has the patience to stuck it out. As you recruit more people to rejoin America, you will gradually be compensated with gadgets that makes delivering cargo easier. Among the most satisfying gadgets has to be the zip-lines which makes delivering cargo a breeze. This brings me to the wonderful online component of this game. 

After an area was recruited, online facilities built by other players in that area will now be usable to you. You can then contribute materials to repair and upgrade other player's facilities as well as paving highways and building your own network of zip-lines to help out everyone. I cannot describe enough how great it felt when an otherwise burdensome delivery mission become so much fun, all thanks to the altruism of other players online. I believe more so than any cutscenes, this gameplay mechanic is undoubtedly the most powerful expression of the game's core theme.

 

Story

The story is really something else and deserved to be experience by everyone, so no spoiler here. The game is never afraid of throwing you into the deep end of the pool, coming at you with terms like DOOMs, BT, BB and Beaches. It all sounds pretty insane at the beginning but the thing is, it will all makes sense by the time the end credit rolls. And what a rare treat this story is, it's so satisfying. 

Most of the sidekick characters are also well written, as there are no one dimensional character here. They all have really interesting backstory, and the best among them is Fragile. I am going to keep my promise not to spoil anything, so go find out for yourself. Kudos to Kojima and his team for giving us such a good character.

Of course, from time to time, the game will spend multiple cutscenes to drive home a simple point as well as interrupting the gameplay to make you listen to CODEC conversation. But the story is actually so good, you really won't be annoyed by it. My only point of contention, is the one scene near the end, where the game forces you to wait on the Beach to listen to exposition. But other that, it's all gravy.

 

 

Conclusion

All in all, Death Stranding feels like Kojima is making a statement criticizing his own legacy. Instead of using combat to make the world a better place like we did so many times in Metal Gear, here combat has been demoted and stepchilded. Violence and killing is also heavily discouraged. 

The thematic focus of this game is to bring people together through acts of kindness. Just like in real life, the real hero is not the soldiers or the warriors, but the average people like the deliverymen and the infrastructure builders. The people who keep on keeping on, doing the most boring task, but in doing so, they become the one who keeps our society running even in the middle of a pandemic. 

No matter what you might think about Kojima's previous work, you have to respect that he built this game from the ground up emphasizing kindness as a core philosophy. Because of that, every aspect of gameplay and story elements reflects the same philosophy. In today's gaming landscape, that is rare indeed.