Even more strandier? Even more beachier? The expansion of the chiral network brought a whole load of quality of life improvements.

Death Stranding 2: First Impressions

I’ll admit I dismissed Death Stranding unfairly the first time I played it. After a few awkward and uncomfortable journeys heaped on an incomprehensible plot, I drifted away from it and moved onto better things. Or so I thought. A friend of mine was absolutely hooked, but I didn’t get the appeal.

Then I played it. I mean really played it. I sat down hour after hour moving boxes from A to B, and I was drawn into the world that Kojima created. The need to find a direct route that wasn’t going to risk the condition of my deliveries. The terror of traversing a BT area without any weaponry aside from a length of knotted rope (the Strand, in the beginning). The mysterious story unfolding in front of me while Sam (the protagonist, Norman Reedus) seemed immune to the events transpiring.

In summary, I really liked the first game once I gave it a chance. I wrote about it a few weeks ago. My copy of Death Stranding 2 arrived shortly after the credits stopped rolling for the first game. That would be impressive if you didn’t know how long the credits were…

When One becomes Two

This will be spoiler light because these are games you have to play to really get. You could read a bunch about the Death Stranding, Beached Things, Bridge Babies and be totally swamped as to what was going on, but it’s much better to organically find out from the people telling the story.

The second game does a lot more explaining at the outset, presumably to bring anyone who hadn’t played (or was flummoxed by) the first game up to speed. There are so many neologisms in this universe that DS2 includes an encylopaedia (the Corpus) that can referred back to at any time. This is immensely helpful given the acronym-dense exchanges in every cutscene. And before you play this game, you should probably ask yourself if you enjoy cutscenes. There are a lot of them.

Of course that isn’t new for Kojima. Forty percent of Metal Gear Solid 4’s play time was cutscenes. Yes, they did the maths. Death Stranding comes in at a relatively light six hours (16%) of the total play time. If you hadn’t already gathered, Kojima is a film fanatic and embraces the cinematic in all things. It does mean that you can sit down expecting to play and end up watching the game for extended periods of time, but the story is compelling enough to forgive this.

The camera has become even more cinematic, too. I was impressed by the graphics in Death Stranding. The graphics in Death Stranding 2, however, completely stunned me. Looking out over a sweeping desert. Skipping along on top of a mountain ridge with Lou in tow. Gazing into the stars. These might be the most realistic graphics I have ever seen in a game. This is by no means a defence of style over substance. Quality gameplay has trumped graphics for me for many years, but in DS2 the graphical fidelity is matched by solid mechanics and story.

The cargo management aspects of the first game nearly drove me insane until I was broken and accepted them. Every menu required a long press to confirm, and backing out of the menu lost the changes. No matter how many times I tried, my body fought against such a frustrating mechanic. That is gone, and now there is an auto arrange cargo option available from a quick menu which takes the hassle out of manually selecting auto arrange then having to confirm. It was a pain in the ass, and it is now completely resolved. It’s a small change but surgically removed a frustrating part of the first game.

Summarising the quality of life improvements, Death Stranding 2 is like the first game, but good. I say that in the best possible way, having loved the first game (as detailed above) but equally understanding that the punishing gameplay could put people off who were more casually approaching the title. And that is a real shame, because digging deeper reveals a truly great game. Thankfully, you don’t have to dig deep before you uncover the greatness of DS2.

The story is much denser this time round. I found the storytelling quite widely dispersed in the first game – heavy at the beginning, and heavy towards the end, with relatively little movement in the middle portion of the game. DS2 brings a steady progression with the periodic addition of interesting characters and enough changes to keep things fresh. That does mean saying goodbye to one of my favourite characters, though. (I’ll leave that cryptic clue hanging…)

Even walking and driving around the landscape is a lot less painful. Counterintuitively, I’m much worse at this game. The finicky way you had to approach terrain in the first game meant being careful and only taking vehicles as far as you could reasonably control them. Planning routes carefully, and liberally using climbing anchors to safely descend. With DS2 I feel like I’m on top of the world, powering across the landscape on a trike at high speed, running over rocks that would’ve stopped vehicles in DS1 instantly. And ploughing into a ravine at high speed because I got too cocky, destroying the cargo about 100m from the destination.

The truck in the first game was awful. Slow. Top heavy. Liable to flip at the drop of a hat. It was as close to the Reliant Robin in Mr Bean as any video game vehicle I have experienced. DS2 has replaced these trucks with much more functional vehicles that can hold a massive amount of cargo and can be modified to a degree. The trike is also a lot more fun to drive in this game, and the vehicles are introduced earlier on than the first game.

There is a great deal of satisfaction in making shuttle trips between distribution centres or shelters and Auto Pavers in order to restore roads, or monorail tracks. A harsh and inhospitable landscape quickly becomes traversable with a bit of effort, making cargo delivery a lot easier.

There are more stealth-adjacent missions this time round which feel a little Metal Gear Solid 5 flavoured, and the introduction of tranquiliser weapons is definitely off the back of MGS. It’s not a major part of the gameplay but it does work pretty well. I still find the weapon and item selection system a bit awkward, but it’s functional enough (and better organised than the first game).

The game begins in Mexico but quickly transports Sam to Australia through a plate gate. A wormhole between continents. This wormhole only appeared after Sam connected the United Cities of America (UCA) in the first game. A porter’s work is never done, it seems, so Sam is left to travel to Australia and continue to link up disparate settlements that have been struggling to survive since the apocalyptic Death Stranding event.

The story combined with the gameplay improvements has made Death Stranding 2 a new all time favourite of mine. If you like Kojima’s other games or are in the market for something completely different, check it out.

A Hard Drive

“It’s all right children. Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it. I am sure we shall never forget IronWolf or this first parting that there was among us”

The words of Bob Cratchit, about the untimely demise of the first NAS hard drive in the household. And only three months after retirement (outside warranty). This is the first drive failure I have ever had, and to happen just after the warranty finished feels like a kick in the teeth. We have a Synology DS220+ with two 10TB Seagate IronWolf NAS drives keeping the house backed up in a RAID 1 configuration. Although it is expensive having the disks duplicated, it meant that one catastrophic failure still left the data un-harmed, allowing me to safely replace the non-working drive. The tool-less drive mount made switching out the drives super easy, and following a NAS restart, all I had to do was start a repair process. Sorted.

Where in the world are Heathers?

In a bizarre twist, my post about the curse of Heathers disappeared! Turns out it was backdated to May so disappeared from the front page of the blog. Even the curse was cursed…