Death Stranding Reviews
Death Stranding is not entertaining. As such, it fails as a video game, it fails as a narrative and it fails overall.
Even if Death Stranding’s narrative was good — and it’s not — a game needs to have actual gameplay. What you find within is abysmal; frustrating, tedious and beyond repair — even with the addition of DLSS on PC. It is to be avoided at all costs.
Death Stranding has to be judged as a game, not as a movie. Gameplay forms the majority of the experience and unfortunately, it just isn’t all that fun. I sincerely wanted Death Stranding to be mind-blowing. Instead, it’s the biggest disappointment in my history of playing video games.
If leaden pacing, meddlesome gameplay, and turgid storytelling is Kojima’s way for us to “build bridges” with one another, I’d rather have the wall be ten feet higher.
Inventory management, encumbrance limits, ridiculous story, fetch quests galore, and never-ending cutscenes. The absolute inverse of everything I want in a game.
Death Stranding is a boring chore of a game that takes the worst aspects of open world games and combines them with a nonsensical plot.
Kojima's first post-Konami project is a bizarre, self-indulgent mess that never quite manages to tie its myriad pieces together.
Death Stranding is a beautiful and unique game that deserves praise for trying something a bit different. However, your enjoyment of it really will hinge on your tolerance for the game's core delivery gameplay of “move item from A to B” and Kojima's episode-length cutscenes.
Death Stranding is an interesting look at what makes a game a game, and not much else.
Death Stranding deserves credit for daring to be so unique, but the price of experimentation is often failure. It can sometimes achieve moments of tranquil beauty, but is usually such a frustrating slog that it's hard to appreciate the quieter moments.
Death Stranding was an awful, tedious experience that felt like a never ending nightmare where going out to get an actual part time job delivering packages would have been more rewarding.
An interesting story, and solid gameplay, but not in a way that combines into a singular experience that players deserve for a 60 dollar title. Still it's worth checking out once the price drops.
Death Stranding is the most complete miss we have ever seen. Everything works exactly as it was intended to work, always reliably but with a few practical disagreements in places.
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Hideo Kojima reminds me a lot of George R.R. Martin and George Lucas. With a bit of restraint, these men have managed to achieve greatness in their respective fields. Without that overarching influence to keep them on the straight and narrow, and with free reign to conjure up something wholly self-published and original, these artists have struggled to reign themselves in and rekindle that early career magic, producing lacklustre and ever-so-slightly egotistical pieces of fiction. Death Stranding then, is Hideo Kojima following in that same vein.
Death Stranding is as thoughtful and meditative as it is a slog and convoluted. It is a different take on gaming that most of us gamers are not used to. It is a Hideo Kojima title where in-game actions provide a sense of emotional joy for players. Death Stranding, for all its depth and struggle, is a beautiful step forward for video games, and a potential taste of what the future may bring.
Death Stranding is an ambitious game, but it’s also one that’s self-indulgent and overwrought. With better pacing and the excising of some of its less flattering content and features, Death Stranding could have been something special
In a way, I respect Kojima for coming out with something he had to know a ton of people wouldn’t like. At the end of the day, though, I just wanted to have fun playing video games, and slogging through snow for a half an hour just to deliver a jar of bugs to someone isn’t my idea of entertainment.
In the end, all I can really say is this: handle Death Stranding with care.
It pains us to say this, but Death Stranding is more like an elaborate sim for being a one-man Amazon Prime delivery service for the whole of America. Despite the beautiful graphics, masterful soundtrack, solid voice acting and fun combat, it's not enough to counterbalance how much of a chore lugging around boxes is.