Note: This game is a story driven sequel. I [b]HIGHLY[/b] recommend you play the first game before this one.
[h1]Story and Acting[/h1]
Death Stranding 2 is a direct continuation of the first Death Stranding. You jump back into the saddle as Sam Porter Bridges, this time having left the UCA for a shelter in Mexico where he is hiding out with Lou, the BB he carried with him in the first game. You embark on a journey to expand the chiral network across Mexico and Australia, where things don't go exactly to plan because of you're old pal Higgs, who still has it out for Sam. You'll reunite with several old friends from the first game such as Fragile, and you'll encounter many new ones along the way. And Troy Baker has returned to voice Higgs once again. Performances by him, Elle Fanning, Léa Seydoux and others throughout the game are just top notch, out of this world. It really makes the whole game feel like a high budget, cinematic experience that you have the privilege of interacting with.
[h1]Gameplay[/h1]
The gameplay loop is largely identical to the first game, but with some tweaks and modifications. For one, there are far fewer lethal weapons. There are some, but when unlocking them it's explicitly stated by the people giving them to you that you should not use them against humans. Therefore, it's much more difficult to put yourself in a situation where you accidentally kill somebody and cause a voidout. Most of your conventional firearms fire non-lethal bullets, without the option for lethal variants even being a thing. This makes the gunplay and the clearing of enemy settlements a little more satisfying because it's a little easier to experiment and take risks without worrying so much about accidentally killing someone and causing a voidout.
But like the first game, your primary gameplay loop is delivering packages and hooking folks up to the chiral network. You'll gain "likes" from the various NPCs you interact with as you deliver more packages or complete missions for them. There's also a "Strand Social Service" social network that you will occasionally use to receive posts from characters you meet in game, such as photos of things that have happened, requests for aid, etc. Screenshots taken using the in-game screenshot tool will also appear here as posts from Sam. Like the first game you can also build structures and signs that will sometimes appear in other players' worlds, and the inverse is true for you as well. Some of these structures have new unlock-able features, such as the ability to upgrade roads so that they have lights or a roof.
[h1]Graphics, Performance and Technical Notes[/h1]
The game looks absolutely stunning. I played at 1080p on Bazzite using the PC listed below, and it performed beautifully. This is the first time a game has wow'd me in a long time. When it first puts you in control of Sam, it becomes very clear that as good as the first game looked, this one kicked things up a notch further. The lighting and environments look more natural and better illuminated. There's a day/night cycle and when you're not in a BT area, things look less dreary than the first game. It supports HDR and ray tracing, as well as FSR, XESS, DLSS and "PICO" upscaling, as well as real time resolution scaling to help maintain a desired framerate, so if your PC has trouble holding your desired framerate (choose from 30, 60 or 120), it will lower the internal resolution in real time to maintain that framerate, using the scaler you defined to help retain image quality and sharpness and preventing the blurriness that can occur from just using a linear scaler on a lower-than-native resolution image. PICO is described online as "equivalent to PSSR" since this was a PlayStation published game, and was the default option for me. One thing to note however is that, at least as of writing, on the Bazzite version listed below, the game supports FSR4, but doesn't allow you to select it without both selecting a newer version of Proton (I used the current latest version of Proton GE) and setting a launch argument:
PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE=1 %command%
Without that launch argument and a newer version of Proton, the menu only lists FSR 3.5, even if you're using an FSR4 capable GPU. I ran the game on my desktop at 1080p with a custom "Very High" preset with most options set as high as they will go without enabling ray tracing. If you're on a machine comparable to mine, and are ok with a more cinematic sub-60 fps experience, frame generation (which the game supports, but I left turned off) or with more aggressive use of AI upscaling, you could probably get away with all max settings and some ray tracing, but it started occasionally dipping below 60 fps at native resolution/framerate with ray tracing enabled, so I turned it off to minimize how often FSR has to kick in and scale the image for me.
On my Steam Deck OLED the game defaulted to a "portable" preset that looks fine on the 7.4 inch screen, and seems to run at ~30 fps with PICO upscaling and no frame-gen.
The game also had a lot of attention to detail put into it when it comes to hooking into the PC platform. There is both an in-game screenshot mode, like the first game, and at one point in the game you'll get a Polaroid camera and can use it to take photos around your ship. These tools hook into Steam so that any photos taken using them in-game get automatically saved as a Steam screenshot. The Polaroids do play a minor role in the story, so it's cool that when you take these in game it also saves them to Steam.
It also pays attention to which controller you're using and adapts on-the-fly. Controls were mapped natively using Steam input. The input options were literally blocked out in game if you had Steam input enabled (though it does also work with Steam input disabled). The default, approved method of modifying controls was to modify them in Steam input, which was kind of cool because it enabled a lot of features and also included descriptions for actions right in the Steam input menu. For one, when playing with my DualSense 5, it made use of the haptic triggers, which is something no other PC game I've played has done yet. The triggers themselves will get stiff or push back when Sam is carrying a heavy load, or they'll pulse when firing a weapon. I also played with my new Steam controller, and the glyphs in game got updated to reflect the square trackpads instead of retaining a generic DualSense shaped trackpad icon.
The game just feels really solid and polished, and like they really took the time to give PC gamers the best experience they possibly could.
[h1]Summary[/h1]
I really enjoyed my time with Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, and will continue playing it to finish optional tasks I'm not done with yet, max out my reputation with the various settlements, find any hidden secrets I might have missed, etc., and honestly to just flesh out my presence in the world. There's something weirdly satisfying about the asymmetric multiplayer implemented by games like this and Elden Ring; something weirdly satisfying about giving a "like" to somebody's bridge, or leaving a sign to warn other players of a dangerous spot and seeing it receive likes from other players.
This isn't a game for everybody. I really enjoyed it, but it is a long winded, narrative driven experience with long bouts of just walking from point A to point B, managing your cargo load and trying to keep Sam from falling off a cliff, freezing to death, etc. The first game was literally called a walking simulator by some people, and that's not entirely inaccurate. But I personally found those portions of the game rather cathartic, and a nice break between the epic cutscenes and moments of story exposition, and it seems like there's always something cool to see, cargo to grab, player structures to interact with, etc. along the way.
So overall I really enjoyed Death Stranding 2, and highly recommend it to everybody who liked the first game.
