‘Death Stranding 2’ game review: Hideo Kojima’s masterpiece steps it up with breathtaking visuals and fluid gameplay

Quiet weekends are often a luxury for journalists. However, the universe showered its blessings recently… a Sunday in the house with no pressing engagements, the light monsoon showers cooling down the otherwise balmy Kerala weather, and my PlayStation 5 loaded with the latest Hideo Kojima game—Death Stranding 2: On the Beach.

Released exclusively (for now) on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro last Thursday (June 26 2025), Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is the sequel to the 2019 action-adventure game Death Stranding developed by Kojima Productions and originally published by Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Norman Reedus is back as Sam Porter Bridges, playing the lead in Death Stranding 2 with Japanese video game designer Hideo Kojima as director, producer, and primary designer. Joining Reedus once again are Léa Seydoux as Fragile, and Troy Baker as Higgs, reprising their roles from the first game. Joining them this time are actors Elle Fanning, Shioli Kutsuna, Luca Marinelli, Alastair Duncan, Alissa Jung, and Debra Wilson.

So, you can imagine my excitement when I powered up my gaming console on Thursday evening, well ahead of the weekend, and began downloading 90-something GB worth of pure Hideo Kojima gaming code. The following evening, I hit ‘Play’. In an instant, I knew why this masterpiece deserved its nomination as the ‘Most Anticipated Game’ months ago at the Game Awards 2024.

With Death Stranding 2, Kojima does not assume that gamers need to be seasoned pros to play a survival third-person video game. The Japanese gaming veteran offers a quick recap of Death Stranding 1 on the main menu itself. For new gamers jumping into this, it means you don’t even have to play the first one. Personally, I wouldn’t recommend skipping the GOTY nominee and ‘Best Game Direction’ winner at The Game Awards 2019—the year of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Control, The Outer Worlds, and Disco Elysium. But Death Stranding 2 gives you a definitive choice. And that’s nothing short of admirable.

The game opens to a massive open world near the southern border of the United Cities of America, with Sam holding the baby Lou, making his way through a tricky terrain to their shelter. Unlike the jarring ‘training’ spiels of new AAA games, Death Stranding 2 uses this premise smartly to do four things: give you a crash course in player movement mechanics, teach you the new immersive way to interact with people in the story (yes, you can rock the baby and make Lou laugh and giggle), introduce you to the danger of surroundings through earthquakes and dangerous terrain, and straight up flaunt its open-world graphics coming to life ever-so gloriously on your gaming monitor.

But I had to know what other gamers thought of it, too. Mumbai-based adventurer and ardent gamer Zerxes Wadia was already 3 hours into Death Stranding 2 by Thursday evening. “The terrain is much simpler, at least in the first episode; the natural disasters and time of day add some nice elements of fun. The mechanics are very familiar to the first game but tweaked for enhancement without actually being too different,” he said.

Pure gaming meets cinema

Ten hours into Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, and it has been a great run. Apart from bandits respawning at places that you have cleared, the open world opens so many possibilities. By the fourth ‘main order’, you are briefly reunited with a favourite character from the first game, and the plot accelerates at that point.

From here on, we are in ‘Beach Things’ territory. Kojima’s story takes shape, and you find yourself fully immersed in the game.

You also get vehicles that make the open world more bearable in terms of travel. After all, you are a porter transporting precious cargo. Any help is appreciated at this point.

The gaming is smooth, and the ability to ‘fabricate’ structures and weapons gives you more control over your unique style of play.

At times, the camera moves further and ramps up the mood music, giving you some of the best shots in the game. Pure cinema, indeed.

The bad is balanced off by the good

Death Stranding 2 lets you interact with other gamers in a unique way. They can give you ‘Likes’—a Kojima nod to the increasingly pointless clout farming in the real world during and after the Pandemic years—through certain points and structures liks ‘Postboxes’ as you traverse the open world. People can use in-game symbols, projections, etc., to mark their structures. You, as a player, can use these Postboxes to stow your stuff in a private locker, contribute some of your materials for another player to use, or even upgrade the structure.

These ‘Like’ farming points set up by other players in the game around the world are, at times, tasteful and useful. However, I found many to be an eyesore, wishing they had better aesthetics—more of a gamer issue rather than a game one.

Yet, during one mission, I used one such Postbox tagged by another player extensively. Given how much I love stealth, carrying too much luggage would mean it would stick out of the grass when hiding, and the enemies would know my location. This was solved when I unloaded most of my luggage to the nearby Postbox, went for the kill, and then took them back… just like that, I was on my merry way.

So far, at certain places, especially where Sam tries to scale near-impossible mountains—especially the terrain near the ‘Spider Woods’, I found his character twitching and a bit of his leg going into the mountain and coming back. However, this feels more or less a PlayStation graphics issue rather than a game issue, given that I have faced the same once or twice in Horizon Forbidden West, too. But I’m nitpicking at this point… they rarely have any bearing on the overall gaming experience, which has been nothing short of excellent.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, despite the overtly moody name, is a mood lifter. This is a must-have title not only for seasoned gamers who play in the ‘Brutal’ or ‘Normal’ difficulty setting but also for beginners who would find the ‘Casual Mode’ more their speed.

The easiest ‘Story Mode’ is more about the narrative and cinematics, and it won’t let you go Platinum. But all other modes do, making it once again a more accessible game than recent AAA titles, which forces you to grind in one of the harder difficulty levels.

Death Stranding 2 fixes most of what Death Stranding 1 lacked—and what it excelled in; the sequel made it better, improving the pace, action, and flow of the plot. In the words of fellow gamer Zerxes, “[Death Stranding 2 is] much pacier, more action-packed and makes a lot more sense. And gorgeous. [It is] like, Death Stranding 1 was like Dune 1 where the movie was [the] setup and [in] Death Stranding 2, you are out right into the thick of it… and did I mention it’s gorgeous!”

The visuals are nothing short of breathtaking—the lighting, the textures, the open-world terrain. And this is on the PlayStation 5, and I would imagine PlayStation 5 Pro would take it up another notch.

Kojima’s latest outing with Sony Interactive Entertainment is pure cinema and immersive gaming—all rolled into one. Despite just ten hours into the game, it lightly tugs at your heartstrings as a human while tightening everything else around you, making you want to game for what games are ultimately made for—pure, unadulterated entertainment.

Game: Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

Developer: Hideo Kojima (Kojima Productions)

Platform: PlayStation 5 (for now)

Rating: 4 out of 5 | ★★★★☆

Sci/Tech