Death Stranding 2: On the Beach — Review

Regardless of the times, the tragedy of reality is that strife and dissolution will always persist in life. In the eyes of renowned video game designer Hideo Kojima, the road to a united utopia is achieved not in distance, but in relationships and social bonds. It may sound like a tenet from a hippie with an appetite for 80s and 90s cinema, but Kojima has masterfully illustrated this theme in Death Stranding, a delivery game by his then-newfound studio Kojima Productions. To some, the game was Kojima’s magnum opus, and to others, a glorified walking simulator filled with cinematic cutscenes. Now, with Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, fans are eager to see what Kojima’s sequel has to say about exchanging sticks (violence) for strands (unification). 

Narratively, Kojima has proven he has the tools and talent to spin a compelling, conceptually highbrow and cinematic tale about bringing humanity together. However, like any delivery errand rooted in the realities of painstaking mundanity, those who wish to experience the story and truly understand its message must be willing to trudge through extensive amounts of jargon and route planning.

For the uninitiated, the world of Death Stranding begins with both a bang and a whimper, where souls of the dead who are unable to move on in the afterlife (represented by beaches) become ghost-like entities unseen by the naked eye, known as Beached Things (BTs). As more people die, more BTs roam the earth. Anyone swallowed by a BT results in a voidout, an explosion of energy akin to an atomic bomb and leaves a giant crater in its wake. In addition, the rain ages anyone who gets caught in it. Consequently, humanity has been driven to isolation, going underground in clusters or alone. To survive, these communities rely on porters to deliver materials and precious resources, and you are one such courier, Sam Porter Bridges, played by a returning Norman Reedus (The Walking Dead). To ensure the safety of porters, they use Bridge Babies (BB), a fetus extracted from a brain-dead mother and stored in a pod, to detect BTs. 

In the first Death Stranding, players are tasked with connecting bastions across the United States of America, integrating these communities into a “Chiral Network”, and thus unifying a fractured country into a new United Cities of America (UCA). Players do so by taking on deliveries and travelling between these bases, and through this journey, they learn of how BTs are formed and how they serve as precursors to the next Death Stranding, an Extinction Event that can wipe out all of humanity.

While the UCA was the focus of Death Stranding, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach brings us to Australia through a portal known as a “Plate Gate” located on the southern edge of Mexico but the name of the game here is still the same — deliver precious cargo across Australia’s isolated communities and integrate them into the Chiral Network. Each order you take on will throw you into similar loops of planning your route, outfitting yourself with equipment for the journey, transporting the cargo to your destination, be awarded points (also known as “Likes”) based on your performance, and integrate the community you’ve arrived in to the Chiral Network. Including the cutscenes for the main story, players will be experiencing this game loop for about 40 hours.

Compared to the UCA, the biomes Australia takes you to have shown how the Decima engine has evolved in generating its visual assets in leaps and bounds. Right from the start of the prologue and opening credits, the game looks and feels like a documentary, showing realistic, breathtaking dunes, rock formations, and cityscapes. Compared to the first game, there is less blue sand and so much more red dust, white snow, green foliage, and grey abandoned buildings, which makes porter work more pleasant through the hours. 

Porter work in Australia is more complex compared to Sam’s journey across the UCA as in addition to the usual bandits, brigands, and BTs, Sam now has to prepare for harsh weather, environmental conditions, encounters with dangerous wildlife, and occasionally fight against robotic terrorists known as “Ghost Mechs”. Instead of just grabbing your gear and going, you now have to actively weigh your options and choose the lesser evil to your next destination. More often than not, the shortest route – logically a straight line – may not be the optimal option as you may encounter BTs along the way, which may not be your cup of tea. 

Instead, you may want to make the detour and brave climbing rocky mountains, which introduce a different type of horror in managing your stamina, hoping you do not fall and damage your cargo or succumb to landslides and avalanches caused by earthquakes (dubbed ‘Gate Quakes’). That said, environmental dangers are a welcome inclusion in the world of Death Stranding. Experiencing natural disasters in your travels, like bush fires, Gate Quakes, and rising water levels, brings a level of dynamics not present in the first game. 

To prepare you for greater dangers ahead compared to your time in the UCA, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach also takes a more action-oriented approach to its combat, with a wider arsenal of tools and weapons at your disposal to confront your adversaries. On top of the usual assault rifle, shotgun, and blood grenade to get rid of BTs, the game offers more innovative tools like a Blood Boomerang that uses blood bags instead of bullets, which is a great de-facto silent way to fight your enemies, or a Tar Cannon that can put out bushfires and act as a flamethrower at the same time. There’s even a grenade that you can use to capture BTs, so you can use them to fight other BTs.

In addition to a wider arsenal of tools is a new character progression system. You will be awarded skill points known as ‘Memory’, to invest in various APAS Enhancements, which make your next journey slightly easier. These enhancements come in nodes you activate, like ‘Aim Assist’ for your weapons or ‘Instant Cargo Binding’, where the scattering of cargo is prevented whenever Sam falls over. Your mastery of weapons (represented by levels) and other statistics like Carrying Capacity will also increase based on the equipment you use and the route you take. 

The game is also more lenient to failure. While players were met with a “Game Over” screen once a BT swallows any human being in the first game, getting swallowed by a BT in Death Stranding 2 will result in the formation of a crater in the environment, making the area inaccessible for travel. This would just translate into a minor inconvenience where players would have to make a detour to reach their next destination. Killing people in the first game is a dangerous endeavour as dead bodies become potential candidates to cause a voidout, thus, a “Game Over” screen that hampers progress, and there is an urgency to incinerate dead bodies by personally transporting them to an incinerator. In Death Stranding 2, however, the denizens of Australia will dispose of any dead bodies that lie in your wake, resulting in a reduction of your total accumulated Likes. That said, although a wider arsenal of weapons and added room for failure empower you to boldly confront BTs and brigands more often, getting caught by the dead feels more inconsequential, which weakens one of the game’s central themes of valuing human lives for connection. 

Although the utilisation of the incinerator in the first game feels like work, it encourages players to be more creative in adopting non-lethal ways to accomplish their tasks, and therefore, there is always room for an incinerator in Australia. Thankfully, you will be able to switch between lethal and non-lethal modes for all weapons, and weapons are pre-set to non-lethal, so there is no need to adopt lethal methods throughout the game.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach also takes a more deliberate, deeper approach to world-building, featuring more individuals studying the effects of the Death Stranding event, and other lore-specific aspects like chiralium and the tar. Although a greater depth to the world of Death Stranding is introduced, the game suffers from too much unnecessary complexity in introducing parts of this world. Why is there research on how tar and chiralium affect groundwater, and how is it relevant to our story? How does the tar help in healing diseases? Even the characters in the game do not currently know. 

While you may argue that learning about the effects of the Death Stranding alongside the denizens of this world plays a part in the immersion, how the game’s lore is uncovered and communicated may just be too convoluted for any layman. The work is important, mysterious, and so complex that it can go over the heads of the casual player because what does “parasitic chiral microbes” and “tar current fluctuations” even mean? Fortunately, the game includes a corpus that spells out events of the story so far and jargon players may not be familiar with if they did not play the first game, and this helps elevate them to the same level of understanding if they are willing to pore over walls of text. 

On the grander scheme of things, it’s more exciting to brood over the game’s core themes of connection and how specific socio-political issues like expansionism and gun violence affect connected communities, which could have been explored more instead of convoluted world-building. The main question posed to players at the start of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach was, “Should We Have Connected?”, and even Sam questioned the underlying agenda for expanding the chiral network outside of the UCA into Australia, citing concerns for the expansion to be politically masked by civility and acting as a vehicle for humanity’s destruction. 

To that, it would seem that Kojima’s stand on the matter is that humanity deserves to connect and establish relationships despite being in the wake of calamity, and this statement is expressed masterfully once again in the main events of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. The story is wholesome and sometimes predictable; however, Norman Reedus’ Sam and the supporting characters involved in the game’s events have proven to be pivotal emotional backbones to its messaging.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach introduces both new and returning casts, all of whom play characters who are beautifully written. Norman Reedus has shown his deep understanding of grief in his performance as Sam, who is not only dealing with the harsh working environments as a porter, but also in his struggle to emotionally handle the deaths of those he loves. Meanwhile, scenes by Shioli Kutsuna (Deadpool 2) as Rainy are sure to tug at your heartstrings and bring tears to your eyes.

The player is also transported to the Spirit World against Luca Marinelli’s (The Old Guard) Neil, a mysterious spirit of a dead porter, similar to that of Mads Mikkelsen’s Cliff Unger in the World War 1 trenches of the first game. Although scenes with Marinelli are not as tense as Mikkelsen’s mysterious, power-bringing aura, Marinelli brings an air of explosive intimidation in his character that can hold his own without comparison to Mikkelsen. On the other hand, Elle Fanning’s (Maleficent: Mistress of Evil)Tomorrow is also a memorable highlight in performance, spearheading most of the game’s action-packed cutscenes, which are measured, exciting, and well-choreographed.

Returning to the scene as the main villain is Troy Baker’s Higgs. Although Baker is a natural at conveying the pained madness of Higgs as a character, the game’s culmination, including the final fight and his conclusion, was underwhelming and anticlimactic.

Regardless, returning to the world of Death Stranding in Death Stranding 2: On the Beach was worth the 40 or so hours to finish, including savouring every moment of the game’s main storyline cutscenes. 

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is released exclusively on the PS5 on 26 June 2025.

Joey Leong

Crack open a cold one with Joey, because the moment you approach him, he will start talking about film and video games for days. He spends his waking moments during the weekends meditating on how the latest movie he’s watched or game he’s played has impacted his worldview.