Death Stranding 2: On the Beach review

I'm carrying half a ton of metal scrap and the soul of my dead daughter over the crest of a red sand dune when a mournful folk song begins to play, the words All that I want is a home inside the woods, and a woman that I can love spilling softly out of the universe. One of Death Stranding 2's endless notifications pops up to tell me the sun is beginning to set. Dusk settles right as I park the truck full of random crap I just stole from a camp full of bandits, and I cherish the uncanny timing of another perfect music video moment before I bring the new location into the chiral network, reconnecting the isolated outpost to humanity via magic wi-fi. One cutscene later, the dusty landscape behind me has transformed into a Las Vegas strip of player-made bridges, power generators, futuristic timefall shelters and neon holograms, each zapped into my game world because they've accrued hundreds of thousands of Likes from other porters who've run across them.

I walk up to the closest one, refill my exoskeleton's battery, and hammer the Like key on my keyboard 73 times in appreciation.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, like its predecessor, is a game of absurd dualities. It is a game of quiet, sometimes extremely deliberate locomotion as I balance the swaying cargo on Sam "Porter" Bridges' back, marching alone over a craggy ridge, looking for a spot to plant a climbing anchor and descend without falling. More often though I'm ignoring the intricate physics and the route planning system's 3D topographical map to haul ass across Australia in a truck that negates most of the challenge and lets me safely lug 10 times the cargo.

It is a game of immense depth and freedom in play, showering me with guns and grenades, boots and buildable structures, skills and sunglasses, to use or ignore as I see fit. It's also a game of lengthy cutscenes dead set on hammering home its themes with the subtlety of an ACME hammer. A character named Tomorrow asks "What is tomorrow?" a few hours before one of the rawest depictions of grief I've ever seen in a game, which itself comes a few hours before Sam shreds on an electric guitar so righteously it fires crackling laser beams at a bunch of evil mechs.

The mix doesn't seem like it should work, and Death Stranding 2 is certainly an ungainly beast, willing to let you burn yourself out on frivolous chores before burying you in the avalanche of cutscenes that deliver the story's emotional payoff dozens of hours in. But by the end, even its most awkward idiosyncrasies seem like, well, part of the point.

Delivering

When I played Death Stranding 2 on PlayStation last year, I spent nearly the entire journey in offline mode, with the servers that sync players' helpful roads and bridges and ziplines disabled for the pre-release review period. It's striking to replay the game on PC with nine months of accumulated player construction available for my game to yoink from the cloud and embed in the earth right where I need them. Other players' holographic signs litter the landscape with glowing and cheering emojis, puncturing that sense of isolation Death Stranding 2 is often aiming for.

As you'd expect from any gaming populace, players figured out they could net themselves more Likes by placing their icons right outside a settlement or in the middle of a road where they'll inevitably be driven though, an idea I quickly copied. The more Likes I accrue, the more skills I can unlock to increase my connection to other players, filling my world with even more free infrastructure.

Crucially, Death Stranding 2 only Vegas Stripifies the Australian landscape once I've connected a region to the chiral network—which is Kojima-speak for completing a delivery to a new far-flung location the hard way. This elegantly plays into the game's theme, highlighting both the value of human connection (it sure is nice to have a helping hand!) as well as the trade-offs (people can be kind of noisy and annoying). This inherent tension, like all the rest of the game's absurdities, is deeply rooted in its design.

I treasured every one of the needle drops that set the last minutes of these lonely deliveries to music, prodding me to pay attention to the quiet triumph or contemplative mood of the moment. But the sense of progress is so much more palpable when playing online, even if it comes with a side of garishness. Though the story is masked by layers of sci-fi gobbledygook, Death Stranding 2 is mostly about learning to live with grief and loss, with each song a track on Sam's recovery mixtape. By the time it's over, he's found a reason to keep living in the new world he's helped reconnect.

Alongside those poignant moments are so many bits of Death Stranding that exist purely because they're cool—a mech that does ninja moves with a glowing katana, Elle Fanning's Tomorrow taking out hordes of bad guys with inexplicable kung fu skills while Sam looks on befuddled, a shootout with a ghost of Sam's past set in a purgatory realm where particle fireworks fill the screen with pure razzle-dazzle excess.

And it all looks stunning on PC, with a port appropriately packed with upscaling options (four of 'em!), new tray tracing features, and even surprisingly good keybinds for what can be a complicated game to control. On my 9070 XT it runs well above 60 fps at 1440p, fully maxed out with AMD's FSR set to balanced. It's mostly smooth, though sometimes the game hit me with stutters while trundling across the landscape. Scoping in with a weapon seems to be its kryptonite—even outside combat, the sniper rifle's scope causes a huge, second-long frame drop every time I zoom in. For this playthrough, that was all the impetus I needed to go loud.

Death Stranding 2's combat and stealth lean unabashedly towards Metal Gear, though there's still some bumbling awkwardness to how Sam moves and the need to pause mid-fight to go inventory diving for a shotgun or silenced sniper rifle or a blood grenade used to dispatch ghostly BTs. But as I wrote last year, some of that clunkiness comes from what is clearly an intentional lean towards the unbridled possibility space of an immersive sim, where having a hundred viable options to handle any scenario is way cooler than two or three slick ones. (While the standard difficulty does little to encourage the use of most of these tools, a new difficulty setting on PC offers a stick for players who weren't motivated by the carrot of a constant stream of new toys to play with.)

As I also wrote last year, "inside Hideo Kojima there are two wolves," one "desperate to say something about life" through confounding metaphors and 'cinematic' storytelling, the other constantly throwing out "wouldn't it be cool if" ideas like Sam's guitar weapon or slamming a Monster energy, then taking a piss outdoors to grow a mushroom that other players can smash Like on.

As much as it seems like these impulses should feel at odds with one another, in 2026 their coexistence makes Death Stranding 2 feel vividly human.

Heads up: Some vague spoilers for Death Stranding 2's plot ahead.

The day is ending

When I played Death Stranding 2 nearly a year ago, I hadn't yet had my own identity ripped off by an AI company. Generative slop had of course already made the internet noticeably worse, but the pace at which it's gotten worse has only accelerated in recent months, as it becomes transparent that the entire global economy has hitched itself to the idea that this technology is life-changing. Grammarly, the company that impersonated me with an AI "expert," offers tools that will write text for you so you don't have to use an iota or brain power or human expression to craft a measly email; it also offers a tool that claims to "provide clear explanations for why a phrase may be flagged as AI-generated and offers one-click rewrites with AI Rewriter." How are you meant to read that without going insane?

Death Stranding 2's antagonist, revealed after dozens of hours of dutiful trekking, is a rampant AI system that claims it will protect humanity by severing all those connections, isolating everyone so as to prevent opportunities for pain and death. "Humanity will be free from the need to move around, and free from the need for porters. Bots are capable of handling deliveries," it says, with the exact smugness of the billionaires who say AI will give workers more free time, despite empirical research and the entire history of human civilization indicating the opposite.

In the game's goofiest—but also most poignant—moment, it rebukes this perspective with a song and dance routine that basically amounts to: Fuck AI.

If you asked ChatGPT how to waste a million dollars in the silliest way possible it'd probably regurgitate a half-assed Brewster's Millions scheme while throwing in some sycophantic praise for your ingenuity. Kojima Productions instead turned a nursery rhyme into a disco diss track, sung and danced to by a classically trained actor in a mocap session I would kill to see the behind-the-scenes video of. It's a cry-laughing rebuttal that revels in Death Stranding 2's absurd see-saw from serious to shitpost, and our own limitless potential for creativity, as long as we never stop trying to come up with new and profoundly stupid ideas.

I'm not sure even Kojima himself appreciates how perfect a metaphor his game is for the current moment. In an interview just months after its release, he spoke about the potential to "co-create with AI" and using it to "handle the tedious tasks." Yet at the heart of Death Stranding is a character whose existence is nothing but tedious tasks. Kojima's team built layer upon layer of creative game systems around the stubborn idea of transforming the tedium of walking from one place to another in an open world game into a whole canvas for player expression. It rejects the idea of ceding control, free will, and the messiness of humanity for the sake of safety, whether bodily or creatively.

"We would rather strive to achieve the impossible while remaining true to ourselves," Kojima said through one of Death Stranding 2's characters, as the climax laid bare every one of its themes. When he wrote that, perhaps he was just thinking about social media, and the trade-offs of noise and mess and harm that have come along with the ease of connecting today.

But we're barreling beyond that era of technology into an even darker one now, and what may be his last game built without AI tools makes a deeply human case for keeping on that course. Because the spark of inspiration lies somewhere within the struggle and inefficiency of creation, and deep down the only reason to care about it is the knowledge that someone poured their small fire into it.

So sure, maybe a dash of Claude code or whatever won't ruin Kojima's next game. But perhaps that will end up proving to be Death Stranding 2's ultimate duality: Joking its way into the profound without even taking its own message to heart.