Death Stranding 2 Review: A Worthy Sequel That Delivers More of What Made the Original Special

Death Stranding 2: A Worthy Sequel That Delivers More of What Fans Love

Five years after Hideo Kojima's divisive, deeply idiosyncratic Death Stranding carved out its own strange niche in gaming culture, its sequel has arrived ?" and it turns out the wait was worth it. Death Stranding 2 is a bigger, bolder, and more refined follow-up that manages to honor everything fans loved about the original while sanding down many of its roughest edges. For those willing to haul themselves back into Sam Porter Bridges' cargo-laden world, the rewards are considerable.

Gameranx's Jake Baldino spent considerable time with the game ahead of release, playing a review copy on the PS5 Pro, and came away with a verdict that's largely enthusiastic ?" though nuanced enough to be genuinely useful to anyone on the fence about picking it up.

The Setup: Familiar Territory, Bigger Stakes

Narratively, Death Stranding 2 picks up in the aftermath of Sam's world-saving exploits in the original game. Having narrowly averted catastrophe, Sam and the enigmatic Baby Lou are laying low when a new mission pulls them back into the fray. The objective will feel instantly familiar to veterans: connect another fractured region of the world to the Chiral Network, one agonizing delivery at a time.

The game's central premise ?" hauling packages across hostile, hauntingly beautiful terrain while navigating both supernatural threats and the mundane logistical challenges of a post-apocalyptic courier ?" remains fully intact. As Baldino puts it with characteristic directness, Sam's core skill set amounts to

"extreme cardio ?" hauling boxes and packages long distances to deliver them, occasionally killing some dudes and some ghosts, but mostly just kind of vibing out in big, sprawling landscapes."

That description might sound reductive, but it's precisely this meditative quality ?" this commitment to its own peculiar rhythm ?" that has always been Death Stranding's greatest strength and most polarizing trait.



Do You Need to Play the First Game First?

One of the most pressing questions surrounding any major sequel is whether newcomers can jump in cold. The honest answer here is: probably not. Death Stranding 2 is fluent in its own dense, esoteric vocabulary ?" BTs, Chiral Networks, DOOMs abilities ?" and it largely assumes the player is already conversant in all of it.

The game does include a "previously on" recap feature on its main menu, but Baldino is candid about its limitations, describing it as "kind of just a big slide show" that "huffs its own farts a little bit too much." His recommendation? Seek out a thorough YouTube recap before diving in. Newcomers who invest that time upfront will likely find the experience far more coherent and rewarding than those who try to wing it.

Similarly, for players who bounced hard off the original ?" those who found it too slow, too strange, or too much of a walking simulator ?" Death Stranding 2 is unlikely to fully convert them. The gameplay has been meaningfully improved, but the game has not fundamentally reinvented itself to chase a broader audience. It remains, proudly and defiantly, a quirky delivery game with Kojima's fingerprints all over it.

A Slow Burn That Eventually Catches Fire

Honesty compels an admission that the opening hours of Death Stranding 2 can feel almost eerily familiar ?" and not always in a good way. The early rhythm mirrors the first game so closely that Baldino recalls genuinely wondering,

"What were they making for the last five years?"

Players return to routines that will feel rote to veterans: delivering packages to identical-looking facilities, watching Sam run through the same connection animations, chatting with holograms, taking a nap, taking a shower, repeat. It's a déj? vu that could reasonably test the patience of even committed fans.

But perseverance pays off. As the hours accumulate, the improvements reveal themselves ?" not in sudden dramatic fashion, but gradually and convincingly. The core delivery loop is intact, but it's been refined, streamlined, and enriched with enough new elements to feel genuinely fresh. Most importantly, the pacing is dramatically better. Where the first game could leave players languishing through hours of expository hologram conversations before suddenly detonating an hour-long cutscene, the sequel maintains a steadier, more satisfying rhythm of story beats and gameplay rewards.

Streamlined Systems and a More Rewarding Loop

Much of what makes Death Stranding 2 feel like a genuine step forward lies in its willingness to streamline without stripping away the elements that make the experience distinctive. The game is still clunky by design ?" and that clunkiness remains part of its peculiar charm ?" but navigating menus, planning routes, and managing cargo have all been meaningfully improved. Players load into vehicles faster, cycle through equipment more efficiently, and spend less time wrestling with interface friction.

Critically, useful tools and technology arrive much earlier this time around. The early-game tension of carefully picking your way up a mountainside with an overloaded pack ?" hoping your balance holds ?" gives way more quickly to vehicles, zip lines, and an increasingly wild array of gadgets. While this does sacrifice some of the white-knuckle fragility of the original's opening hours, it more than compensates by letting players engage with the game's richer, more complex systems sooner.

The new weather system represents one of the sequel's most satisfying additions. Intense rainfall can flood rivers and wash away player-built bridges. Sandstorms reduce visibility and drain stamina. Fire becomes an environmental hazard. These aren't cosmetic flourishes ?" they actively force players to adapt strategies on the fly, adding texture and unpredictability to what could otherwise become routine traversal. Baldino was enthusiastic enough about the system to wish there was even more of it.



Combat Gets a Meaningful Upgrade

Combat was perhaps the most widely criticized aspect of the original Death Stranding, feeling like an awkward graft onto a game that didn't quite know what to do with it. The sequel addresses this head-on. While Baldino is candid that it doesn't reach the refined heights of Metal Gear Solid V, the improvement is substantial and genuinely noticeable.

Stealth has been overhauled with better scouting options, enemy marking, tall grass concealment, and an expanded toolkit of quiet approaches. When situations inevitably escalate ?" and they will ?" the gunplay feels meaningfully more responsive and satisfying, thanks to a wider arsenal and improved control feedback.

There are also proper boss encounters this time, moments where Kojima's flair for theatrical, high-stakes confrontation gets to breathe. These sequences deliver on the promise of the franchise's cinematic ambitions: tense musical scores, striking art direction, imposing mechanical enemies, and the kind of over-the-top spectacle that only Kojima Productions seems willing to attempt with a straight face.

The one area where the sequel arguably regresses is in its BT encounters ?" the ghostly, otherworldly threats that provided some of the original's most genuinely terrifying moments. In the sequel, these sections feel defanged. The BTs are easier to detect and avoid, their threat radius seemingly reduced, and the palpable dread of those early-game sequences in the original is largely absent. Whether this is a deliberate design choice or simply the result of player familiarity with the threat is debatable, but it's a noticeable loss.

A More Confident Sam, a More Engaging Story

One of the more pleasant surprises of Death Stranding 2 is the evolution of Sam Porter Bridges as a character. In the original, Sam often felt passive ?" a delivery vehicle for the player rather than a protagonist with genuine agency, frequently standing silent while the world's lore washed over him. The sequel addresses this directly, giving Sam more active involvement in the story's events and a more defined sense of self.

He remains a man of few words, but those words carry more weight now. He feels, as Baldino puts it, "well thought out and significant" rather than simply functional. Enhanced customization options and the visual fidelity of the PS5 Pro version only reinforce this impression ?" Sam looks, in an almost unsettling way, like a real person navigating a real-world disaster.

As for the broader narrative, it's a complicated picture. The story is better paced and more engaging than the original's occasionally interminable structure, and its high points are genuinely spectacular ?" the kind of singular, audacious storytelling moments that only Hideo Kojima seems to reach for. But it's not without flaws. Some characters are introduced with considerable fanfare before fading into narrative irrelevance. Certain plot threads that seem to promise depth don't quite deliver it. And the game's fondness for referencing and recreating moments from the first installment occasionally crosses from homage into something closer to retread.

"While the story isn't perfect, it did a great job of keeping me playing. Even if it had weird spots that didn't quite land, I still wanted to keep playing to see what happens next."

That may be the most meaningful endorsement a sequel can earn: the consistent desire to push forward to see what happens next.

The World, The Weirdness, and Why It Works

Ultimately, Death Stranding 2 succeeds because it leans into its own singular identity rather than diluting it. This is still a world where a person's death can trigger a catastrophic supernatural event. Where rain literally ages everything it touches. Where some individuals wield inexplicable supernatural abilities. Where a celebrity cameo might wait just around the next ridge. Where real-world musicians score your lonely treks through gorgeous devastated landscapes. Where the cooperative, asynchronous thread of other players' contributions ?" bridges built, ropes left, cargo salvaged ?" creates an unexpectedly warm sense of shared humanity.

The strand-type connectivity that defines the series' multiplayer dimension remains as compelling as ever, enriched by the expanded toolkit available to players. Stumbling across a perfectly placed zip line that carries you effortlessly over terrain that would otherwise have been brutal ?" and knowing that another player built it ?" hasn't lost any of its quiet magic.

Verdict: Delivering on Its Promise

Death Stranding 2 is the rare sequel that understands what made its predecessor worth revisiting and amplifies it thoughtfully. It doesn't abandon its identity to court a wider audience, nor does it simply retread familiar ground without meaningful evolution. What it offers instead is a more refined, more rewarding, and more consistently engaging version of one of gaming's most idiosyncratic experiences.

For existing fans, this is very close to everything they could have reasonably hoped for: better combat, smarter pacing, richer systems, a more compelling protagonist, and the same gorgeous, melancholy world rendered with stunning visual fidelity. For newcomers curious about what all the fuss is about, the first game remains the essential starting point ?" but what awaits on the other side of that investment is a sequel that genuinely justifies it.

This is Hideo Kojima doing what Hideo Kojima does ?" strange, ambitious, technically accomplished, and entirely unwilling to apologize for any of it. And in a landscape crowded with safe sequels and iterative follow-ups, that counts for quite a lot.