Death Stranding 2: On The Beach
Number of likes received: 372,709
Total Weight of Cargo Delivered: 11.0t
0% is my success rate when it comes to recommending the first Death Stranding, absolutely no one I recommended it to who trusted me enough to give it a shot came away telling me they enjoyed it or saw what was so good about it. All I could do was agree with basically every complaint levelled against it and suggest watching the cutscenes on YT. So no, I won't recommend DS2 because if you are reading this and bounced off the first then you most certainly will bounce off this. If you haven't played DS, do not listen to me because like a particle being observed, my presence will forever alter the outcome and you won't enjoy it. With that out of the way, DS2 is absolutely fantastic and improves on everything that DS1 did poorly but unfortunately takes some missteps when dealing with elements that DS1 excelled at. 47.9 hours were stolen from me by DS1 and before playing this I did attempt another playthrough, but that number won't go any higher. It's because I resentfully booted up DS1 with the expectation that I would uninstall, refund and feel smug in the confidence that Kojima is a hack and I can see past the weird cult-of-personality around him. Unfortunately for me, the game is weird enough that I pushed on long to find out what the fuck was going on only to find myself Stockholm-syndrome'd into actually having fun with this stupid postman simulator.
Once the story wrapped up I felt no call to return to the UCA however, and knowing that would likely be a similar case for DS2 I endeavored to make the most of the one-and-only playthrough I intended on enjoying. This meant a full completionist run; after all, DS2 is so far the first game to make me drop more than €60 on a new release so I may as well squeeze all the juice from it. The first 10 hours of DS1 had me rushing main story missions, ignoring all optional content, just wanting to feel the satisfaction of wrapping my head around this nonsense world. 24 hours into DS2 and I still hadn't left the western regions of Australia because I was obsessively sweeping the land for lost cargo, hoarding resources and building every road/rail-line I come across and god knows I do not want to have to backtrack to a single one that may have fallen outside my crosshairs. Ironically this has lead me to a ungodly amount of backtracking, going from facility A with goods for facility B, stopping at facility C to gather resources, finding lost cargo for facility A, making it to facility B then swinging back around to build a road from facility C to facility A, and like the indomitable human spirit it's absolutely ceaseless. 38 hours is the milestone I hit when I decided that my stubborn approach to 100%ing this game was doing it no favours and burnout was inevitable, so with 11 five-star outposts I threw in the towel, opting instead to ride the plot to the end...
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