- Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
- Release Date: Jun 26, 2025
- Also On: PC
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Aug 27, 2025Death Stranding 2: On the Beach continues the same gameplay from the original without any meaningful innovations or ideas. That said, the brilliant story and unparalleled music and performances make this worth a look.
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Edge MagazineJul 10, 2025This is a grand, unwieldy behemoth of a sequel, buckling under the weight of its features and bombast. In lacking a sense of direction, though, it sometimes delivers in unexpected ways. [Issue#413, p.102]
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Jul 7, 2025Death Stranding 2 On the Beach is a brilliant game which I largely do not care for. I think it’s inoculated me from the impulse to ever play a new open-world action game again, and I weirdly appreciate it for that. But also Chvrches ordered me to bring them a kangaroo at one point, and that was entirely delightful.
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Jun 23, 2025A surprisingly iterative sequel that’s nonetheless superior to its predecessor and despite some dull moment, and an incoherent narrative, this is still the best Metal Gear game in a decade.
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Jun 23, 2025The first Death Stranding was eerily prescient. Releasing in 2019, it was impossible to divorce it from the COVID-19 pandemic that followed a year later, the parallels between preppers living in bunkers and people struggling to find ways to connect with others reflecting a period of quarantine and uncertainty about the future. By contrast, Death Stranding 2 is less precise and clear about what it wants to say; it seems committed to making you ponder many things at once, inviting different takeaways. Its story touches on topics like the increasing harms of climate change, how our everyday actions are being automated with each passing day, the damaging presence of guns, the clash between governments and privately owned entities, and the importance of helping others in any way we can. If the sequel is prescient of anything, it is that fixation on the past binds us to repeat history, no matter how much we try to pretend otherwise.
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Aug 12, 2025The script is terrible, the twists were predictably dumb, and the humanity isn’t present. The performances aren’t good, and none of the story works for me on any level. In terms of mechanics, the traversal that made it stand out for me before is not interesting this time around. It was all too easy, too fast and too simple.
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Jun 23, 2025Death Stranding 2 isn't a bad game. It's a beautiful game. But it disappoints precisely where the first one was astonishing: by levelling out the difficulty, rendering the journey anodyne, watering down what made the original game a tough, unforgettable experience. Here, Kojima seems to have given in to the temptation of comfort and past criticism, delivering a game that is more accessible but less meaningful. Far from extending his vision, On the Beach seems to mark his running out of steam.
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Jun 23, 2025Death Stranding 2 is a game that pulls from the same playbook as the original, one that wants you to know it was made by the creator of Metal Gear Solid, and doesn't use its 55- hour runtime to pull on the threads that are interesting about the world. Instead, its focus on combat and retreading similar ground gets tiring fast. There are moments of something special here, but they can't shine past their own shadows.
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Jun 23, 2025Ultimately, Death Stranding 2 is a good video game, even recommendable, but for me, it's not as good as Death Stranding, and that's what pains me the most. And, while I celebrate Kojima's authorship and courage, and I liked the game as a whole, in terms of narrative, which for me is always where the author excels, I struggled to connect with it as I did with the first one. [Recommended]
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Jun 23, 2025Death Stranding 2: On the Beach should have been called Death Stranding 2: Quality of Life, because that's what this game is. From top to bottom, Kojima Productions made so many improvements to the original, making a weird delivery-sim game that is quite relaxing. Those improvements may not be enough to attract people who avoided the original, yet the players coming back are going to find a sense of calmness that you could assume Kojima wanted to deliver with his game.
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Jun 23, 2025I’m not sure I want to go through another chapter in Death Stranding’s convoluted, messy, and often contradictory universe. Especially if the next game’s ending is as unsatisfying as Death Stranding 2’s finale. Sure, the bizarre moments are amazing to watch on screen. So much money in Death Stranding 2’s development budget was put into some of the silliest and strangest ideas. And that’s all wonderful. I love it. But it doesn’t make up for the fact that so much of the game feels, ironically, disconnected from what you actually do in Death Stranding 2: On The Beach. Or that it all ends so poorly. But I guess I can always build more ziplines and roads and get the satisfaction of a job well done.
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Jun 23, 2025It’s possible it won’t fully click until you play one long and confusing game, and then jump into its similarly demanding, if more accessible, sequel. But for me, that struggle was worth the effort, because, again, there just isn’t anything like Death Stranding. It’s haunting, beautiful, and forced me to focus all of my attention on it, something that’s becoming increasingly rare in modern games. It can just take some time to get past that barrier.
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Jun 23, 2025Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is a world of both the familiar and the alien, of trails well-worn yet frontiers to be explored. So much of what made Kojima Productions’ first title such a unique experience is here, with something brand new to explore. Those looking for a comfortable walking simulator to transport goods by food and explore nature have exactly what they’re looking for, while those who come to Hideo Kojima’s works for the off-the-wall narrative and memorable fight scenes will also walk away satisfied with plenty to chat about online. This is one title that I’ve been taking my time with and enjoying at my own pace, even if that experience has been hauntingly lonely the past couple of weeks.
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