In a world of saturation, I have always championed new IP's. The biggest challenge they still have is that they're risky and compete against established franchises that firmly have their foot in the door.
Reputation will always help though, and Death Stranding is the brainchild of Hideo Kojima. He refers to it as a "Strand Game" and whilst I'm still not entirely sure what this actually means, the core concept of the game revolves around delivering supplies to groups of different people - A necessity to keep civilisation alive and kicking within a post-apocalyptic United States of America.
The "Death Stranding" refers to an apocalyptic event caused by supernatural beings that have invaded the land via the afterlife, causing devastation to the world and collapse of the population. You control Sam Porter Bridges, a courier who is now responsible for ensuring the remainder of society can still function by delivering goods, produce and stock all over the landscape, whilst connecting them all together via a chiral network to help gradually rebuild the country.
The overall premise is easy to understand but the deeper elements of the plot are confusing, and I ended up losing the will a bit with the game in general for various reasons (more on that soon). However, the plot was what lost me first. It has too many complicated concepts to it that are both difficult to understand and make any reasonable sense of. Typically Kojima, some might say.
Sam carries around a baby (A "BB" to provide it's technical term) that can help detect threats in the outside world, but also ends up becoming a core component to the story when Sam develops a personal attachment to it. There are a variety of cryptic characters you'll meet along the way whose motives are unclear due to unnecessarily ambiguous use of storytelling. You'll frequently transfer to other characters realms called "Beaches" where you freely teleport to and from at various points in the story with no real reasons as to why this happens. It's a huge digression for a game that's ultimately just a delivery simulator at it's core and it never really had me hooked at any point. If I only played games for their story, I wouldn't have made it past 10 hours with Death Stranding.
The graphics are OK, but definitely better in some departments than others. The environments are very samey and dull, with the exact same shades of grey, brown and black plastered all over the landscape but the character models are very sharp and well detailed, especially when you see them up close in cutscenes and cinematics. In a game that I don't think excels in much at all, this is a stand out positive.
I'll talk more specifically about the gameplay features that I felt let this game down, but the overall concept is just a big swing and miss for me. It heavily leans into the delivery simulator element, and despite being supported by a detailed story, you'll spend the majority of the game traipsing the landscape and delivering cargo between various points of the map. It's an idea that holds very limited novelty value, which is aided in some part by some terribly executed gameplay features that really let the game down.
In terms of trophies, this is a large list, containing a total of 63 trophies, including the Platinum trophy. These are spread across a mostly Single Player experience, though a small handful of these trophies are dependant on the online component of the game too.
Firstly, a primary focus to complete the story, which is split into 15 episodes, with a total of 15 progression-based trophies awarded for the completion of each.
The "Thanks for Everything" trophy, awarded for Completing Episode 14 : Lou, is the final trophy to conclude the main story portion of the game, and this group of trophies equates to roughly a quarter of the list. Whilst the game has options for varying difficulty levels, there aren't any trophies on offer for beating the game on any specific level of difficulty.
However, it is important to note that there are other trophies in this list which will require you to achieve them whilst the game is set to a certain difficulty level, so it's better to play the game on Hard difficulty if you want the recommendation that suits the best interest of what the trophy list requires of you.
I'm not too sure what the difficulty level influences. Death Stranding isn't exactly a difficult game. How tough can you make a delivery simulator after all? However, it does lean on elements of combat which are prevalent throughout the story. When I said above the game suffers from some terribly executed gameplay elements, the combat fits straight into this category.
Sam feels very clunky and slow generally, but especially so when dealing with firearms, and the guns you'll have access to lack a fluidity and punch. Combat is treated like a secondary part of Death Stranding, and it shows. The range of weapons you'll add to your arsenal throughout the game is vast, but making use of it all just feels cumbersome and lacks excitement.
Throughout the story, these fights are forced upon you, but my approach to conflict within the open world environment was to avoid them. Combat becomes annoying and hinders the overall experience. It is not fun running into enemy territory and getting dragged out of your vehicle 200 meters by BT's, just to fight a generic boss every single time - and this was sometimes difficult to avoid. It is frustrating to have deliveries constantly disrupted by enemies you're trying to evade but the game decides it wants you to engage in it's rigid combat system instead - like a neglected child desperate for attention.
I set the difficulty to Hard in preparation for some of the trophies in the list, but did not experience anything overly challenging. Even the forced combat segments were easy enough to navigate, and anything else I could actively avoid, I did. It's a lengthy story, and with a little bit of sidetracking to indulge the open world, I'd managed to finish it within 60 hours.
Ironically, even after this level of time commitment, I still wasn't sure on my overall stance with the game. The story clearly had enough for me to stick around for, and 60 hours isn't exactly a small sample size - Then I looked to complete the rest of the list and indulge the post-game grind...
Before I talk more about the other notable trophies in this list, I will preface this by saying that I'm no stranger to a post-game grind. I've done them before and I'll do them again, but Death Stranding has had me the closest to tapping out of any game I've attempted to grind to the end, and it's down to a couple of reasons.
Firstly, the "Best Beloved" trophy, awarded for Reaching the maximum connection level with all facilities, requires you to complete enough deliveries in order to achieve a full 5 star rating with that particular facility. This is cumulative and you will need to do this for 36 different facilities across the map.
When delivering cargo, you're awarded assessment points based on a variety of different factors that may be applicable to that particular order. These can include condition of the cargo, distance travelled, time taken to deliver and volume/weight of the cargo. Each of these factors will be rated with "likes" upon reception of a delivery, which are then converted into points and will fill the 5 star rating bar accordingly. Better assessment ratings will lead to more points, and subsequently fill this bar up for the facility receiving the order.
Certain facilities will require more points than others to max out, but just to give some context of the level of input required here, I completed a total of 356 orders across my time with the game. A small proportion of this wouldn't have been related to this trophy specifically, but out of this total, 238 orders were related to standard deliveries, which would have been completed in order to progress this trophy.
That's alot of delivery, and unfortunately, this is another area of the game that suffers from deficiencies in it's design that made this such a tedious grind. There are a small handful of ways to deliver cargo across the map. You can walk and use tools such as ladders and rope to scale mountainous environments. This is long-winded and boring, but sometimes the most practical way to get around. You can also use the game's multitude of vehicles. A much quicker alternative, but will struggle to navigate certain terrains. You can also use structures such as ziplines and cargo catapults. This is the easiest method, but requires alot of resources to build enough of these to make an effective network and won't always be the most viable option.
I mainly relied on vehicles to transport deliveries, but the handling of vehicles in this game is comfortably one of the worst executions of driving mechanics I've experienced in any game.
Vehicles are an absolute nightmare. They handle like a fridge on square wheels. They spin out, move with unpredictable volatility and feel cumbersome and slow. They'll randomly get stuck on rocks or inside little gaps/ridges and you won't be able to free them, meaning you have to abandon the vehicle and find another one nearby or progress on foot. If you're using a vehicle for the purpose of carrying alot of cargo, then you'll have to leave everything behind. Vehicles have a battery which will run out unless you find a generator to charge them, which just becomes an inconvenient annoyance - You can use the turbo feature to gain a speed boost, but this just drains battery faster so it doesn't feel like a benefit with a genuine payoff.
There's nothing more annoying than your vehicle running out of battery and you're nowhere near a generator or having your vehicle randomly get stuck on a piece of the environment you can't free it from. Walking is pointless and dull and I wanted to save my building resources for other structures that were required for other trophies in the list, so I refrained from building zipline networks as they're costly and resource-heavy. I know building a network of ziplines would have prevented this, but it's still worth calling out an aspect of the game that should be 100x better than it actually is.
Vehicles seemed like the happy medium but increased my disdain for this game tenfold. I can forgive the combat being sub-par. That is a secondary element to the game. However, the delivery aspect is your bread and butter, and there's no excuse for the vehicles to be so badly executed as a consequence, with awful handling and too many inconveniences that extract the already limited fun straight out of the game.
This trophy is where the bulk of the post-game grind lies, and you can chip away at much of the list through completing deliveries to the 36 facilities across the map. I simultaneously paired this trophy up with another though.
The "Growth of a Legend" trophy, awarded for Completing at least 20 unique premium deliveries in each order category with an evaluation of "Legend of Legends" or "Legends of Legends of Legends", requires you to fulfil 80 total orders with one of the top 2 highest assessment ratings possible.
Where the "Best Beloved" trophy is effectively a volume exercise, this trophy is more geared towards quality of the delivery, and you can only achieve a Legends rating with a certain score that meets this threshold, meaning you can actually fail here.
You'll need to be aware of a few things here. Firstly, you can only achieve a Legends rating on Hard difficulty. This is why it's importantly mentioned above to make sure you're playing through the game on this difficulty level - it's the best method to avoid any unnecessary additional work and you don't want to go around fulfilling orders on a lower difficulty and not being properly rewarded for it.
Secondly, you'll need to make sure the 80 orders are split evenly across the main 4 order categories referenced in the trophy. These are Condition-focused, Quantity-focused, Time-focused and Miscellaneous-focused, and they're all referenced by a unique logo next to each order. Don't fall into the trap of going above 20 orders for a particular category - The Time-focused orders are much rarer in comparison to the others and this'll be the one you're missing.
One thing I will give Death Stranding it's plaudits for is how detailed it tracks in-game stats, and with such a focused trophy list on numbers and quantity, everything you need from seeing which facilities you have at 5-star level to your order-type split, is all laid out perfectly and clearly. Efficient stat tracking will always get a positive mark for me, and it's very good here.
I did say this isn't just a volume exercise though, and the requirements for a Legend rating are dependant on the order type. For example, Time-focused orders will need to reach their destination within a specific timeframe, and this carries the bulk of the assessment points. Condition-focused orders will have fragile cargo susceptible to easy damage, so will need to get there within a certain degree of damage allowed. If you infringe these limits for that particular order, you'll miss the S rank and have to re-do them.
It's frustrating to navigate terrain and suddenly lose your footing, or traction in a vehicle, and end up rattling the cargo around. This will cost you, and it cost me numerous times, and does lead to rework as you replay the order or move onto another instead. This is what the wonky mechanics will cause though. I'm not saying it wasn't ever my fault, but the game has a habit of putting you in unnecessary and helpless peril.
Thankfully, I had been selecting premium deliveries since the beginning, and playing on hard, I'd already gone a reasonable way towards this trophy via my quest to reach maximum rating with all 36 facilities, but there was still some more grinding to do.
The "Home Faber" trophy, awarded for Fabricating all available weapons and equipment, requires you to fabricate all 108 different types of weapons and equipment in the game.
Most of these items and their fabrication plans become available through progression, but there's also a fair amount of items that you'll need to unlock through different means. Some of them are unlocked through specific orders for Sam that need to be completed, some of them of unlocked through side quests given to you by other characters and some of them have up to 4 different level variants that you'll need to work up towards - And like a dosage of salt to a wound, there are also some fabrication plans that require you to beat time trials around a race track in the variety of different vehicles the game offers. I can only believe that's an inside joke that someone thought the one thing this game could do with more of is driving.
This is also a slog and I was completely numb to the game at this point. Running around, still doing these pointless errands in the name of the final few trophies. Staring at a checklist of 108 items with their requirements listed next to them and dreading what the next task was going to be, just to fabricate a single item. You can't complain that the depth isn't here at least.
On a final note, the game does also have a small selection of 5 Online trophies, despite being a fairly pure Single Player experience. You'll notice the world is populated with other players structures and cargo and these can be used to your benefit as long as you can see them. Some features such as postboxes and delivery terminals allow you to donate and receive cargo from others, and the trophies that relate to these features require an online connection to function properly. There's nothing too tasking, but there could be a day that comes where these trophies become unachievable if the online support is dropped, so it's at least worth noting just to make sure you grab these at the earliest convenience.
Just to be clear, the difficulty rating of this game is not down to the actual challenge of the game on paper. It's fairly easy for the most part, even with the necessity to play on Hard for the extent of the "Growth of a Legend" trophy. It's challenging in the sense that it tested my patience and resolve, and the post-game grind was such a struggle, I've seldom been closer to giving up on a game than I have here. The delivery sim concept just doesn't work for me, and it was only bearable due to my sheer determination to not have to swallow my pride, so it will feel high, even at a score of 6, but I will stick by it. After a save file clocking in at a whopping 152 hours, I can respectfully say, never again.
Notable Trophies -
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| Thanks for Everything - Complete Episode 14: Lou. Best Beloved - Reach the maximum connection level with all facilities. Growth of a Legend - Complete at least 20 unique premium deliveries in each order category with an evaluation of "Legend of Legends" or "Legend of Legends of Legends". Home Faber - Fabricate all available weapons and equipment. |
Best Beloved
Reach the maximum connection level with all facilities
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