Death Stranding Review: 9 Ups & 3 Downs

1. It's A New Genre

Before launch, Hideo Kojima was talking a lot about this being the first "Strand game" - that Death Stranding would in some form or another, be a whole new video game genre.

And although I've seen plenty of critics lambast this idea or label DS as "an open-world game with fetch quests", that's completely missing the point.

The aforementioned things I noted about a community of players forever contributing to one another changing the landscape in tow while sharing items, weapons and routes, combatting the enemies of this world and "getting America back online" as one? That's something that hasn't been done.

Yes, we've had messages left in Dark Souls, items shared in Animal Crossing or motes of light representing players in Fable 2, but nothing on the scale of this, and nothing with a narrative backbone ostensibly still routing this into a single player mould.

Death Stranding is everything those games were working towards, and something only possible on the current generation of consoles.

It fundamentally needs server interactions and thousands of players working together to function properly, and as of right now, the "Death Stranding experience" is pretty incredible.