Death Stranding 2: On the Beach Review - The Weird, Wonderful Return of Sam Porter Bridges

I don’t know when it really clicked. Maybe it was the moment I found myself delicately balancing a stack of volatile cargo while weaving through a sandstorm that was actively trying to shove me off a cliff. Or maybe it was when I launched a talking crash-test dummy named Dollman into the air to scout out a group of enemies near a flooded outpost, then used a coffin-shaped hoverboard to cruise through a river of black tar. That’s exactly what Death Stranding 2: On the Beach throws at you without a wink or a nudge—it’s completely sincere in its oddity, and somehow, it works.

It begins with Sam Porter Bridges trying to live quietly near the Mexican border. He’s with Lou, no longer a BB in a pod but a child, free and growing—a peaceful opening, and one that almost feels like a farewell. But of course, this is Kojima and peace never lasts. A familiar face finds Sam and offers another mission, and before long, he’s swept back into the endless cycle of reconnecting a fractured world. This time it’s not America, it’s Australia, although it doesn’t really resemble the real one in any tangible way. Instead, it looks like an alien version of Earth, with twisted deserts, sky-swallowing mountains, and surreal stretches of terrain where the laws of nature feel like they’ve been partially rewritten.

Australia is also a mechanical change. The land actively fights back. Sandstorms don’t just obscure your path; they push against you, forcing you to struggle for balance. Earthquakes rattle the ground beneath your feet, and if you don’t brace quickly, you’ll watch your carefully stacked cargo tumble into a crevasse. Timefall rain returns and swells rivers until safe crossings disappear. And then, inevitably, the BTs appear, those tar-soaked ghost entities still lurking wherever death and weather intersect.

But Sam isn’t the same man we controlled in the first game. He’s more experienced now, and the game makes that very clear. You don’t have to wait ten hours to get a working vehicle. The first few hours hand you an off-roader equipped with an automatic cargo collection tool, which immediately makes those early missions more manageable. It’s still Death Stranding, and the process of plotting your path, checking elevation maps, and packing gear remains crucial, but the sequel smooths out many of the rough edges that made the first game occasionally feel like work instead of play.

You still plan for everything. Before a mission, I’d spend time at a terminal studying the route, marking points on my map, and deciding whether to bring ladders, ropes, a floating carrier, or just hope I could brute-force it with enough stamina boosts. And when I saw warnings about BTs in the forecast, I made sure to bring blood grenades, or even better, one of the new weapons like the blood boomerang. That one’s incredibly effective, but it drains your health every time you throw it, so it’s a tradeoff. 

Combat in On the Beach is significantly more engaging. In the first game, I avoided it as much as possible because it felt awkward like the systems weren’t really designed for it. This time, it’s a different story. You get access to a tranq sniper rifle fairly early, and that alone changed the way I approached enemy camps. Taking out a bandit from a distance before sneaking in with a Bola Gun to clean up the rest became my go-to approach. And when things fell apart and they definitely did more than once, I could fall back on actual weapons. There’s a powered glove that delivers electric punches, and it’s one of the most satisfying tools in your arsenal when the stealth route fails and you’re forced to fight.

One of the best additions is Dollman. He’s a floating puppet clipped to Sam’s belt, and while he’s mostly comic relief—he references Moby Dick and sometimes tells you you stink—he’s also extremely useful. You can throw him into the air like a drone and use him to scan enemy territory, mark targets, and spot threats. The enemies never seem to notice him, which feels a little off, but it’s a minor break from realism I was happy to overlook because of how helpful he is.

Enemy AI hasn’t taken a massive leap forward, but it’s functional. The game throws different types of enemies at you, some heavily armored, some more mobile, and learning which ones to prioritize and what weapons work best is part of the strategy. On normal difficulty, I rarely found myself overwhelmed, but that didn’t make the fights boring. There’s enough variety and freedom in how you approach encounters that it stays fresh.

Boss fights have their moments, too. There’s a tentacle mech fight early on that sets the tone for how big and bizarre things will get, and later encounters push that even further. If you don’t want to deal with them, you can skip them entirely, but honestly, you’d be missing out on some of the game’s most striking visuals. 

Progression now includes a perk system. Skill points can be spent on stealth perks like erasing your own footprints, combat perks that make your guns more effective, or traversal boosts that improve weather prediction or stamina. It’s also tied to how you play. If you spend time engaging enemies and leaning into combat, you’ll unlock better gear for that style. If you go out of your way to give “likes” to other players’ structures, you’ll be rewarded by having more of those structures appear in your world. The game pays attention to how you play and gives you tools that support it, which is a great improvement from the more static systems of the first game.

And the gear keeps coming. From mechanical missile dogs to hoverboards shaped like coffins, the game throws a lot of weird and wonderful tools at you. The blood boomerang is a highlight, but I also fell in love with the monorail system. You can help construct it with contributions from other players, and it makes massive deliveries, like hundreds of kilos of chemicals across unstable coastline terrain, so much easier. I still walked sometimes, but more often than not, I found myself driving or riding across the landscape, treating it like a post-apocalyptic rally course.

Deliveries are still the meat of the game, and they’ve become more varied and, surprisingly, more entertaining. One mission had me deliver a pizza to an anime VTuber. It had to stay hot and had to be transported flat, which meant no vertical stacking, no risky terrain, and definitely no deep water. It sounds like a joke mission, but I had to switch out my usual vehicle for one that kept the cargo level, plan a new route, and avoid sandstorms. It was silly, but it also felt like a genuine logistical challenge.

The story unfolds slowly, sometimes too slowly. There were stretches where I didn’t see a major plot beat for hours, and during those periods, I really started to feel the weight of the game’s quiet moments. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but in a meditative one. Eventually, things pick up, and the story becomes more emotional, more cryptic, and more visually surreal. Cutscenes can be long, but they're generally well-executed. The Corpus system helps you stay on top of the lore, functioning like an in-universe glossary that updates every time a new term is mentioned.

The cast is stacked. Fragile returns as the leader of Drawbridge and serves as the thread that ties your journey together. Elle Fanning plays Tomorrow, a mysterious figure with the ability to move through tar. Rainy, played by Shioli Kutsuna, literally causes rain wherever she goes. George Miller is Tarman, Nicolas Winding Refn makes another appearance, and Troy Baker returns as Higgs, this time with a red mask and a guitar, stealing almost every scene he appears in. His performance is theatrical in the best possible way.

Visuals are phenomenal. The Decima Engine brings Australia to life in a way that’s often breathtaking. Whether it’s a sunrise over the desert, a thunderstorm lighting up a ridge, or the surreal sight of an oversized moon hanging low in the sky, the game constantly surprises you. I ran it on a PS5 Pro in performance mode and never experienced a single technical hiccup.

Music is deployed with precision. Ludvig Forssell’s returning compositions hit all the right notes. Woodkid’s vocals add gravitas, and Low Roar makes a powerful return, especially in a late-game sequence that involves a long desert drive. 

Interestingly, while so many big-budget games these days come bundled with microtransactions, randomized rewards, or even outright gambling mechanics, Death Stranding 2 avoids all of that completely. There are no loot boxes, no in-game purchases, and no hidden economies. Kojima Productions confirmed that from the start, the full release stays true to that promise. Everything in the game, from new gear to vehicles to weapon upgrades, is earned through exploration, progression, and completing deliveries. It’s quietly refreshing in an industry where chance-based monetization has become the norm. There's no need to worry about rolling the dice to get the right sniper rifle or unlocking outfits through some randomized grind. What you unlock depends on how you play, not what you pay.

Of course, that doesn’t make the game perfect, as the menus are still too dense. Cargo management, while improved, can still be clunky. There are also missions that feel like filler, and a few narrative beats don’t land as well as they should. Kojima’s portrayal of women remains awkward, there’s an unskippable photography minigame, characters who take their shoes off for no reason, and lingering camera shots that feel out of sync with the rest of the tone. These moments are brief, but they stand out.

That said, by the time I reached the end credits, I felt something I didn’t quite expect. I felt satisfied. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach didn’t radically change what the first game was, but it refined it, polished it, and expanded it in ways that made it feel more alive. It’s still weird. It’s still dense. It’s still unapologetically slow at times. But when it’s working, it’s unlike anything else out there. And I’d take that kind of game over a hundred safer ones any day.