Conclusion

Don't hate me, but I really don't like Death Stranding. For me, it's a terrible game, and playing through it felt like a huge chore. But let's start from the beginning. Death Stranding by legendary game designer Hideo Kojima tries to be different than the majority of games out there. While today's market is getting spammed with run-of-the-mill shooters, copy and paste Assassin's Creed titles, and an endless stream of multiplayer battle royale games, Kojima took a different route.

You're Sam Porter Bridges, a courier in a post-apocalyptic United States whose mission it is to transport physical goods from one point to another. Sounds easy enough? Sure, there will be monsters to fight on the way. Yeah.. not really.. your biggest problem in Death Stranding is walking. Unlike other games, which hide the physical size of your backpack, Death Stranding piles everything on your back, which affects your center of gravity, and your walking ability. Good idea, horrible implementation, it's a balancing nightmare to keep your character from falling down ALL THE TIME. If you randomly start leaning left, the game engine decides when, you have to press and hold the left mouse button to counter it or you'll fall. Running down a steep hill? You'll fall on your face and spread what you're carrying over a small area. But hey, you can hold both mouse buttons to stabilize your movement, which makes you walk like you would through molasses. Flat terrain? It's filled with rocks and boulders you have to navigate around, but don't worry, you'll still get stuck in them.

To make your traveling life easier, you can build ropes and ladders in the world. This is indeed a good mechanism as it motivates you to do some planning, find a good spot to place the item, but overall, I felt like it was just another mechanic to make me overlook the shortcomings in movement. I ended up using Cheat Engine's Speed Hack feature to play at a higher speed, so that the sluggish game pace wouldn't make me cut my wrists.

The core game loop of Death Stranding revolves around package deliveries, just like in the 1985 novel Postman, and the movie based on it. Nearly every single mission is an even simpler fetch quest than those people hated World of Warcraft for 15 years ago. The quests are extremely simple: pick up X, go to Y, and deliver to Z. The challenge? The "go to" part. While being miserable navigating the world, you'll get to encounter some human or supernatural enemies, with the former just dumb cannon fodder with zero intelligence and the latter to be evaded stealthily even though you're unable to see or avoid them until the encounter starts, similar to how Final Fantasy throws random enemies at you as you walk around. The map designers also didn't just create easy paths between mission objectives, like in other games. You'll instead often find yourself cursing them because they didn't quite make these impossible to traverse, so you'll always feel as though you can get up there and won't give up—let's call this a plus. Later in the game, you may use vehicles, which definitely helps with travel times. You'll have to navigate around rocks, so the imprecise controls are almost like a mini-game to learn, and your vehicle will usually run out of battery life before you reach your first mission objective, or you'll get stuck between stones or realize the map designers decided to make the path ahead impossible to drive on because it's too rocky.

A lot of time is spent watching real-time rendered cutscenes which are very well directed in terms of camera, movement, and voice acting. Kojima hired several Hollywood actors for important characters and made extensive use of motion capturing. This resulted in very believable characters that play their role well, but I'm not convinced all that money is worth it. Rendering quality of characters is poor and the cutscenes are limited to 60 FPS. Compared to other recent games, the story in Death Stranding is good, fairly complex. At the start of the game you're thrown into the world with very limited knowledge of what happened, and things unfold over the first few hours before everything suddenly starts making sense—very nice. Further into the game, there are a bunch of interesting plot twists, although none of these are groundbreaking—as "good" as in the story of a good book. My concern, however, is that the slow pace of the core game takes away from the story. It almost feels like they made movement intentionally slow to be able to meet their "x hours of playthrough" objective. Cutscenes are long, they make up a significant portion of the game, and many are repeated when delivering quests or using your private room. You can only skip a whole scene, not individual lines of dialog, which is not a problem, Cheat Engine Speed Hack to the rescue.

Character development is minimal as there are no skills you can learn, or some sort of skill tree. As the game progresses, you get access to new items that can be manufactured in hubs, including some basic equipment, like boots and armor, a handful of them, maybe a dozen in total. While you start out with non-lethal options only, you'll acquire several guns quickly—we're in the United States after all. Gun play is nothing to write home about, however—there's also some auto-aim. Death Stranding has a base-building aspect, which lets you craft shelters, supply stations, and other useful objects in the world. The cool thing is that these will be shared with other players. While the game is completely single-player, it will share the existence of these in-world objects, which makes things crafted by other players usable too, but only in areas Sam has already connected to the network, which means backtracking. You may turn off this functionality; the whole game can work offline, I've tested it.

Death Stranding runs on top of the Decima Engine, which is a fairly new engine that has powered a handful console titles already. It runs very well on PC and uses DirectX 12. Take a look at the screenshots on page two: while the world environment is rendered incredibly well, almost photo-realistic, character models are rendered poorly—engines from a decade ago have been achieving better visuals. Maybe the underlying reason is the limited hardware of the PS4, so they had to decide what to focus on for graphics. There's a little bit of pop-in as the dynamic LOD changes geometry, and some textures are quite low resolution, no doubt due to console memory limitations. While Death Stranding was advertised as "first-class PC title", I'm seeing things that make me disagree. For example 32:9 and 16:10 are not supported—when developing for PC this can't happen unless you specifically remove filter out those resolutions. Also a field-of-view setting is almost mandatory on PC, Death Stranding doesn't have one. The default FOV is alright though. It's good to see the FPS limit increased, but why stop at 240 FPS, and not give us "no limit"?

Hardware requirements are very reasonable for a PC game in 2020. For 60 FPS at 1080p all you need is a GeForce GTX 1650 Super or a Radeon RX 570, so basically any half-decent card from recent years will do. Fluid 1440p gaming is possible with a GTX 1660 Super or RX Vega 56, and 4K 60 FPS is in reach with an RTX 2080 and up. AMD is close at 4K, though, with the RX 5700 XT at 56.1 FPS and the Radeon VII at 54.7 FPS. VRAM requirements are minimal by today's standards. At up to and including 1440p, 4 GB is sufficient, even 4K stays below 5 GB.

Taking a more detailed look at the numbers, it seems this game is very well optimized for AMD Radeon—we used this week's game-ready AMD driver, NVIDIA released theirs last week. While we usually find the RX 5700 XT close to the RTX 2070, it trades blows with the RTX 2070 Super in Death Stranding. AMD's older Vega and Polaris architectures aren't doing so well, seems a lot of optimization specifically benefits the RDNA architecture. Things are similar on the NVIDIA side. Last-generation Pascal cards are taking quite a performance hit, part of that seems to be because Death Stranding is slightly CPU limited, especially at lower resolutions, which Pascal is more susceptible to than Turing.

In this review we also took a look at NVIDIA DLSS 2.0. Performance gains are huge, up to 50% depending on the scene, yet visual quality is pretty much identical to native resolution rendering. This is a huge achievement for NVIDIA as it makes DLSS an important technology many game developers do not want to miss out on. Unlike the first generation of DLSS, DLSS 2.0 does not need any time-consuming and expensive game-specific training. Rather, one algorithm fits all. Effort required from game developers is minimal, all they have to do is feed the game's motion vectors to the NVIDIA API. Technically, DLSS 2.0 is an optimized temporal anti-aliasing algorithm, basically TAA on steroids. Machine learning is no longer used to solve the aliasing problem, but to solve the TAA history problem. The end result is an algorithm that works much better than anything we've seen before even though it's not perfect. In Death Stranding, I've noticed a little bit of ghosting around moving objects. The comparisons in this article are also not ideal because the default setting of the game has TAA enabled, so essentially, our comparison images are "TAA vs. More Advanced TAA" and not "no AA" or "MSAA" vs. DLSS. Still, given the gains on tap and how closely DLSS resembles the best non-DLSS option, this is a clear win for NVIDIA.

Overall, I have to say I'm disappointed by Death Stranding, not in terms of graphics, but in terms of gameplay. I'm puzzled by how the game could achieve such high ratings, maybe I'm just not getting it. If you feel like you're interested in the game, definitely check out some gameplay videos, PC or console, doesn't matter which, to see how it works. Also don't skip through the video, do watch one whole quest and then imagine yourself doing that over and over again, with some distraction from cutscenes between quests.