IGN gives Death Stranding a 6.8 review score

shredingskin said:
Kojima:

Also Kojima:

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That's some quality political commentary, it really flies above people heads.
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Elementary take on American politics aside, I really don't appreciate him presenting himself as the final arbiter of genre hierarchy. I'd expect him of all people to be better than that, and no I'm even a fan of very many FPS. You can (and should) promote your product without resorting to tearing down others. Using FPS especially at the moment as the point of comparison just seems like low hanging fruit.
 
You know after playing this game even longer, I think the initial negative reviews come from the reviewers who were pressured to rush through the game. The game is hella frustrating when you are trying to get from point A to B as quickly as possible, but THAT IS THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT. You are a deliveryman in an America that has no infrastructure. Sure there are vehicles that help you transport a lot of items, but vehicles are useless without any roads. I tried loading as much as I could on the first vehicle I could find, but I found that the vehicle actually made travel slower because I had to find flat enough ground to use it on.

The cool thing is that they made the game so that you can build structures to help out other players. Highways, bridges, ladders, charging stations, etc are built by the community and you are sometimes really thankful when you run into a player made structure at the right time. Of course the timefall mechanic naturally makes structures decay so that the world doesn't become to convenient over time.

My only major complaint of the game so far is that the main enemies (MULEs) are so fucking stupid. The MULEs are supposed to be guys who are addicted to delivering and the hormone rush that comes from delivering packages, but their actions say otherwise. They attack porters (like you), steal their packages and hide them in their personal post boxes...? Instead of getting the rush of a job well done they just gain the ire of everyone they steal packages from. It makes no goddamn sense. If they are addicted to delivering why don't they just take the job of porter and do their best? It frustrates me every time I have to deal with these stupid enemies.

I think the story overall is fairly shit, but that is my opinion. Kojima fanboys will eat it up but if you aren't into Kojima's story telling style, it is very boring. However, it isn't shoved in your face as much as it is with MGS games and you get most of the story through e-mails and brief cut scenes.
 
I'm pretty well into the game now, I just want to say that chapter 3 and 4 were downright excellent all around, granted chapter 4 is essentially just a single action sequence but it was a fucking tense one and felt like a long lost sequence to what mgs 5 should of been.

I pretty much think at this point I adore the game, talking to my friends going through it at roughly the same pace has been a treat too cause we all get to come together and be like "bro you get to this fucking rad part or easter egg"
 
jsh020 said:
I'm pretty well into the game now, I just want to say that chapter 3 and 4 were downright excellent all around, granted chapter 4 is essentially just a single action sequence but it was a fucking tense one and felt like a long lost sequence to what mgs 5 should of been.

I pretty much think at this point I adore the game, talking to my friends going through it at roughly the same pace has been a treat too cause we all get to come together and be like "bro you get to this fucking rad part or easter egg"
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Pretty much where I'm at with the game now. Early on in chapter 3 but am loving it. Traversal is a blast, online implementation is surprisingly cool and while the story is weird, its at least entertaining kind of weird! The encounters with BT's are a blast and how a normal delivery can go south in a matter of seconds is hilarious. Definitely glad I grabbed the game, it'll keep Shenmue III company for the remainder of the year!
 
By definition, all games are moving from point A to point B, maybe fight in-between. If you open up the dictionary and read that definition out loud in a negative tone, it's a 6/10 review; if you read it in a positive tone, it's a perfect score. This is game journalism. Like ice cream journalism, it is incredibly subjective whenever it's not talking about technical flaws, novel design elements, or other objective facts. This is why I oppose the entire current review and scoring system, and I always have. It's meaningless. Specifically, it violates the principle of charity, which would necessitate only fans of particular genres reviewing new games of those genres, so that reviews would be logically categorized (i.e. subjectively) and progressive from a certain point of view. As it is now, IGN or whomever will assign like the king of all hip hop fans to review a bluegrass album, then hype up the negative reaction, which is not worth anybody's time. In order to develop any art, you need a group of people who basically happen to agree on some subjective elements to push for the way they'd like the genre to go. You can't just say "games" is a category or "kojima" is a category. Is Space Harrier anything like Shenmue? Imagine if an art museum had absolutely no organization whatsoever, and one of the curators on a tour just randomly denigrates a Renoir hanging between two 4k landscape photographs -- "this dude just moves his paintbrush from one side of the canvas to the other, and everything's blurry! terrible!"
 
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jsh020 said:
I'm pretty well into the game now, I just want to say that chapter 3 and 4 were downright excellent all around, granted chapter 4 is essentially just a single action sequence but it was a fucking tense one and felt like a long lost sequence to what mgs 5 should of been.

I pretty much think at this point I adore the game, talking to my friends going through it at roughly the same pace has been a treat too cause we all get to come together and be like "bro you get to this fucking rad part or easter egg"
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Rad? How old are you? Lol
 
shadowman16 said:
I mean, I've seen the phrase "That's Rad" popping up an awful lot lately... wonder what might have influenced that...
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I was saying it well before that, one of my friends always gave me shit for it around 2014, then he lost the culture war when more people started using it.
 
I got into mgs pretty late, after 4 and likely portable ops had been released, and only had a vague idea and interest in it after learning about Snake in Smash Bros Brawl. Quickly played through each and enjoyed most of them, 3 still at the top and 2 a bit behind. 4 was kind of meh in some ways, I thought the original vision for Rising looked promising but Platinum’s take grew on me, Peace Walker was fun for having coop but the bite size mission structure didn’t translate well over to 5 imo.

Prefacing with all this because while there are Kojima games I haven’t played, it seems mgs makes up the bulk of his career and is the most easily comparable to Death Stranding. That, and the only things I enjoyed about it were particularly in contrast to 5, but even then I feel it also makes the opposite mistakes and even repeats a lot of 4s.

The world design is better for the most part, by no means perfect or even great but at least it feels like there’s some variation and you do have to think about actually traversing some of it...at least until you get stuff like ziplines, which basically cheat the game. Same thing with the thing that lets you straight up kill BTs long before the end of the game. The only threat after some time were the mules, and their AI weren’t even anywhere near as good as 5’s already dumb soldiers so they weren’t even worth bothering with outside mandatory sections.

The combat in general is extremely bland, and that fact is only exemplified in most of the boss battles. The first fight with Cliff was interesting if only because it was the first time facing a humanoid boss, and that’s about it...I guess I should be glad that at least they aren’t as gimmicky as stuff like fire Volgin.

The story and characters seemed like the strong part at first, and I’m glad to have had it at least focus on story after 5, especially with a lead actor who didn’t just phone in his role, but a lot of the story quickly falls apart with almost anything to do with Amalie. Many of the characters don’t have anywhere near the screen time they need, most only ever talk to give exposition dumps, and often are almost entirely forgotten outside their own chapters. And while there’s definitely more going on in general, I feel like there’s still just not enough between Fragile’s chapter and finally getting to Edge Knot.

According to the stats, I spent 50 hours on this. I completed it in about a week, same as Shenmue 3. I can’t account for all of it but I feel like there were long sessions I simply had it paused, and anything else was really spent trekking. I didn’t bother with any side content. Longer games are nice, but it seems to me something is really wrong when most of it is filled by the main quest and not cutscenes and not anything more engaging or fun than just keeping my balance which is way easier thanpeople make it out to be; my stats at the end said I only stumbled a total of 4 times. Never any voidouts and only a handful of deaths during one of the last bosses.

Lastly you can’t rate it properly without taking into account online features. Kojima was so proud of himself when stuff like this isn’t really new. Thing is, the difference between this and others like Dark Souls is that you can still have fun in that without any hints or even summons or invasions, etc. Death Stranding on the other hand, as bland as it is, will only be worse when servers inevitably go down. Some may not care but I still replay all my favorite games from time to time and this, among all my other complaints, will make sure I don’t even bother. As much as I disliked mgs5, I still have it a few chances because at least some of it was based on having fun in something designed to be played alone.

Unfortunately games like S3 will get blasted for being boring while DS will mostly get perfect scores just because of the name attached to it, never mind all the other people who have worked on it and his past games.
 
I recently got this;

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Death Stranding PS4 Pro Limited Edition

Honestly.. I've mostly just been playing Shenmue I.

I bought a bunch of games, and obviously Death Stranding came with the console with a bunch of special download bits and bobs for it.

I didn't even try the game for the first couple days, just played Shenmue. Then I played some others, started a Fallout 4 GOTY save, started playing MGSV Definitive Experience (irony?), I even started Duke Nukem 3D World Tour before I finally put Death Stranding in the machine.

Why? Well, I didn't know much about Death Stranding. I'd heard of it, but I'm not one of those people who keeps up to date on the video game news or latest happenings/games etc. I suppose I just knew it was going to be highly entertaining and unrelentingly-cinematic on the storyline side. I wasn't disappointed. Kojima games are just like that.

I also knew it'd be very confusing, and take a lot of your overall mind just to sit there and play it. Kojima games are like that. Plot lines that inter-twine, disappear and resurface again hours later and you're supposed to greet them with a higher understanding then when you last saw them, etc etc. Kojima games are like that too.

I played a couple hours of it in the end. I still have read no reviews on it or anything. Literally no idea what happens mid or endgame. I'll say this; it reminded me a lot of MGSV, just in the way it feels to play. I don't know if maybe that was my mind telling me that because I knew it was a Kojima game.

Regardless, it's high-quality stuff from a visual, artistic, yadda yadda point-of-view.

Then I realised that you're a rag-n-bone man. I've no idea if this changes later on.

It's definitely gonna be a slow burner for me. I've got other, more appealing games to play. But I can totally see why it's dividing people (if it is). Even I know IGN normally hand out 8s and 9s to big games, so yeah.
 
Just started this today. Very early on but outside a few environmental elements and impressive character rendering I’m not as blown away visually as I would have imagined. I’m playing this on Pro on 4K set with HDR enabled.

Getting used to gameplay loop but what little I played I did enjoy. Can’t wait to sink my teeth into tHis over next few weeks.
 
beat the game a few days ago, the final 8 hours basically elevated the game to one of my favorites of the year and honestly if this wasnt a strong as hell year with stuff like sekiro and dmc5 being pure treats it likley would of been my fav, theres problems i have with the game but they get pretty pushed to the wayside in my memory in favor of how damn spectacular what worked was. I very much hope kojima's next game is a bit more normal especially since I hope he leaves this property here as it ends so strongly and any vagueness left in the plot actually adds to the themes of the game rather than take away from them.

Everything to do with Mads' character pretty much made the game something im gonna be thinking about for a while, he did a spectacular job and the way the game came together plot wise with him and generally overall to be shockingly coherent and straightforeword worked so well cause you can look back on so many of the more vague and confusing past scenes and spot so many small details and hints staring you in the face the whole time, a few in particular being downright gut punches. Also without spoiling what it was, the section where this played was goosebump inducing


I guess this does answer the question as for who was really at fault for mgs5, konami or kojima being overly ambitious. Pretty easy to say it was definitely konami on this one. If mgs5 is incomplete then death stranding is like the most complete game, it could have very easilly ended at a few points near the end only to keep going and reach far greater heights, especially crazy when you consider he made this in 4 years which is less than the standard length most open world games get (5 years) which includes him completely rebuilding a team from scratch and learning a new engine. Makes me really excited to see what they can do now that all the hard parts are out of the way and they can just go straight into active development
 
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I've been putting more hours into the game as well. Onto chapter 9 now, and I've been loving it. The characters are pure Kojima for better or worse, and while the story isn't exactly amazing I still really love it, again because of the weird and wonderful characters included. Having a chapter focus on each of them was definitely a great move.

As for the actual gameplay, I only have issues with some oddities with the physics when it comes to the mountains, sometimes my character doesn't do what I want him to... but on the other hand the other 99% of the time has me loving the traversal and environments you visit in the game... its definitely a strange game, not really quite like anything else I've played but its something I've definitely been enjoying loads. Oh, and I can't stand BB. I hate the sound of crying babies (and can't stand almost any kids in games, no matter the age) and this only helps further that point, for any sequel, give me a cat/dog companion instead, would instantly make the game much better for me.
 
shadowman16 said:
I've been putting more hours into the game as well. Onto chapter 9 now, and I've been loving it. The characters are pure Kojima for better or worse, and while the story isn't exactly amazing I still really love it, again because of the weird and wonderful characters included. Having a chapter focus on each of them was definitely a great move.
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Death strandings story is kind of all at the start and all at the end with the middle like 30 hours being mostly gameplay it feels like, where as chapter 9 onwards is all pure mgs4 kojima for better or worse, I dont think it reaches the heights of that game cause it was working off an entire legacy where as death stranding is totally self contained, but there are definitely some moments that really say to me the guy still has it after mgs5 left me empty.
 
jsh020 said:
Death strandings story is kind of all at the start and all at the end with the middle like 30 hours being mostly gameplay it feels like, where as chapter 9 onwards is all pure mgs4 kojima for better or worse, I dont think it reaches the heights of that game cause it was working off an entire legacy where as death stranding is totally self contained, but there are definitely some moments that really say to me the guy still has it after mgs5 left me empty.
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Yeah. Finished the game tonight, and boy is the last few chapters of the game incredibly bizarrely paced. Chapter 10 felt like the final boss chapter (which I loved) while the chapters after that are all sorts of weird. Chapter 13 itself is one of the single worst examples of content in a game ever, I hated it. Stupid plot twists and pure Kojima silliness wrapped up in the worst credits sequence in a game I've ever experienced. Then chapter 14 rolls along as an epilogue and manages to make up for all that - Die Hardman and Cliff get some amazing scenes and really I think Die Hardman himself is easily the best acted character in the entire game, his story arc is fantastic. Not sure how to feel about
Bridget though, she seemed like one of the most evil characters in a game I've played, not Higgs level of cliche badass evil, but just pure hatred evil - like one of the main antagonists in Horizon Zero Dawn, evil but not because you have a boss fight against them, just for their actions in the past
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So yeah, great game and one I'll be returning to post game just to wrap up a couple of things, but no more unskippable credits please, that was bad enough the first time let alone the second!
 
shadowman16 said:
Yeah. Finished the game tonight, and boy is the last few chapters of the game incredibly bizarrely paced. Chapter 10 felt like the final boss chapter (which I loved) while the chapters after that are all sorts of weird. Chapter 13 itself is one of the single worst examples of content in a game ever, I hated it. Stupid plot twists and pure Kojima silliness wrapped up in the worst credits sequence in a game I've ever experienced. Then chapter 14 rolls along as an epilogue and manages to make up for all that - Die Hardman and Cliff get some amazing scenes and really I think Die Hardman himself is easily the best acted character in the entire game, his story arc is fantastic. Not sure how to feel about
Bridget though, she seemed like one of the most evil characters in a game I've played, not Higgs level of cliche badass evil, but just pure hatred evil - like one of the main antagonists in Horizon Zero Dawn, evil but not because you have a boss fight against them, just for their actions in the past
.

So yeah, great game and one I'll be returning to post game just to wrap up a couple of things, but no more unskippable credits please, that was bad enough the first time let alone the second!
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yeah chapter 13 is a bit of an unpleasant one, I like the twists but it definitely felt a bit like a slogg, chapter 14 being a rollercoaster of emotions through made up for that especially with all the context changes it had.
That vietnam scene especially, god damn that scene hits hard when you know sam is Cliff's son and you notice that scene was Cliff realizing this. Everything related to Cliff was so well handled and I'm glad the game realized that was the note they needed to end on, not some big apacolyptic final conflict or existential philosophy, just the tragic story of a father trying to see his son one last time.

These couple lines right here I think are the part of the game thats going to stick with me much like the final words of mgs4 were
 
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