From cats with bat wings to a talking Alan Wake lookalike puppet, Death Stranding 2 is even more absurd than the first game. Oh, and how could we forget the villainous Higgs somehow returning, wielding an electric guitar as a weapon? Well, hidden among all these amazingly weird new additions is perhaps the most important new feature in the PS5 title – environmental hazards.
Titled Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, this PS5 exclusive looks to take full advantage of the PS5’s power to create an even more vivid and detailed world, fully flexing Kojima’s Decima engine. However, more important than that is the increased level of interactivity with the environment that will hopefully make On the Beach even more engaging than its predecessor – which is already one of the best PS5 games.
Revealed in a new gameplay trailer during Sony’s State of Play 2024, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach will feature more environmental hazards and events that will keep you on your toes. Early in the trailer, we see the one and only Sam Porter Bridges running away from a surge of water quickly rising behind him. Just after this sequence, we see Sam overlooking a massive landslide on the side of a cliff.
Excitingly though, these will have an impact on gameplay. Obviously, if you’re caught out in a landslide then you’re likely to be met with damaged cargo, if not an untimely death. However, we see that the rushing water is strong enough to disable the equipment constructed in its path – including the large bridge.
In the first game, traversing the massive world safely and with speed required you to build items such as ziplines, bridges, and roads. After all, you don’t want to wade through a strong river with piles of cargo if you don’t have to. While this mechanic worked well at first, as you got later into the game, constructing these items made traversing almost too easy, skipping the engaging mechanic of staying balanced over terrible terrain.
Well, Death Stranding 2 looks to solve this issue by finding ways to take these powerful upgrades away from you at any given moment. Excitingly, this has the potential to make you think on the fly to find a new solution to the puzzle. There’s potential for even more natural hazards to be revealed as well – something like a tornado would be undeniably terrifying.
Pairing these new hazards with the much more diverse locations of Death Stranding 2, Kojima Productions’ new PS5 game could become one of the best games of all time. Sadly, we’ve still got a long way to go before the Death Stranding 2 release date in 2025 – though this gives you more than enough time to find out why Hideo Kojima ripped Death Stranding 2 apart during a full rewrite last year.