Unlike most of my LttP threads (such as my recent ones on Persona 1 and the Persona 2 duology), I'm not waiting until I finish the game to post it, because I'm really not sure whether I am going to stick with it or not. I picked up the game on a Steam sale a little while back.
I decided to finally started it on a whim the other day. I'm using an Xbox Series X controller to play it. My PC can run it at max settings and it's quite a looker of a game.
There's mainly two things that struck me as I'm playing it.
1. Dialogue and cut scenes - Good LORD I am so sick of hearing Die Hardman. When he's not appearing in every damn cutscene, he's ALWAYS contacting you while you're making runs. Many times during runs it feels like every 10 seconds you hear that "dooo do doo doo" and he says some other bullshit you either already knew, or could have said in the last transmission or cutscene. I'd also call this game "Holy shit just let me play the game: the video game", as they LOVE to have their cutscenes that go on forever and ever. There's times I'm thinking "oh yeah I should be able to save soon" and it just keeps going, and going, and going, and GOING. I know this is the nature of modern Kojima games, but goddamn if it ain't aggravating. I know they love to show off all the celebrities they got for this game, and the motion capture, and all, but it's just so incredibly self-indulgent to an annoying degree. I'm glad they got the celebrities, particularly people close to Kojima like Norman Reedus and Guillermo Del Toro. I get that some of this is Kojima doing tongue-in-cheek goofs, but it just comes off as annoying and self-indulgent.
2. The gameplay - I'm really really undecided about this still. I just past the point where you go steal something from the first MULE camp, which honestly I found that mission to be a blast. Having to sneak in such an open world like this is pretty neat, and the fact that you can't just kill them (or you can, but it's a bad idea for what the game tells you is obvious reasons) makes things really interesting. Yes, the game is in fact a lot of delivery missions. I was slightly surprised to find some kind of combat, but I have a feeling there's not a whole lot of it compared to the rest of the game. I do kind of like how the stealth works though. Avoiding the BTs is always fairly tense, and at first I didn't understand how to know when it was okay to not hold my breath, but I understood it on the second BT encounter. The first time one got close to me and turned the ground nearby to oil/chiralium, and one of those BTs in the shape of a whale with tentacle mouth chased me and had a few close calls. That first time you get "tagged" by the MULEs across the river was definitely unexpected and intense, and I had to run like hell since there was nothing to hide behind.
Unless this changes later on, I don't completely get the frustration people had with balancing and falling over, losing cargo all the time. Almost every video I see looks like it's from early game, and people have very Jenga tower-ass stacks of cargo and then are surprised when they fall over. They explain the balancing pretty clearly, and it still gives you button prompts. I have only had ONE cargo loss incident, and it was just me going into a river that was too deep to stand in and lost my cargo, but I was able to just get out, go downstream, and get it back easily. All the rest of the time, even when I've been pushing it on how much weight I carry, I have had close calls but used the balance controls to stay balanced. The game gives you tools like the postboxes, for instance if you have to retrieve cargo, you can use an existing postbox private storage or put down your own and use it. On that first mission where you have to take something from the MULE camp, I retrieved some of the extra cargo along the way, and set up a postbox fairly close to the distribution center, and just put some stuff there, went back after I made the delivery (which was down a hill) and got my stuff back out of the postbox.
That said, I'm not sure if this is gameplay I'm going to want to stick to for 50 hours, or however long this game is. I do like weird realistic games, and while this pushes on realistic, things like the load bearing and balance are fairly realistic, and of course nonsense like BTs and BBs are not. I like Arma 3, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Elite Dangerous, etc, but this game is just very different from those, because it's not consistently fun.
As much as I hate the comparison, especially comparing games that aren't even in the same genre, I think the Dark Souls-like mechanics are really neat. What I mean by that is basically the "shared helpful online content in a single player game". In Dark Souls this was things like the messages warning you of things, and summon signs. In Death Stranding that goes a step further, and there's things like other players leaving ladders, ropes, bridges, and I hear eventually roads. You can give these things "likes", which I'm still not completely sure what likes are used for, as finishing missions seems to give you them. It is pretty cool to be able to have these traversal objects left by other players show up in your world, as well as the usual advice signs like in Dark Souls.
With the annoyances of Die Hardman interrupting every 2 minutes to tell me how great it is that I'm restoring the connection to make America whole again, and how the gameplay can be monotonous sometimes, I'm really unsure whether to stick with this game or not. I'm probably going to keep playing until I get so sick of it that I will just drop it, but we will see if that's within 2 hours or 200 hours.
I know when the game originally released on PS4, opinions were rather mixed on it. These days I see the people that absolutely loved the game mostly, and those that didn't don't really talk about the thing they don't like. Has anyone else had a similar experience as me with this game?
