Just finished the game. My conclusion is that if you liked the first one, you'll like this one because it's basically a big Death Stranding 1 DLC. No new vehicles, basically no new (useful) structures or gear (that isn't just stat changes), and some endgame-tier shit is now starting shit and it never really advances beyond that (besides it taking a while to unlock old shit like trucks/ziplines, and overpowered artillery strikes from your Oily Gear ship that you'll only maybe use in one main mission because there's barely any combat).
Pretty much all the characters are either awful or incredibly boring, and the Australian setting is... fine for a bit of a palette switch. If you're hoping for fun/authentic Australian characters I have bad news, you get Melbournian dorks and a family of HR ladies at best, besides "The Government" (who I appreciated somewhat, but it's an archetype that died in like the 80s and he's boring as fuck too). The new map is okay but not stellar, and the sub orders seem pretty poorly designed so you never really have much shit to deliver in routes that feel natural.
Monorails are a great addition (I think those are new?), it feels good to use them to plan bulk deliveries by sending shit on ahead to distribution nodes, but the coverage sucks so you hardly get to use them and the mines they're meant to connect are also pretty much useless (even when roadbuilding, because you have a teleporting ship to grab ceramics from anywhere on the map).
So if you're ambivalent about the first one like me, you might have fun for about half of it and then be mildly annoyed about spending dozens of hours building roads you turned out not to need for the second half.
If you played DS1 recently though instead of at launch
do not fucking play this shit yet, you might need a couple years to get the taste of that last shit out of your mouth.
But the ending was actually pretty good, if you weren't spoiled on it so the ridiculous shit comes as a surprise. The rest of the plot was fucking nothing though. I spent most of the game thinking "this feels like they want to make a trilogy and his notes for the second one were like two bullet points."
There's a mid-credits scene that seems to confirm this but they better fucking recast
Elle Fanning if we're going to play as Louise, bitch sucks ass.
I was optimistic about this game, but the last few trailers kinda made me cringe a little bit with the puppet character and a couple minor things. But what made me hold off buying the game was the whole “gun culture” line, and reviewers praising the games critique of guns culture. What is the extent of this criticism since I couldn’t find a lot on it online?
Dollman isn't that bad. He is completely fucking unnecessary and you will tell him to shut up every time he says something, but he isn't yapping constantly (it's just when you pick up a quest package or spot a new BT type a couple times). And he's okay as a character so I'm kinda neutral on it. Adding him was a mistake, as is not letting you unequip him, but there's at least some minor plot justification for that and it's not game-ruining.
The gun culture criticism thing is bullshit from halfwit journalists. There's in-universe reasons to avoid killing people at all costs, that's it. Mechanically it's kind of a justification for a stealthy play style since this is a metal gear game where you aren't playing as Sneaky McSnakeman perhaps, but you can murder all you want. Visit
the Pizza Chef for a code that unlocks the safeties on guns that default to enemy-specific ammo, or just blow them up. You even get cluster bombs and a horrific tool for pulling groups of enemies directly into the afterlife later on. (Which you don't need because the combat is easy as fuck.)
Or, how the entire purpose of MGSV Phantom Pain was to introduce a fourth Snake clone; Venomous, simply to explain how the hell you can kill Big Boss in the original Metal Gear who then pops up alive at the end of MGS4 (only to basically die immediately after anyway lol), because 'he faked his death' wasn't good enough for Kojima.
Nah, if you look closely, it's Ocelot wearing FaceCamo. The FaceCamo device doesn't cover your ears and he has Old Ocelot's ears instead of Old Snake's. Which explains why the FaceCamo is set up like it has plot importance and then doesn't seem to.
I'm the only person who ever noticed this btw, so you're welcome. Everybody is dumb but me.
Pretty sure MGSV is just setting up what became Death Stranding, since it's a game where the whole point is everybody is fucking lying to you and it pretty obviously has plenty of holograms and robots and shit that didn't exist in 1984 so it probably takes place is 2084 or something, and it ends with the most advanced Metal Gear yet (which you're told isn't a metal gear but it has "Metal Gear" fucking written on the side) about to end the world with the magic black goo it controls.
That doesn't mean Kojima isn't senile but there has to have been a point where he was only becoming senile, y'know.
