Recent reviews by mark082

Death stranding 2 forces upscaler use that is enabled by default with a target framerate acheved through dynamic internal resolution. Saying this game is well optimized is disingenuous, and while all DLSS, FSR 3.1.5. and Xess as well as Guerrilla's own PICO upscaling solutions are availavble, these cannot be fully disabled in-game, native AA being the closest thing to doing so. Please keep in mind all the reviews praising how well the game runs may be unaware of this fact and may not be playing on native resolutions.

To whom it may concern, I personally played up until the end of Act 3 so far on high-very high settings using FSR 3.1.5 on Native AA 1440P with no ray tracing whatsoever and the game hovers around 90-80 FPS with a dip into the 70-65's in the more demanding and populated areas such as enemy camps so far.

It's really funny considering the flak the 1st game got for this, DS2 being the sequel that hit it off with the wider playerbase, because out of the two this is the one with the mind numbingly uninteresting "just push the stick forward" traversal. The maps are flat, there is no friction, no inconvenience, you can easily walk or even drive anywhere without having to place a single ladder or anchor or structure whatsoever. You are provided with lots of keys only to find no locks to open. Death Stranding's real difficulty relies in the terrain, the topography's own hostility; the cliffs, the rivers, the ravines and dangerous steep inclines... Of which this game plants none of in Sam's main path.

DS2 comes with a brand new "to the wilder" difficulty setting, but that doesn't make the traversal challenge any different, because you can't up this game's core gameplay without altering the terrain's layout. Harder difficulties just inflate enemy health and apply higher cargo damage and timefall degradation penalties - they make the game more tedious, not challenging.

The maps aren't all that interesting either, whereas DS1's US was alluring yet alien at the same time, producing a very unique blend of atmosphere this game sorely lacks. While graphically impressive, Mexico looks like Mexico, and Australia mostly looks like Australia, and that's a problem. They are faithful to real thing, which harms the game's atmosphere more than it aids it.

As someone that put close to 100 more hours to the first game in anticipation of this game's release these past few weeks alone, please be aware that Death stranding 2 heavily punishes the muscle memory of those who extensively played the 1st entry on a controller. A lot of actions are mapped to different buttons for no good reason whatsoever. The Odradek's terrain scanner has been remapped to L1/LB instead of the R1/RB for this game. Why? Because now you crouch with R1/RB, which you used to do with the O/B button, which in this game you use for melee attacks/reloading, which were formerly bound to the square/X button... So on and so forth.

Half of Sam's moveset has been obnoxiously switched around for no good reason whatsoever, and while remapping is an option through Steam Input, this is a problem that shouldn't be in the first place. Some menu controls are different enough to throw returning players off as well.

These may not be all that of a big deal individually, but they quickly amount to be noticable enough to be annoying, and would be as easy as introducing a toggle to revert back to legacy controls in the settings.

Trigger input issues on Dualshock 4 controller

Since this is a game originally released on PS5, this issue might only affect Dualshock 4 controller players. The issue at hand is that haptic trigger compatibility might mess up other non-dualsense Sony controllers, since Death Stranding only registers analog trigger input only, and only when fully pressed - in other words it's like playing with a 99% trigger deadzone. You won't aim guns unles L2 is fully pressed, you won't fire them until R2 is fully pressed. Same goes for precise vehicle throttle and braking controls too, so forget about those as well.

Where a tap might suffice to register the input elsewhere, DS2 requires you to press the triggers all the way in to register any input, turning your analog triggers into buttons essentially.

Fixed in patch 1.2

Sam's jumping jumping cycle sort of abrutply ends, as if it's cut a few frames short. This isn't tied to the game render's frame rate. Some combat animations poorly blend together, like the jump > knee attack and the jump > body press attacks. These animations stick like a sore thumb considering they had already been made better in DS1 already. Still, considering how this game has been out for 9 months already, it's surprising these haven't been fixed yet.

I'm personally experiencing noticably high stutters when hiding and coming out of a postbox too for some reason. The game is installed on a Gen 3 NVME.

In-engine cutscenes are locked to 60 FPS, which fair enough, but so are the "cutscenes" where you talk to distro center workers and prepper holograms, where you can move the camera around and zoom in, and said camera actions do not happen at 60 frames whatsoever, it is very stuttery in fact, while character animations are being played smoothly. The same issue happens when the camera pulls back from a terminal to Sam's back, it stutters noticeably.

There are some noticable texture draw distance issues where the soild and land that is roughly ~100 metres away from Sam display low-res muddy textures, clashing with the sharper land geometry and grass/flora assets in the area.

Some patches of land look like they have been straight up spray painted over, not just the ground texture but the rocks on it as well which most of the times will have the original texture and then halfway it has the "spary paint" effect. It looks very cheap.

Cryptobiote spots keep playing the creature sounds even when said spots have been cleared out and none remain for collection at all, misleading the player. Either that or the sounds are playing properly and it's the critters the ones that aren't spawning.

Wind makes tree folliage sway too violently, as if it were vibrating almost.

Cargo stacked up too high on Sam's backpack doesn't display on the cargo management screen, since it's displayed out of the screen, making selecting it guesswork.

Paths permanently remove tall grass, which is used to evade detection and hiding in enemy territory, and prevents it from growing it back. In the 1st game it would respawn after the camp was reset after a while.

The weather overly on the map is horrible. It blacks the topography out, forcing the player to switch contantly to see which regions are affected by timefall and said timefall areas' outline is too faint it barely shows on the screen as well.

Death Stranding mightn't be as well optimized as it initially may seem for native resolutions, is much more of a walking simulator than the 1st game ever could hope to be, a control scheme that could perfectly be reused from DS1 is instead different enough to throw returning players off, non Dualsense Sony controllers trigger input detection issues and some noticably janky animations and stutters may be found.

At least remove contact damage on DOWNED bosses. More often than not the
hitboxes of these are slightly larger than the sprite and you will get the big hurt
punishing them.

And god forbid you're right under a flying one when you stun them, because they
will very much drop right on you and you won't be able to dodge out of the way.

Pretty soild game soured with poor optimization.

There's noticable geometry and texture pop-in on an NVME install and graphical glitches like shadow and reflections glimmering on native resolution, which is odd because the game looks miles better uring in-engine cutscenes.

And even past the optimization issues, this game feels experimental at times. The gameplay and hunting has been enchanced with multiple monster at the map... but that's the only net improvement. The new food system is a downgrade, and you'll end up just cooking plain meat, fish or veggies because ingredients are so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ scarce and you get a handful at once. There is no farm so far, no canteen either. The capture tutorial comes EXTREMELY LATE in the story, and still you don't get to purchase sleep bombs after it.

There are some questionable choices too. Lucky vouthers are used automatically, camera locks in to monsters automatically, slinger ammo is equipped automatically at times too... It feels like you don't have agency as a player at all. The game likes to bombard you with notifications non-stop, and you can't turn them off. Half of them are tutorials you might have no need for while some other stuff you are on your own to find out. It can get frustrating.

The wound system is a nice feature overall, but grossly overtuned and could use improvements at the same time. It can easily be abused for constant monster topples, while it feels bad to interact with because your wound break attack won't register you hit a wound at times, making bursting wounds a nightmare, especially with bigger monsters.. Kind of like clutching on to some monsters was on World, it's quite janky.

I understand Capcom wanted to go all in with the story with this one, but it ends up just getting in the way a lot. You get reeled into these long sequences of dialogue, cutcsenes and exposition where gameplay is just a fraction. Often times the game will take you out of the map after some hunts, you won't be able to fast travel or do anything else after you are done. It's very on rails. Character animations have this thousand yard stare and very bad animations so they feel lifeless out of cutsecenes.

Hopping on multiplayer is okay. Hopping on multiplayer with friends, however, is not. Rise did it perfectly, correcting World's cutsecene problem and was seamless. It had been done and Capcom decided to throw that away. Instead of joining your friends and posting a quest, there's lobbies, hunt parties and evironmental links... It's a mess. And the cutscenes gettin in the way is back.

The game looks very drab and washed out through fallow season. I understand what they were going for with the dynamic environments and all, but after World's earthy and Rise's washed out color palettes it's just obnoxious at this point. We finally get a game with some vivid colors and they kneecap it putting a mud filter on it half the time.

This last bit may just be me, but combat feels worse on a controller than the prior games. I don't know it the input queuing has changed or there is more overall lag, but pulling some moves off takes forever. It doesn't feel responsive at times.

New Monster hunter game overall, but let's see if it turns out to be a good one.

Don't touch this game not even with a 10 ft. pole. It's one of the most lazy, uninspired and bland online only corporate cashgrabs out there. Every other game on the Motorsport and even Horizon series does what this game offers better. Lots of cars are missing, physics upgrades introduced on FM5 are missing, drag, drift and autocross are missing.

Whatever is here is just... serviceable and barebones contrent-wise. The game still feels unfinished almost 9 months after release. Lots of car models just don't hold up, the first person camera on some models is still weird. Some other quite relevant cars are missing.

The game runs decently enough, although the performance is somewhat underwhelming for a racing game, For some reason T10 decided to reinvent the wheel and instead of just letting you choose a rendering resolution, you just get a "low/mid/high/ultra" selector. Wanna play at 1080P? Well go figure how to do that. Oh, and get ready to compile shaders EVERY TIME you launch the game if you have an AMD cpu.

Car customization is yet another letdown. T10 did sort of roll back the infamous Car point system and remover level requirements to every upgrades so that is not to be dealt with anymore. Still, the "gray void" in which you customize your car is poorly lit, so you may have a hard time to create custom liveries and make aesthetic changes to your machine. If the latter wasn't bad enough though, you also can't rotate the camera, so good luck checking those rims out on a poorly lit room from a fixed camera angle.

The driving is just ok, as expected from the series, and it looks good enough. But oddly enough the game has some washed out colors and this warm-ish breaking bad mexico style filter all over it that makes all the different locations feel the same.

The ui is pretty meh, they reused some stuff from fm7, like the map. The menus are serviceable, except having to choose the "quit" option mid race to restart it, or the UI you get when boxing in for fuel/tires, for some reason that one is particularly bad,

All in all you're better off just burning this game's worth of cash and you'd have a far more interesting time than this game has to offer while being less of a waste of your money.

Regardless of the recent PSN account linkage drama and the popularity this game has garnered since release, it really baffles that it wasn't until I picked up the game myself that I realized how poorly optimized this game is on PC, and I don't see anyone talking about this either. It even struggles to keep a steady 60fps @ 1080p running on a 5600X + 3060 rig. The control bindings all over the place too. Movement doesn't feel as snappy as it expected either.

TLDR: runs poorly, meh control mapping.