Death Stranding Director's Cut Review friv game - Even Better, Even More Brilliant
In some games you want to return after a while. Even in linear, single, well-groomed up and down. To return in order to follow the familiar path again, to re-live the emotions and events, maybe to discover something new. In this regard, Friv2Online strategy of releasing "director's cuts" of its hits is simply amazing, allowing you to immerse yourself in your favorite game again and get fresh impressions from it. Not so long ago we told you about the Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, now it's time to get acquainted with the director's edition of Death Stranding. All the details of the novelty are in our review.
To tell for the third time about the plot of the friv game and the emotions that it causes, perhaps, will be superfluous. At one time, we walked many kilometers along the original Death Stranding, wandered into the version of the game for personal computers, and we won’t praise its script again - it’s already known that here a strong story is combined with a masterful game of famous actors, excellent direction and camera work, and during the passage, gamers will simultaneously strive for a common goal, entangle the world with threads of interactions and constantly break into each other's universes - but not for the sake of war, but for cooperation.
The gameplay of Death Stranding is meditative, slightly drawn out, sometimes tedious, but in the end it creates the right atmosphere of a dying world, whose inhabitants are afraid to lean out on the surface, travel across vast territories and overcome obstacles, where everything is used, from a wide variety of gadgets to ingenuity and strength will of the protagonist. A walking simulator in the most literal sense, a courier game that's more fun delivering goods than fighting opponents, Hideo Kojima's powerful statement about love and building bridges between people all over the world.
The feeling of unity in the game is impressive: when in the pre-release version the servers were turned off for maintenance, and my world lost the signs, buildings, roads and other traces left by other couriers, a feeling of loneliness and some kind of helplessness washed over me.
Nearly two years after its release on PS4, Death Stranding was released on the PlayStation 5 in the Director's Cut edition. This is not just a native version for the new console, but also modified in all respects, from performance improvements to the introduction of new content.
It is worth starting, first of all, from the technical side. Death Stranding Director's Cut plays on PS5 in true 4K (or upscaled to 4K and 60 fps in performance mode). I first got to experience the friv game on PS4 Fat, where it ran at 1080p at 30fps with frame rate drops in action-packed moments like boss fights. This did not affect the gaming experience, but still I would like better performance. Well, it's all good now and Death Stranding looks amazing on PS5.
It also loads very quickly: less than a minute passes from the launch of the game to the appearance of Sam in the game world, and most of this time is taken up by the starting cut-scenes. Jumping between hideouts with the Fragile Express takes a second: even if you move between regions, in this case, instead of a loading screen, you will see only a momentary blackout between the points of departure and arrival.
In addition to the beautiful picture (by the way, you can now enable widescreen display in the friv game settings, which adds black bars at the top and bottom on a TV with a standard 16:9 aspect ratio), Death Stranding Director's Cut also boasts cool sound. On PS5, the game supports 3D audio, and if you play with good headphones, the immersive effect will be maximum.
Shortly before the release of the game, the console received a system update that allows you to activate 3D audio on regular TV speakers: after enabling this option, the sound became a little more rich and varied, the sound scene was replenished with new sources. Of course, you can only achieve full immersiveness with a gaming headset, but if one is not at hand, the new feature will add a few points to the treasury of impressions.
Finally, as expected, Death Stranding Director's Cut has added support for the features of the DualSense controller. The speaker and gyroscope were also used on PS4, but now there are more sounds made through the gamepad : the crying and laughter of BB were joined by the sound of water, the rustle of grass and snow. However, these effects seemed too intrusive to me, I wanted to turn them off.
At the same time, tactile feedback allows you to better feel the movements of Sam, the severity of his load and the fall that happens to him. The gamepad gives into the hands of point vibrations during the run, and the triggers resist at the moments when it is necessary to balance with the load on the back, and the more it is, the stronger the resistance. In episodes where you need to pinch and hold both triggers so that Sam gently descends a slope or wade across a river, my fingers began to ache.
In terms of content, that Kojima Productions has prepared a lot of new products. The Death Stranding Director's Cut includes all missions from the PC version related to Half-Life and Cyberpunk 2077 : now Sam can put on Gordon Freeman's glasses, attach a decorative valve to the back of his head, decorate his face with cyber implants, get hold of a cyberpunk -style tricycle, decorate a truck with a lambda symbol, and so on. It is noteworthy that the missions for the extraction of "cosmetics" from the above games are optional and stretched over several chapters - you will not be able to just go to Death Stranding and get all the bonus content: you will have to run around the locations, guided by the hints from the letters.
Sam's arsenal has expanded with other tools. First of all, weapons: shortly after the start of the campaign, the hero receives an energy rifle that effectively knocks out enemies. If this seems not enough, a stationary turret is at your service. You can try out these and other barrels at the shooting range located in each shelter. To make delivering cargo easier, new boots that mitigate fall damage, an autopilot helper bot, and an incredible catapult cannon that fires boxes at a great distance: you can launch cargo from a couple of hundred meters and run light to it.
In addition, the Director's Cut has been expanded on the soundtrack : new songs can be listened to in Sam's hideout (although I don't see any reason to spend so much time there, it would be great to be able to independently include tracks anywhere, for example, during delivery). There are also several new missions - not mandatory, but complementary to the lore of the game. Finally, you can build a racing track in one of the locations (first you have to bring a lot of resources to the construction site ) and drive around it to your heart's content, including in a new car.
On the face of it, the "Director's Cut" of Death Stranding appears to have less new content than the recently released Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut. However, this is not the case: there is a lot of it, but it is not collected in one place as a separate location, but is evenly distributed throughout the game. For this reason, it's worth returning to if you're willing to not just pop in to see the new missions and gear, but re-do the entire journey of Sam Bridges, courier and America's hero.