Latest news with #postapocalypse
Top Gear
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Top Gear
Death Stranding 2 is a masterpiece, but is it a decent driving game?
Gaming The long and winding road that leads to Hideo Kojima's art Skip 10 photos in the image carousel and continue reading You'll no doubt have heard something about Death Stranding 2 since its release. An artisanal piece of game design presented with arthouse strangeness, it's a game about shifting boxes around in the apocalypse that somehow makes that incredibly mundane task feel captivating, but also retains the lingering sense that the whole thing might be a practical joke at your expense. It is, ultimately, a masterpiece. The world that protagonist Sam Porter-Bridges occupies has been changed almost unrecognisably by the Death Stranding event, a mysterious phenomenon that has allowed the dead back into the realm of the living, and now there are Beached Things, or BTs, roaming around on the surface. Being killed by a BT causes a massive and devastating explosion called a Voidout, so all surviving humans have fled underground to their bunkers. Advertisement - Page continues below There's some pandemic allegory in there, and no shortage of discourse about how we connect with each other in the digital age. It has much more to say than the vast majority of games do, and a much more vivid, esoteric, and fascinating way of articulating it, too. The preposterously A-list Hollywood cast helps, of course – Léa Seydoux, Norman Reedus and Elle Fanning are just some of the big names among many others. However you feel about being a post-apocalyptic DPD man, the sheer quality of Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima's world-building and storytelling steamrolls your reservations about the prosaic hiking gameplay and forces you down onto a reverent knee by the time the credits roll. You might like But is it a good driving game? That's the question nobody dares tackle. Here's a game in which you're frequently tasked with driving vehicles full of cargo for upwards of 20 minutes across a vast open-world map of Australia (albeit an off-kilter, slightly Scandi version of Australia with a massive snowcapped mountain in its centre), and yet nobody's talking about the handling physics. An oversight which it falls to TG to rectify. What are the vehicle options? There are just two vehicles available, and wouldn't you just know it, they're both EVs. Advertisement - Page continues below As such, the battery life on both the Tri-Bike and the Pickup Off-Roader is a major purchase consideration. On the plus side, charge time is almost instantaneous, and if you're travelling within the Chiral Network – territory that's been hooked up to Death Stranding 2 's mega-internet and where other players can build shared structures for anybody to use – recharge stations are frequent. Since it's your job to connect human settlements to the Chiral Network, though, you're often travelling outside of it. If you hit zero charge out in that barren territory, your options are as follows: get out and walk, or throw your head back, shout some expletives into the sky, and then get out and walk. How do they handle? Let's start with the Tri-Bike. In a way it's bang on trend – we've seen boxy Eighties design principles find their way back into the zeitgeist in EV form recently via the Hyundai N Vision 74 and Renault 5, so why not a Reliant Robin, too? While the latter was designed primarily to transport market traders' goods to and fro or go round corners on two wheels in BBC sitcoms, the Tri-Bike is an all-terrain vehicle capable of navigating rocky trails and scaling formidable hills. It's a marked upgrade on its inspiration, in that sense. Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Look out for your regular round-up of news, reviews and offers in your inbox. Get all the latest news, reviews and exclusives, direct to your inbox. However, very little joy can be extracted from the driving experience. That's partly down to the punishingly trundling top speed, partly down to the fact it takes corners like a shopping trolley, and also partly down to the scarcity of actual roads in DS2's Australia. Not strictly the vehicle's fault, but worth bearing in mind for any potential buyers. Oh dear. Does the Pickup Off-Roader fare any better? As a matter of fact, it does. The basic factory model might not excite, but this thing's got serious upgrade potential and – importantly for the end-times courier – cavernous boot space. A near-infinite amount of cargo can be loaded into the rear, and even when driving with heavy loads the steering maintains a lithe, responsive feel that Tri-Bike owners can only dream of. The fun really begins should you opt for anti-gravity module and mountain tyre upgrades, though. With this spec you can jump the car several feet in the air to clear substantial boulders, and drive up sheer mountain faces at full throttle. It's hard to find fault with that. It's also worth calling out the avant-garde seating position: the driving seat is positioned several feet clear of the giant front wheels, leaving you dangling in the air as you drive for extra ground clearance and, let's face it, cool points. Can you race them? Not really. Part of Death Stranding 's bizarre but lingering appeal is its slow, deliberate pacing, so anything quicker than walking pace feels nippy in this world. With that in mind, it's probably no surprise Hideo Kojima didn't think to build a banked oval circuit amidst his meditative hiking game about human connection. If you were particularly determined to find a performance angle, you could replay missions while trying to beat your previous time and refine your route on the map each time. But that doesn't suddenly turn it into Gran Turismo 7 . It's almost like this isn't a driving game at all. We'll level with you: it isn't. And yet it's a game in which driving accounts for the majority of your gameplay. What a curious dichotomy. If you can stomach the absence of lap times, there's a genuinely wonderful and thought-provoking experience to be had here, even though the cars handle like washing machines. There will be extended passages in which you grow bored, and moments in which you might actively come to dislike it. But Death Stranding 2 is a special kind of game that rewards perseverance with imaginative sci-fi, dreamy imagery and poignant social allegory every few hundred miles.
New York Times
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Stranded Again, but Unable to Escape an Auteur's Themes
The first moments of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach offer us glimpses of a very different sort of game. Sam Porter Bridges, the grumpiest delivery man in the postapocalypse, is awakened from his nap by a cooing baby's small pudgy fist. This is Lou, the child Sam saved at the end of Death Stranding by freeing her from an embryonic pod. Lou is a toddler now, at the mercy of Sam's clumsy single-dad shenanigans. You spend the first few hours of Death Stranding 2 toting Lou around in a custom harness, taking extra care not to trip while navigating pitched inclines. You watch as Sam cooks her breakfast, sings her lullabies and distracts her with toys. This touching sequence is cut short, unfortunately, so that the real game can begin. When Lou is taken away from Sam (Norman Reedus), he is thrust back into the deeply familiar role of a porter designated with reconnecting a bunch of estranged cities and bunkers. Like in the first game, most of the action of Death Stranding 2 involves making solitary, perilous deliveries — across mountains, through forests, over rivers — in order to rebuild a world torn apart by its returning dead. Though Death Stranding 2 has Sam connecting the forts and outposts of a ravaged Australia rather than the United States, its format remains the same. The game is less a sequel than a reiteration. Many of these story beats overlap with those of the game's 2019 predecessor. There's still Sam's ambivalent relationship to power and his reluctant, if inevitable, obedience to shadowy figures and organizations who wind up revealing their true nature in the third act (a staple plot device of the series' auteur director, Hideo Kojima). The dastardly Higgs Monaghan, playfully embodied by a returning Troy Baker, appears intermittently to foil Sam's steady advancement. There are even occasional visits to an alternate dimension where Sam must do battle against a mysterious man with sad, beautiful eyes; Neil Vana (Luca Marinelli) takes over the position that Cliff Unger (Mads Mikkelsen) ably filled the last time around. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘28 Years Later' Review: Danny Boyle Revives His Monsters
After more than two decades of dipping in and out of genres that have taken him from the Milky Way to Mumbai, Danny Boyle has returned to the juicily gruesome world of consuming violence, human and otherwise, with '28 Years Later.' Once again, flesh-eating creatures are wandering, crawling and, most worryingly, running amok, ravaging every conceivable living being. Humanity remains on the run with some souls safely barricaded in isolation. It's a sensible precaution that — along with all the gnawed bodies, shredded nerves and broken relationships — makes this futuristic freakout seem as plausible as it is familiar. Pitched between sputtering hope and despairing resignation, the movie is a classic boys-into-men coming-of-age story updated for the postapocalypse and future installments. On a lushly green British island, a ragtag collection of adults and children are doing their best to keep the tattered remains of civilization intact. Inside a protected hamlet, they live and congregate much as their peasant forbears might have centuries earlier. They share precious resources; nuzzle sexily in the dark. There are threats and some provocative mysteries, like the figure who appears in a ghoulish mask that's suggestive of Edvard Munch's 'The Scream.' This is the third addition to a cycle that opened with '28 Days Later' (2002), a violent parable also directed by Boyle in which humanity is stricken into near-oblivion. (The 2007 follow-up, '28 Weeks Later,' was directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo.) The 2002 movie opens in Britain with animal-rights activists set on freeing some lab chimps. Even after an on-site scientist helpfully explains that the animals are infected with rage, the activists keep blundering toward doom. As they restrain the scientist, he shouts, 'You've no idea—' just before a chimp chows down on a would-be liberator in a flurry of blood-red imagery. Like the new movie, '28 Days Later' was written by Alex Garland and draws on different influences, most obviously zombie movies. (Boyle directed the screen adaptation of Garland's novel 'The Beach'; they also collaborated on 'Sunshine,' a very different dystopian fantasy.) In interviews, Boyle readily discussed the inspirations for '28 Days Later,' realistic and otherwise, citing the Ebola virus as well as 'The Omega Man' (1971), a thriller set in the wake of germ warfare. Even so, he pushed back against genre-pigeonholing '28 Days Later.' 'See, it's not a film about monsters — it's a film about us,' he told Time Out. That our monsters are always us is as obvious as the all-too-human face of Frankenstein's creature. Whether zombies or not, the infected in '28 Days Later' kill indiscriminately, much like the undead that George A. Romero first sicced on us in 1968 with 'Night of the Living Dead.' One striking, nerve-thwacking difference between these generations of insatiable ghouls is their pacing. Along with Zack Snyder in his zippy 2004 remake of Romero's 'Dawn of the Dead,' Boyle popularized the now-familiar fast zombie. Romero's tend to stagger and lurch with their arms raised like scarily ravenous toddlers, moving slowly enough for some of their swifter would-be victims to escape, though not always. Quickening the pace of the creatures added genre novelty, and it expressed the real world's ever accelerating rhythms. The pace complemented Boyle's filmmaking, which tends toward speed. That's very much in evidence in '28 Years Later,' which opens with some pro forma background about the state of the world (it's still bad) and a freaky episode in a house that echoes the opener in the previous movie. The scene here begins with a group of obviously terrified children shut up in a room watching 'Teletubbies' on a TV. It's an unsettling scene that grows all the more disturbing as noises from outside the room grow progressively louder. As the thumps and panicked voices rise, increasing and then converging, the editing rapidly goes into overdrive and grows choppy, finally becoming a grim churn of tots, Teletubbies and flesh-eaters. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
