This isn’t a review of Death Stranding on iOS so much as it is an announcement that I will not be reviewing it. I posted some impressions earlier this month about the release where I mentioned my intent to finish it, but I just… can’t. This is not from a lack of desire, to be clear. It’s from this port being particularly awful in a crucial way: managing saves.
Every time I boot up Death Stranding on my iPad, I have no idea if it will actually load my most recent save. Sometimes after the 90+ second load time I am right where I left off. Sometimes, the game seemingly accidentally loads an old save and I just have to go into the system menu to reload to the more recent one. And at other times still, my most recent saves appear to have completely vanished.
I have reliably been able to get to my most recent saves eventually, but doing so is always a frustrating process. It usually involves a lot of force closing the app and rebooting it to see if my save files magically reappear.
For this reason, I don’t think anyone should really consider playing Death Stranding on iOS, regardless of your interest or affinity for it. It’s a beast of a game that will push your iOS device to its limits, but–or perhaps because of this–it also just can’t get the most basic thing right. At a $40 price tag, this is just unacceptable.
The strength of mobile devices is their ability to allow you to do things conveniently. I understand that this strength isn’t leaned into quite as hard or in the same way on other platforms, so there’s always some pain points playing console and PC ports on iOS. That said, I’m totally ok with playing a beefy console quality title on my iOS device as long as it works well enough. This is how I finished Resident Evil 4, Hitman: Blood Money, Alien: Isolation, etc. Most of these games I’d contend aren’t event mobile-friendly, but they were made convenient enough to play through by not completely fucking up how you start or resume a play session, among other things.
If you like Kojima games or are just generally interested in Death Stranding, I recommend you play it literally any other way than on iOS. Not only will it very likely be a more impressive looking experience, but (presumably), you won’t have to restart the thing several times over just to make sure you can pick up where you left off.
