IGN gave Death Stranding a 6.8 because the walking simulator involved walking.

The math aint mathing. IGN looked at Hideo Kojima's thousand-layer logistics opera, saw a game explicitly about weight, distance, isolation, terrain, infrastructure, and the emotional burden of connection, then complained that the gameplay 'struggles to support its weight.' That is not a critique. That is walking into a bakery and docking points because the room smells like bread.

Tristan Ogilvie's review reads like someone trying to grade a concept album with a stopwatch. Every time Death Stranding does the thing it is clearly designed to do, IGN marks it down for not doing a different thing faster. The review keeps circling the same revelation: carrying packages across hostile landscapes can be slow, awkward, and exhausting. Yes. Correct. That is the assignment. You have identified the noun.

A 6.8 is the funniest possible score because it has the confidence of precision without the burden of meaning. Not a 7, which would imply basic respect. Not a 6, which would imply real rejection. 6.8 is a number generated by a calculator that has recently gone through a divorce. It says, 'I understand this is important, but I personally wanted more pew pew per square kilometer.'

The review's central failure is not that Ogilvie disliked parts of Death Stranding. Fine. Art can annoy you. The failure is that he reviews friction as if it were an accident. The tedium, the planning, the slow traversal, the vulnerability of carrying too much stuff over bad ground — these are not bugs in the experience, they are the entire grammar of the game. IGN treated deliberate discomfort like a loading screen with opinions.

And then history did what history always does to launch-window hot takes: it put on steel-toed boots and walked over them. Death Stranding became one of the defining games of its generation, spawned a director's cut, influenced design conversations for years, and somehow made multiplayer strand mechanics sound normal in polite society. Meanwhile this review remains preserved in amber as a monument to platform blindness: a critic standing in front of a bridge simulator, furious that it is not a roller coaster.

We give this review a 2/10. It successfully contains sentences, but so does a parking fine.