How long is Death Stranding 2?

(Image credit: Sony)

How long is Death Stranding 2: On the Beach? Well, the time to beat will vary significantly depending on how much side content and extra side quests you do beyond the main story. If you're determined to be a completionist and do everything that Death Standing 2 has to offer, you might triple the playtime you would've normally had if you'd only been doing the normal story and nothing else. It's a big world, after all.

At an estimate, the vast majority of you will be spending at least 50 hours in this game if you're determined to see the end credits, and potentially much more. To help you get a better understanding, here's everything you need to know about the length of Death Stranding 2 and how long it takes to beat.

Death Stranding 2 length and time to beat explained

Death Stranding 2 prologue Sam standing on a mountain with lou strapped to his chest — (Image credit: Sony)

As I've said, Death Stranding 2 is far from an express experience, and it will take you many hours to complete. The main story consists of 48 Orders split across 17 Episodes, and there's a whole host of extra deliveries, side missions, and enemies you can take on along the way.

With that in mind, here are some estimations for how long it’ll take you to complete Death Stranding 2, depending on your playstyle:

Critical path (Main Orders only): 40-50 hours
Standard (Main Orders + some side activties): 50-70 hours
Completionist (Main Orders + lots of side activities and exploration): 80-120 hours

Overall, it's not that different in length to Death Stranding 1 if you've played that, despite that game having 70 Orders to complete to reach the end. If you (mostly) stick to only the main missions of Death Stranding 2, you'll likely reach the end in under 50 hours. The writer of our Death Stranding 2 review rolled the credits after 42 hours, having spent little time on side activities.

The time it takes to beat Death Stranding 2 then becomes a lot harder to judge when you start factoring in exploration and all the various extras you can undertake, whether that's connecting NPCs, completing their side quests, delivering cargo, or just wandering the wilderness. This incredible capacity for dilly-dallying means it could easily take you upwards of 75 hours to see most of the game – I spent almost 11 hours on just the first Episode, mostly getting to grips with the cargo-hauling ways of a porter, so knowing these Death Stranding 2 tips would have certainly sped up my progress.

Playing online should also speed things up for you as this will allow you to benefit from the contributions of other players, be it structures they've built or resources they've left behind for anyone to use. That means less busywork, so you can crack on with important deliveries, but you'll need to dish out plenty of Death Stranding 2 Likes as well.

You might also be wondering what you can actually play the game on and how likely Death Stranding 2 on PC and Xbox is in the future.

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Will Sawyer is a Guides Editor at GamesRadar+ with over five years of experience in writing online guides, news, and features, and has a BA (Hons) in Journalism. Starting as a freelancer, Will contributed to startmenu and Game Rant before joining the GamesRadar+ team in August 2021. Since then, he has written hundreds of guides about a huge range of games, with shooters and action games being his areas of expertise. Outside of writing about games, Will hops between multiplayer shooters with friends, such as Darktide and Helldivers 2, and delves into whatever has been on his backlog for far too long. He also tries to get through his never-ending Warhammer pile of shame of grey Tyranids, Aeldari, and Chaos Space Marines.

With contributions from

Oscar Taylor-KentGames Editor

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