After Metal Gear Solid 5 made sparing or killing enemies so important, I'm disappointed Death Stranding 2 wasted its most interesting mechanic

Towards the end of Death Stranding 2, I picked up a sexy weaponized guitar that could be used to shoot people by playing solos at them. Now, clearly this was one of the best Death Stranding 2 weapons for vibes alone, and obviously I was going to have to try this out at the earliest opportunity – shredding power chords while blasting through bandits like every Bard player in D&D is a no-brainer – but there was a part of the description for this new toy that stuck out to me. To club people with it, the game assured me, would be non-lethal. But mowing them down with the lightning gun effect was marked "lethal".

Huh. It sounds obvious to those who aren't familiar with the game, but I'd completely forgotten that killing was a thing. Of all the many weapons I'd accrued across Death Stranding 2, the vast majority were non-lethal by design, firing rubber bullets or taser shocks that leave hired goons dribbling on the floor. I mentioned this discrepancy to a friend, who'd commented that they'd seen some tutorial box in the game somewhere telling you that you could actually change most of these safe weapons to live rounds with the right controller input.

Safety off

Well, I would clearly have to test this out. I grabbed an assault rifle and fiddled with the settings until I could work out how to set my phaser to kill, wandered up behind a bandit, and blew a hole in his skull. Yep, that's a gunshot alright. But hi-ho, what's that alarm being squawked at me now?

I'd completely forgotten that when a human being dies in Death Stranding, you have less than an hour before they detonate and kill everybody for miles around, in what is termed a "voidout." That concept is played up a lot more in the first game – the first mission of which is sprinting with a fresh corpse to the nearest furnace before it goes nuclear – but in DS2 it comes up a lot less. And until now, I hadn't killed a single human being.

Panicking, I shoved the mangled corpse in the trunk of my car and sped for the nearest bunker, hoping they'd have a toilet I could flush it down. No such luck. How about the next settlement? Nope, nothing there either. Where next?! The closest city now was still quite a drive away, and as I gunned it through the desert, my truck rattling over rocks and threatening to overturn on each one, I could practically hear the fizzing of the fuse behind me. Not to mention that if any cops pulled me over, it would probably be very hard to explain all this.

Leaving tire marks as I screeched into Fort Knot City, I was finally rewarded with an option for "Corpse Disposal", and practically threw the body at them in relief. The second apocalypse averted and calm restored, I was suddenly cognizant of the fact that this had been… well, exciting, even with the realization that the countdown to boomsday had been pretty generous. And yet the game was practically over!

Asking around, I couldn't find many friends who'd had the same experience – most of them seemed as surprised as I was about this mechanic – and I can't help but feel like an opportunity was missed. Death Stranding 2 is a good game, but it's a bit easy for many, especially in the context of a brutal apocalypse where only the hardiest can survive. But if killing enemies had been a lot harder to avoid doing, there was a real opportunity to make something out of this system!

Imagine it – backed into a corner and with all your rubber bullets expended, you're forced to choose between the potentially nuclear consequences of going lethal, or to try and flee and save you all the subsequent problems. If Death Stranding 3 is going to play up any element of the series, I really hope it's this one.

I'm enjoying Death Stranding 2, but I wish Hideo Kojima would stop teasing me with cool powers I'll never have.