Hideo Kojima’s critically acclaimed third-person, open-world game Death Stranding: Directors Cut has now come to iOS bringing the controversial epic to selected Mac, iPad, and iPhone 15 Pro models.
This eerie and atmospheric title is set in post-apocalyptic America where you play as Sam Porter Bridges, (played by Norman Reedus) delivering packages and reconnecting isolated pockets of humanity via a communications grid called the Chiral Network while avoiding hostile forces and phenomena on the way.
Thanks to the A17 Pro chip, this version of Death Stranding runs on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, as well as iPad models using the M1 or M2 chips, including the iPad Pro 2022 and 2021 models, the iPad Air 2022, and any Apple Silicon Mac.
It also supports both controllers like the Sony DualSense or Backbone One, as well as on-screen touch controls for mobile devices.
Game data can be saved via iCloud allowing players to switch between Apple devices and continue their journey. The game can be played offline however, a network connection is required to experience the Social Strand system.
Death Stranding: Directors Cut is out now available on the App Store and is currently 50% off making the game $19.99 / £19.99 / AUS$29.99 from now until February 20.
The was originally released in 2020 for PC and PlayStation 4 and was noted for its incredible visual quality, so any mobile-compatible release will still require some graphical compromises to run on mobile hardware.
Console-quality titles coming to mobiles aren’t a huge surprise when you consider the Nintendo Switch uses a much older Tegra X1 Mariko chip and runs games, with the biggest difference being in active cooling; dedicated handheld consoles tend to come with fans. But seeing a much bigger more complex game like Death Stranding on iOS is still a remarkable achievement.
Death Stranding could be taxing on the iPhone’s A17 Pro chip and according to Toucharcade, it provides no graphics options and targets 30 frames per second but suffers from lackluster performance. I haven’t yet played it and I would like to see how running such an intensive title could cause overheating or throttling issues.
The release of such a high-profile game to iOS shows Apple’s dedication to bringing AAA titles to mobile devices could boost iPhone popularity with gamers and help challenge Android gaming-centric devices like the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro and RedMagic 9 Pro.
