To you, who is reading this review,

I know what you heard about this game. They call it a walking sim.

Well, that's wrong, and I'm going to dedicate this review to addressing this point.
You see, when people say "walking simulator", they mean not a game dedicated to making walking around a proper mechanic, as they did in Death Stranding, among other things - they mean there is nothing else to do except walking and looking at the things the developer is showing you, for some reason choosing to do it in a game instead of simple cinematography or even a book (visual novel, perhaps?) where such narrative belongs, like with Dear Esther. Is QWOP, a game actually about walking, a walking simulator? Definitely not. And neither is Death Stranding.
1. "Walking simulators" never feature any gameplay whatsoever and that is their actual problem, the very point of this derogatory term. They feature no gameplay, Death Stranding is the opposite - this game turns simple walking into gameplay. You need to mind inertia, weight positioning, and your posture and level of fatigue, among several other things.
2. The basic gameplay loop doesn't consist of walking, it consists of delivering. The main difference is that you have an actual aim and how you do it - on foot, on a bike, on a truck - all depends on the objective and on the route you're planning to take. It's closer to games like Port Royale and Freelancer-style games in that regard than to any walking sims.
3. Said gameplay loop isn't even the true core of the game - the true core is the asymmetrical multiplayer of the Strand genre.

Do you remember the messages from Dark Souls? Do you remember the corpses of androids, each with its own message and a boon for you, and the [E]nd of YoRHa in NieR: Automata?

If you do, then you will get what it is about - connections. Even if you can pause the game at any time and don't see the players all around you and hear yelling about selling in-game currency from bots standing atop an auction house, unlike in a certain MMORPG, you are still never alone. The other players' works - paths, buildings, ladders, ropes, roads - all bleed into your world as do yours into theirs. All of us help each other all the time, from finding lost cargo and bringing it to the recipient (or the actual owner if that was equipment), donating some of our own equipment to those who may need it more than we do, build things where others cannot do so alone because of the building limits - there's always some cooperation happening, and the tutorial zone teaches us about exactly that with NPCs as our first co-op partners.

And that is something that isn't explained enough in the promotional materials because it isn't something that can be shown as easily as cutscenes or walking from point A to point B.

And that is why this game s not a walking simulator. It's a logistical Strand game.