Xbox Series X
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The best live-service FPS on the market has lost much of its older content, but plays as well as ever.
Destiny 2is extraordinarily different from the game that launched back in 2017. Many of the original quests and activities are now gone, including the one story campaign and one raid Destiny 2 launched with. In 2023, it’s grown into an amalgamation of storylines and activities from bothDestiny1 and Destiny 2, and includes a tutorial quest that does a relatively good job of introducing you to the game mechanics and world. Even so, this free-to-play game can become overwhelming for people who haven’t ever played an MMO-like service game, and there are few quite like Destiny 2.
The core gameplay in Destiny 2 has you selecting an activity, loading into an area, and fighting your way through encounters FPS-style while using various firearms and superpowers. There are currently eight diverse destinations to explore — ranging from swamplands to frozen tundras to glowing cityscapes.
Each area is quite open and lets you freely explore them. While in free-roam, you can do simple combat-focused Patrols, or explore unique and rewarding underground Lost Sectors. But while in one of the game’s various activities, you’re usually taken on a linear path to a final objective. These activities range from story campaigns, which can be completed solo or in a group of three; strikes and battlegrounds, which will matchmake you into a three-person squad; and raids, the pinnacle activity that puts you in a group of six players and intermixes puzzles with the combat. There’s also the PvP-focused Crucible with a range of different modes one would expect from an FPS, and the PvPvE Gambit mode that has you fighting other players and large groups of AI enemies at the same time.
“Luckily you have guns, magic, and magic guns to aid you in the fight.”
While not quite a traditional MMO, Destiny 2 has many MMO-like mechanics: You’ll spend a lot of time grinding out activities to make your Guardian more powerful and to unlock special weapons and armor. All of this is in the name of being able to take on more difficult content, which in turn gains you even more power and gear.
All of these activities are built around Destiny’s interesting, if convoluted, story and lore. You are a Guardian, a warrior resurrected into a post-apocalyptic future where humanity and their solar system are in a perpetual war with various alien invaders. Luckily you have guns, magic, and magic guns to aid you in the fight. Plus, you’re technically unkillable since your Guardian isn’t limited to just one resurrection — no matter how many times you fall, you will always respawn or get revived by other players, which really doesn’t make the fight fair for the bad guys. But even so, they will put up a major fight, and if you die in a “Darkness Zone”, you will be expected to reload and try again like in other games.
There’s actually so much story in the game now that it can be hard to keep track of. Much of the story is confusing and disjointed, and the characters aren’t always the most compelling, but if you really dig in, there’s a lot to love. Much of the story is told through the campaigns, and some of those have been great. The Witch Queen campaign has you learning about Savathun, and how her devilish Hive minions have gained access to the power of Light, the very power your Guardian relies on. The Hive are deliciously evil, and follow the “Sword Logic” that declares the only beings that deserve to live are those who fight to dominate everyone else. But Savathun herself is more complex than that, and discovering her motivations and secrets makes The Witch Queen campaign well worth the price of entry.
Monetization
Unfortunately,Bungiecan’t give all that content away for free. Even though this is a free-to-play game, getting access to The Witch Queen, Beyond Light, or the latest expansion, Lightfall, will cost you almost as much as a full game. Each expansion launched at $50 USD, though the older ones can usually be purchased at a discount or in a bundle at this point. Destiny 2 is also monetized through $10 season passes and the Eververse microtransaction store.
The Eververse store has gone through a lot of iteration over the years, but is currently in a mostly-reasonable state. It only offers cosmetic items, like weapon skins, emotes, armor colors, and loading screens via new ships. The pricing on these items varies depending on the item itself, anywhere from a couple bucks to $20 for anAssassin’s Creed-themed armor set. There’s always something tantalizing in the Eververse store, thanks to Bungie’s amazing artists, but the game also lets you earn quite a lot of cosmetics as loot on your adventures, and through the Eververse store thanks to an earnable currency. It will take a little bit of grinding to get max value out of that system, but if you play for a couple hours at each weekly reset you can expect to get quite a lot.
Combine that with the simple fact that Destiny 2 gets bigger and more consistent updates than pretty much any other live-service game out there, and it’s hard not to be okay with Bungie needing to monetize and support the game. The yearly expansions are massive; every season comes with a new story, new locations, new activities, weapons, and armor; and even every week they bring in smaller story beats and sometimes interesting new quests to accomplish. The consistently high quality of its updates might be the biggest way Destiny 2 sets itself apart from other live-service games on the market, and Bungie are relatively quick to fix any bugs these updates come with.
All About the Raids
Once you’ve got the expansions you want, and you’re through the easier activities, it’s time to get into the raids. Raids are one of the best things on offer in Destiny 2 due to their complexity, challenge, and just the overall fun of accomplishing them in a group of six Guardians.
There are seven unique raids in total, each with their own complex mechanics and exclusive rewards. One has you entering the alternate dimension of The Black Garden, for example, and eliminating scores of time-jumping robots called the Vex. Another has you invading the Throne World of the Hive King, Oryx— a formidable giant who can only be killed in his own dark dimension.
Those are two of the harder raids, but there’s a good spectrum of difficulty across all the raids. Deep Stone Crypt is a good one to get started on, and has you fighting The Fallen alien race both on the ground, then in orbit, before crashing right back down to the surface for a final showdown. Raids always feature a challenging final boss that often proves to be the bane of longtime Guardians.
Content in Destiny 2 is always changing, however, and two of the current raid options are actually reprised versions of raids from the first Destiny game (Vault of Glass and King’s Fall). Unfortunately, there are also some raids that have been removed from the game, like the excellent Leviathan raid that launched with Destiny 2. The main problem with raids is that, after all this time, getting into one is still a challenge if you don’t have a lot of friends who also play the game regularly. Destiny 2stilldoesn’t feature any sort of matchmaking or built-in group-finding for raids, so you’re left trying to organize raids with friends, or searching for groups online.
If you’re able to get a group together, though, raiding alongside your pals is one of the most fun experiences in co-op games. Recently, I was playing through the King’s Fall raid with some friends, and though some of them were inexperienced players and progress through the raid was slow, it created some gloriously absurd situations. During one encounter, we were tasked with defending some capture plates while hordes of enemies came streaming toward them. Standing on a plate, however, kills you unless you have a specific 30-second buff that you pick up in the other room.
This forced us into a sort of relay where we were constantly having to pick up the buff, run to the plate, then rotate out once the next person with the buff got there. All the while, we were fighting constantly-spawning enemies, including miniboss-like Champions, while communicating at all times where we were and how long was left on our buff. Needless to say, mistakes were made, and at one point my friend and I were trying to defend the same plate, but they forgot their buff and suddenly flopped over dead in a great example of Destiny 2’s hilarious ragdoll physics. Everything went wrong, but it’s in these moments that the best Destiny 2 memories are made.
Tools of the Trade
Destiny 2 still has some of the best gunplay in gaming. Movement and weapons feel responsive and consistent, and there’s a wide variety of enemies to face that each have their unique mechanics and visuals, such as husky warlords in giant armored suits who like to attack with measured coordination, or the robotic Vex, who have no consideration for their own safety and will march you down in droves without bothering with cover. There are six total enemy factions in Destiny 2, and each have their own minions, majors, champions, minibosses and bosses who all fight differently, so there’s plenty of variety. Because of all that variety, there can be a lot of visual clutter at times, and some bigger enemies feel like bullet sponges, but these things don’t detract too much from the experience.
The variety goes even further with the weapons you’ll be using to take down those adversaries.The weapons in Destiny 2 are some of the best in FPS games. With 18 unique categories, each with hundreds of different individual weapons, there’s always something to love. Even better, the designs are really imaginative, and don’t fall into the usual ARPG trap of only being differentiated by numbers and pallet-swaps. Want a burst rifle that creates enemy-seeking nano swarms? Let me introduce you to Outbreak Perfected. What about a sword that revs up like a chainsaw and cuts through enemies like butter? Well, then it’s time to go searching for The Lament. Or maybe you prefer to embrace your inner Katniss Everdeen with a bow that launches five ice arrows at once? Well, that’s one of thenewer and most exciting weaponsin the game.
One of my personal favorites is a scout rifle called Symmetry. This weapon fires in full-auto with great accuracy, but has a special function where landing precision hits (usually headshots) on targets builds electric charges in the weapon. At any point, you can smack the rifle and switch it to its arc seeker mode. In this mode, your shots turn into homing projectiles that do extra damage based on the number of electric charges you built. When an arc seeker kills an enemy, they disintegrate in a glorious electric explosion that hurts any enemies caught in the blast. This function works particularly well when using an arc damage subclass.
The powers in Destiny 2 are broken into three distinct classes — Titan, Warlock and Hunter — each with five element-themed subclasses: Arc, Solar, Void, Stasis and the recently-added Strand. Each subclass has plenty of options when it comes to unique grenades, melee abilities, class abilities and super abilities. An Arc Warlock can go full-blown Emperor Palpatine and electrocute swarms of enemies with shocking efficiency. The Void Titan conjures a circular shield and tosses it around like they’re doing their best Captain America impression. And the best comparison I can make for the new Strand Hunter is none other thanMortal Kombat’s Scorpion, because it lets you conjure a roped spear and hurl it into foes that get too close.
And because of the subclass 2.0 system that was introduced in 2022, each of these subclasses is fully customizable to the player’s preference, and grants an incredible amount of buildcrafting potential. Using the Symmetry rifle in conjunction with the Arc Hunter will allow you lighting-fast reloads as you dodge around and punch through enemies like a Norse god. The game even lets you save some of your builds in-game — though this systemdesperately needs more slots.
Unlocking these loadout slots is part of the recently-introduced Guardian Ranks system in Destiny 2, which basically tracks your progression through the game and gives you higher ranks once you’ve completed essential activities. Though this is a nice way to track your accomplishments and overall progress as a Guardian, that progress can feel quite slow, and the menu itself is overly-complicated. New players especially will likely find themselves Googling specifically how to get some objectives done in this tab.
Destiny 2’s physics and graphics support the art style very well, and still hold up after all these years. They aren’t photorealistic by any means, but the intentionally colorful and borderline cartoony style makes for some truly epic settings, such as Nessus, a jungle world with giant red trees that is beautiful and alien; or The Moon, which is desolate and hostile, and has a giant hole in the middle called the Hellmouth that’s just as ominous as it sounds; or the recently added Neomuna, a cyberpunk-esque cityscape with glowing neon lights and massive skyscrapers.
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There are currently eight of these unique destinations to explore, but unfortunately five destinations that were once in the game have been removed, like Mars and Titan. Hopefully Bungie brings these locations back in the future.
The flair and personality of Destiny 2 goes well beyond the visual. The music and sound design are consistently among the best in video games. Grand orchestral music scores are meant to range from heroic to ominous depending on where you are in the game, before jumping into pulsating rhythms once you’re really in the action. Enemies sound monstrous and eerie, and weapons sound efficiently deadly. There’s a lot of variety to take in, as each enemy and weapon type sounds unique, and quite often you’re able to distinguish them by sound long before you see them.
Criticisms
Though Destiny 2 is a stellar gaming experience, it can feel a bit frustrating at times if you don’t have all the time in the world for gaming. It’s common to feel a little impatient by just how much Destiny 2 demands from you at times. If you really want to try and unlock all the weapons, subclasses, and Guardian Ranks, you’re going to be expected to repeatedly grind out the same strikes, raids, campaigns and seasonal activities until the RNG gods finally give you a break. This can be a huge time investment, and sometimes there are so many things to do in the game that you don’t quite know where to start.
Despite going through thousands of changes and refinements of the years, Destiny 2 is still quite unwieldy in how it organizes quests and activities for the player. The destination tab is a mess of all the planets the player can visit. The quests tab helps with organizing some of the priority activities, but there are many quests that aren’t featured here, and even veteran players can get lost or overwhelmed by everything the game expects them to accomplish. The game doesn’t guide you through a lot of things either, so don’t be surprised if you find yourself frequently looking up YouTube guides just to figure out how to progress some missions.
The double-edged sword of Destiny 2 is that most players will never run out of things to do in the game. This is great for a player who only wants one game to play and to put all of their effort into. But for those who have limited time or like to play other games, Destiny 2 is hard to keep up on.
“The double-edged sword of Destiny 2 is that most players will never run out of things to do in the game.”
And sometimes keeping up on everything doesn’t quite have the payoff you’re hoping for. The most recentpaid expansion is Lightfall, released in February 2023, and unfortunately that campaign is one of the more underwhelming the game has produced due to a lackluster storyline. Many of the weapons in the expansion felt more recycled than Destiny 2 usually gets, and some of the new Strand powers were a bit too weak compared to the older powers.
Luckily, some of Destiny 2’s better campaigns are still in there for new players to experience, but others — like the original Destiny 2 campaign, The Red War, as well as 2018’s stellar Forsaken campaign — have been removed. You can still experience the excellent Witch Queen campaign, as well as the overall enjoyable Shadowkeep and Beyond Light campaigns.
Conclusion
Despite the occasional slip-up, Destiny 2 is a game that always feels like it’s moving forward, and Bungie has done an incredible job in recent years keeping the game updated. Though many beloved activities, stories, and destinations are currently gone from the game, there’s no doubt that there’s a whole lot still in there to experience, and that the game will continue adding more.
If you’re looking for a big game to invest hundreds or even thousands of hours into (not to mention hundreds of dollars), then Destiny 2 might be the best game on the market. Its exceptional gameplay, beautiful worlds, deep lore, and extensive customization make it worth suffering through some of the clunky menus and FOMO from removed content you might experience along the way.
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