Video Games

Destiny 2: Lightfall Review in Progress

With striking chitin heels witch queen expansion And after a relatively strong year for live service support overall, Destiny 2 finally seemed to be gaining momentum towards the end of its epic narrative. After a thousand hours of playing, my optimism for the game shattered like a Cabal drop pod after just a few dozen uses of Destiny’s latest expansion, Lightfall. The story was shockingly incoherent, and even those who had spent countless hours reading Destiny lore couldn’t make sense of the nonsense. Neptune’s new destination is just as lifeless as the real planet, with few surprises in endgame/seasonal activity. I offer to give you a sense of déjà vu in the worst possible way (at least so far). Challenging, the new Strand subclass is a great addition to Destiny’s sandbox, and the latest batch of quality-of-life improvements has been wildly successful in filming my time. space rhinoceros. I still have a little more work to do and the final raid is ahead of me, but so far even the best part of Lightfall has washed the taste of overwhelming disappointment out of my mouth. has not been completed.

Lightfall’s opening moment is the best when Destiny’s long-awaited final villain, The Witness, arrives in the solar system to strike down on humanity and its allies. However, the excitement is quickly swept away into the vacuum of space as you are strangely and inexplicably redirected from the action to participate in a seemingly unrelated sidequest in Neptune’s city of Neomna. Not only is it a decidedly low-stakes distraction that pulls you away from the actual conflict going on, it just makes sense. Some of the best lore minds in the Destiny community are: completely baffled By the sheer nonsense of the Lightfalls story.

Events on Neomna surround a mysterious artifact called the Veil. so far What it is or what it’s for, even a little bit – so far. Your enemy is his Calus, a mountain of pancakes dressed as an Air Fryer who serves as one of the least intimidating villains in Destiny history. Strand’s dark power is also discovered as he battles incompetent fools for control of the ignorant artifact. This is the green elemental subclass that heroes spend half the campaign figuring out how to use in the process. It’s so boring that at one point it literally skips part of it by offering a Rocky-style training montage.

Along the way, you’ll also encounter Cloud Strider, Nimbus, and Rohan, 12-foot-tall cybernetically-infused humanoids. Rohan is an older man, Cloud Strider, who just stares at the camera and tells him he’s one day away from retiring (I wonder what will happen to him). Meanwhile, Nimbus is a young surfer who tells grumpy jokes as the holocaust of humanity unfolds. Staying with the brand for the rest of the campaign, these two are so badly written that dealing with them becomes a painful chore. It makes you feel even more funny with the hijinks of the season. .

This story puts a brake on the momentum coming from the Witch Queen.


As fast as it started, the story ends after just eight hours, but the bigger issues remain unsolved and the actual story development is handled at a later date, putting all the pieces back together neatly. Exactly where they were originally. The storytelling is so terrifying that it makes me miss the infamous “I don’t have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain” line uttered in vanilla Destiny. By dwarfing The Witness’ arrival and putting the brakes on the momentum and goodwill Destiny derives from her The Witch Queen’s excellent writings. As a longtime Destiny fan, I was completely heartbroken by both the disappointing whiplash in terms of quality and the potential for wasted story by the time I finished Lightfall’s campaign.

The plot isn’t the only thing that disappoints. The levels themselves are decidedly less unique and memorable than Witch Queen. The interesting puzzles and diet raid her mechanics introduced in last year’s campaign have been replaced with frustrating battles that take place in the arena. In the arena, you run around in circles to survive, stopping to take shots here and there whenever you can. In Lightfall, instead of fighting intriguing new enemies like the Light-ridden Hive, she’s mostly pitted against the same burly Cabal she’s fought for nine years, which has remained one of Destiny’s less attractive foes. I have to.

Strands at least help ease the monotony of the campaign’s action and represent the biggest change to Destiny’s sandbox in a long time. You get new melee abilities, new supers for each class that deal massive DPS, and several new buffs and debuffs you can play with, such as Suspend, which lifts enemies off the ground and briefly tangles them. , or Sever greatly reduces the enemy’s damage output. Admittedly, these additions aren’t all that different from what we’ve seen in Destiny over the years. Suspend, for example, effectively does the same thing as Stasis’ freezing power, which Beyond his Light gains. Also, casting Strand Super to take out large groups of enemies works much like the other subclasses, but with a different color.

But that’s not to say the Strand doesn’t have anything unique to offer! The main reason to choose it over other classes is its unrivaled mobility. Subclasses replace Guardian grenades with grapple hooks so they can swing around the environment and pull towards enemies to follow up with devastating melee attacks. It is very fun. It’s definitely an interesting trade-off, as gaining access to grapple hooks is almost never worth losing a grenade, but it also adds much-needed variety to the sandbox and helps navigate the vertical nature of Neomuna’s skyscrapers. A great option to help you gate.

Neomna’s neon-soaked streets feel barren and lifeless.


Neomna has hitherto been unusually hidden from the rest of the galaxy, but most of your time is spent in the neon-dyed streets of Neomna, a city with gigantic buildings and technology that surpasses even the Guardians of the Golden Age. will spend Unfortunately, the setting is as flimsy as its lore, barren and lifeless despite supposedly thriving until the recent Cabal invasion. There are plenty of buildings and Cabal and Vex enemies to fight, but very little to engage with other than the standard fare of patrols and public events found in all Destiny locations since 2014.

“But shouldn’t there be a lot of people to talk to in this thriving city on Neptune?” Of course you should, right? It would be crazy to make the whole thing look like an abandoned corporate park with no visible intelligent life. Now, as you were conveniently told early in your visit, all of Neomna’s citizens have been uploaded to a virtual network in order to achieve immortality, so they can be seen around the city as blurred, ghostly outlines. The only physical entities occupying Neomna’s flesh space are a duo of Cloud Striders who seem to follow the rule of two of the Sith.

Luckily, there’s at least one exciting new enemy to fight along the way. Lightfall introduces his Tormentor, a warrior of darkness who can chase you with his scythe, disempower you with his suppressive powers, and take you down with almost one shot. with his terrifying grapple attack. After years of speculation that their pyramid ships are riddled with new horrors that we must face, the Tormentor, as the first true infantry of darkness we’ve faced, is fully realized. It serves as a glimmer of hope for what I imagine would be a devastated enemy camp. But for now, these are his one of the only things that occasionally inject some desperately needed freshness into Lightfall’s stale sandbox. So while it might be a little overused in the campaign, it’s at least a really fun new obstacle to overcome.

Quality of life tweaks have given Destiny 2 at least a smoother ride.


A less thrilling addition is that Cabal enemies infused with dark evil powers will frequently drop shards that grant allies an overshield for a long time unless destroyed. At least a new challenge to deal with, but you have to remove overshields from enemies before you can move on, so most of the time the flow of battle stops every few seconds, causing another shard to drop the next Only when you kill something.

Once you’ve completed Lightfall’s campaign, you’ll be greeted with the usual post-game quests and busywork that follow all recent Destiny campaigns. There’s nothing bad about the postgames I’ve played so far, but there’s nothing very exciting about it either. You may also want to dig deeper into customization options for subclasses of . around Neptune.

I have a few more quests to check off the list before I finish this review. Lightfall’s shortcomings are made more painful by following The Witch Queen and its powerful post-launch updates. is not very bright.

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