Destiny 2 is a game that everyone had their own opinion on it. If you went on any article about the game on this site, you probably saw some things that were questionable. The game got a Nine on GI and many other publishers. I am a big Destiny fan and I think that’s a bit of a raised bar to rate it such a high number. The game is fun and I will say it’s taken my life, but there are a lot of things the game has that can ruin itself and disturb new or older players of the game that will take a while to accept. Hello and welcome to this Abstract Review with no restraints on spoilers.
Story and Its Characters
The first thing that I should talk about is the story. It’s something that felt very absent in the first game, every that we hoped to see in the game was not there and felt very rushed. I actually got the game on launch and it was very dry until the DLC came out literally two months later. I’m not kidding, the game came out September 9th and the first DLC, The Dark Below, came out December 9th. Anyways, the game was deemed to have more story involved in this sequel, to please haters and fans who wished there was more to explore. The beginning was actually something new compared to the dry beginning of the first one. You come to your home and see it being burned to the ground along with your friends. It does a good job on conveying the real tragedy the attack on the tower is, having the player see places he use to go to being destroyed and burned, it’s something that every Destiny player would see as a threatening sight no regular player imagined on seeing. And the moment you defend the tower with Zavala was so touching, having the player attack incoming Cabal with other random players, sharing the same experience as you. I already covered this in my last blog about the Beta, pointing out some key things that was a character filled moment with something to think about with the story, seeing your home gone and Ghual taking the light from you. The one thing that was new is how you don’t have anything besides a Pistol to defend yourself. The game didn’t give you an Exotic straight from the start, the game gave you a class weapon to defend yourself from the invading Cabal. It’s something that didn’t expect and was very underwhelming when you lose it all. Of course the game would have been bad if they take away a good and powerful weapon, but I would have loved feel that kind of loss. Besides, it would have been cool if you could retrieve the weapons at a later level or light, giving you the mission straight from the beginning, once you recover, you see a chance to get it all back, but you are took weak to do so. That would have been cool and a great way to drive the player to achieve the best weapons in the game, until you get more complex and powerful weapons. That would have been a great way to begin a game and drive the player to keep playing this great adventure.
Besides that, the game does a good job on showing the devastation of how losing your light is, shoving the weakest enemy at you in packs, playing soft and saddening music that more so drives the feeling of this moment as you fight furious packs of enemies with the weakest weapon you found on dead Guardians. That single moments makes you think about the other Guardians in universe that died to escape these hordes. As you progress, you see how much time it took to get to the place you are. It took you hours to see this outpost of dead Guardians, showing you that you could have helped them if you came sooner. It took you days to stumbleupon a snowstorm that will kill you. Of course all this is said to you, to make the player think, but of course, if you’re a regular gamer, this is all something you know you’re going to get past. There wouldn’t be a game if your character permanently dies, so why care about all of this? The hordes aren’t even that hard. I wish they made each enemy increase in value, showing the different bars of health that each enemy can get, making each enemy horde feel so much of a tackle instead of pushing down a kid. I get why they did that, but make the player feel the moment that the Guardian is facing, punish the player when he dies by making his respawn go back to the start of the horde, no checkpoints, nothing to save the player from feeling the moment he’s suppose to feel. I know that dying in the same spot would be annoying, but at least make it challenging for the player to be careful in missions or strikes.
Once you beat two hordes, you have a ledge to jump across and a deep fall. The game forces you to fall, making this moment feel very scripted. I know story based games do that, but those kind of games do their best to make it feel natural. This felt forced and seemed like a possible jump. At least have a first-person cinematic in-game, having the player witness him hitting the ledge and falling to his death. That would have at least shown the struggle and how weak the guardian is now. After plummeting to the ground from an impossible height, you should see almost every on the Guardian, his reload animation, the way he held his gun, how he walked, all should look crippled. I know this would require more work, but this small moment in the game would have made the experience massively better.
Back to the review, you get picked up by this outcast gang that help you get back on your feat to prepare yourself for battle against the Cabal. This little moment was to make the player feel that there’s hope in this war. Of course you already know that, but it’s suppose to feel that way, a possible motive that will power the player to continue on this adventure. After that, you know can play the game, not at its fullest, but something to freshen the minds of the newer players and the old. Any regular players would find this part of the game annoying, since everything is taken away from you besides Earth, but it’s still a good start for anyone. The missions are one thing, but we’re not there yet.
The game makes you go on about three missions to get the player use to the new map system, then shows the player the story mission. You do a forgettable moment, get rewarded, repeat. They’re all fun and it was a shame to see that the first three or four story missions aren’t that great. Once finish those three or four missions, you get your Light back. Pretty underwhelming to get your powers back so quickly. If you’re a Titan, you have the Defender Subclass, Hunters a Blade Dancer and the Wizard gets the poorly named Downblade along with everything to go with it, but the punch ability. I wish they gradually gave you each ability, discovering more and more shards of light in more Story Missions, having Zavala or Ikora to doubt you in your battles. That would have made the powers more meaningful, making them feel well earned to player. It would be a boasting kind of reward, but at least it gave some importance to the ability. Instead we got it all at once. It just derived the player from any enjoyment at all that the moment where you get to show off your super on hordes of enemies feel so boring. I know that’s a typical word to describe it, but you tend to want everything to end and continue on your fun. Like I said before, they should have made the player achieve each ability starting with the jump boost and on, give this moment a good story feel, but still maintains the gamey feel. Other than that, you continue your pursuit to stop Ghual, prove your powers to Zavala, give your part in the war to against the Red Legion, A.K.A the Cabal. There are some touching moments in the game where Zavala is willing to die without his light for the people he protected in the walls of the city. Ikora thinking she lost everything and there’s nothing to fix it, she lost too much, so why do anything. Cayde… He wanted to go on another adventure. I hear a lot of people say that people say that Cayde has a lot of character, but he is borderline Deadpool with his character. He never shows more emotion than just funny. I wish he was more expressive about the situation he ran away from, make him have a reason for why he wanted to go on an adventure! Say that he wanted forget the things he lost at the city, the friends, the Guardians he taught, show that he has more than just one emotion. This can be argued that this would destroy his character, but that would have showed why he likes to be funny, say he had to fake a smile a few times because of the memories. Why not have him show a funny, but worrying fear in him, not doing anything, but hide in cover. Or maybe say he likes to go to the Planet Nessus because that’s where he has Failsafe delete all the bad memories. Something make this character more interesting than him being played by Nathan Fillion or being funny. I love you Nathan, don’t get me wrong. I’m going off track again.
Back on the story, once you find out the Red Legion’s plan is to take the energy from the Sun and leave with everything destroyed, you rush to the sun and stop them. I love that moment in the game. This part of the story must have been handled by someone else since everything about it was just so awesome. You are constantly given music to amp you up for the fight, the enemies are in higher numbers, you can just feel the distress of the Cabal, throwing everything at you to stop this single Guardian, killing every Cabal Legionary he sees in rage, from stealing the sun’s energy. There was even part of this level where you go out where the Sun’s rays hit you and have to hide behind shade. The Cabal come in chasing you risking their lives to kill you while being constantly burned by the Sun. All that was just awesome and lead up where you destroy the Sun Siphon, you have to escape with explosions and the sun killing you. This part could have been things barely hitting you, but this part made me feel as if I was in danger. Once you finish this segment of the game, you are told to go to the Traveler, replacing the Farm. That moment once you see that floating Traveler, you feel like you’re going to fight the good fight. The story had a slow beginning and filled with flaws, but that moment felt so in sync with what was going on. Once you landed near the Traveler, you are met with many other players fighting for the Light, doing the same mission as you. This moment was empowering to me, you fight with another player is such a great idea. It’s like playing a campaign and seeing the Grunts actually fight with their lives, seeing a gamertag over their head. It actually felt you were apart of something and as I’ve seen in many MMO’s, they do this a lot with any mission. I know this game is a poor excuse for a MMO, but still has some great qualities of one.
Before we talk about the final fight, there was something that I forgot to talk about: Ghual. I have mentioned him, but the game had some cinematic moments with the character, showing his plot with the light and his obsession over the Traveler. If you ask me, he builds this kind of crazy and obsessive person who will talk and torture the Speaker for any information about the damn white thing in the sky. But I’ve heard people say that he has this kind of plain character arc of a villain, I don’t know. If you ask me, he’s a Dry Erase Character: a character that feels different everytime you encounter him. It even felt like sometimes he had this bored voice to him, where he just didn’t want to waste time, but later he wants to prolong the capture of the light and leave the solar system to be blown to pieces, to talk more about the Traveler some more to the player. I think the only one moment in the entire game I liked with Ghual was when he asked the Speaker how does one become chosen by the Traveler. The Speaker responds with Devotion. Ghual is confused and Speaker makes it clear. “Devotions inspires Bravery, Bravery inspires Sacrifice, Sacrifice leads to Death.” At first this sounds very descriptive of the Guardians, painting a picture of their life and duty, but then he says this, “So feel free to kill yourself.” I know up to this point it’s a meme to the community, but I loved that and seeing Ghual’s reaction was such a given reward. The anger and rage he felt, but the one thing stopping him from hurting the Speaker was his second in command. Don’t know his name, but also made some great parts in those segments, giving some great character story. That’s another thing I didn’t like about the game’s story or these segments, they never make it clear as to who that guy is. I’ve actually tried looking him up and he doesn’t appear in any site or wiki page, but on the voice actor’s lists of the game. Apparently his names is The Consul. Perfect name for someone who is second in command for the Red Legion, on unknown territory doing as they please. Yes, I had to look that word up.
As we gotten through that, we are now to the final act, the fight with Ghaul. He just killed the Speaker and his friend, The Consul, and is on a power rage. He gathers as much as could from the light, which is strange since he was trying to find out how to be chosen by the light, but now he can use it… Did he already know how to use it? He starts to use all this power from the light and use abilities you have. Whatever Guardian you are, he will use all the supers against you. Cool in a sense, but it’s a bit cliche or predictable to me. I don’t know, it’s just something that I could have found out before I even gotten to this fight. And if he could have used this new power, why couldn’t he let all of his higher-ups have some? That would have been a great enemy to fight, a Cabal that has similar powers as you and can regenerate health. Anyways, the fight. He stays at the same Light Level which is about 170 or 150, which is kind of a bummer since I got to this fight at 200 light. All the fun was sucked out because I was grinding the entire game. Once you get him about two-thirds of his health, he runs back to the light and is invincible for a while until you clear all the enemies in the area. Once you do, you shoot him until he gets down the next slab of health, then that’s it. This felt very underwhelming when I did it, as if they made this entire fight something they wanted you to scratch off. Of course, if you wanna play nothing but the Story, which the game prepares you for during those missions, you will have a different experience, but the game should have made this fight something more immersive or simply more difficult. Maybe make him follow you Light Level for the entire game, so you would have to work around him as well as the incoming enemies, that would’ve been a very simple solution to this. When he dies, his shell you call a body cracks open and releases his energy. At first, you would think it’s the Light returning to the Traveler, but it’s actually Ghaul’s ghost saying that he is now immortal, taunting the Traveler. The Traveler gets pissy and releases a pulse of light to destroy Ghual’s spirit and Light touches every space in the Galaxy.
Month’s later, a cinematic moment comes in to say Hi and shows Zavala, Cayde and Ikora great the player with a happy and at peaces faces, showing that the leaders of the old are still standing and will never fall without a fight. Then they look behind them and there you are to greet… Yourself… This was to signify that you are apart of the leaders, to guide your generation to victory. It’s cool, but means nothing since the game will tell you there are still Red Legion in the Solar System to fight, just the make sure the player doesn’t put down the controller and forget about the game. I will say the game is fun afterwards since the Traveler has some new vendors to see and get some great loot out of while finishing their missions or quests. Kind of a great end, just made Ghail look like an idiot to mess around with, the cutscenes with him weren’t as great as many would say, but the game gave some interesting lore like Failsafe, Sloane, Holiday or even Hawthorne. No, I didn’t look them up, they all were great characters and had some great backstory that said a lot about the world and the planet they were on. My favorite would have to be Asher, a crazy scientist that doesn’t sound practical, but follows certain codes that would benefit the Guardians and the Tower. And his Arm, apparently it’s a Vex arm that in one mission where the Vex were being imprisoned by the Taken, he says he can feel his arm being drained of it’s life force, that someone wants to rip it out of him. It’s interesting and makes me want to read more into it.
Weapons and Loot
Now that we are finished I can talk about the game, so let’s start with the game’s weapons. If you don’t know, the primary and secondary slots have been changed. Instead of having the Auto Rifles, Pulse Rifles and Scout Rifles being the in the Primary and the Fusion and Sniper rifles and Shotguns being in the Secondary, it’s now Primary is Kinetic Damage, Secondary is Energy and the support weapons being the Power weapons. This means I can have an Auto Rifle in both Secondary and Primary slots. To most this means nothing, but it means a lot and has a lot of mechanics to follow. Energy Weapons do more damage to shields than flesh, while Kinect does more damage when the shield is down. Of course each one would do similar damage rate, but there is a great downfall to both that you need to follow or you won’t have fun. And the Energy has elemental damage to it, so it does more damage to a certain kind of shield. I found out what it was for and I feel stupid for not noticing. If the shield is say Orange, then fire will have the shield to explode, doing damage to anyone around the enemy. Of course, this doesn’t follow the same principles in the Crucible, but it does bring down those shields faster. If you ask me, this is great game design for this kind of game it’s just fun to just see a crowd of Cabal explode because the Commander was wearing a Fire Shield on the wrong day, I just love it.
The only thing I have a problem with in the game is how the newer additions to the Scout Rifles are. They seem to do the least amount of damage unlike the first game. They made the Scout Rifle so bad that it doesn’t even do much with headshots. I guess I might have gotten some of the worst of the bunch, but I haven’t found a good one in either Energy or Kinetic. If not, please tell me which one is better, I miss long shotting enemies. Anyways, the Hand Cannons, I believe, got a step up in this game. I don’t know, the last game kind of made them so… Ignored is the best word I can think of. They did massive damage up close, but weren’t the best in that type of situation. You want to lessen the horde as you risk your life, not miss five times and get only three shots in, that’s just not the fun way of doing that. In this sequel, they made them so satisfying having them do heavy knock-back damage. They actually stagger instead of continuously fire at you as they feel a small push on their shoulder. It stops enemies in their tracks and make each bullet sponge more satisfying to shoot. The fun weapon may be great on AI, but it would have to be in the right hands for it to be the same in the Crucible. Other than that, the game’s primarily used weapon would have to be the Auto-Rifle. I’ve seen a good plenty of people use the Scout Rifle (which is why I’m asking if there’s a good one), but there will never been a Titan or Hunter that doesn’t use the Auto-Rifle. It’s a weapon that does consistent damage to the enemy and doesn’t stop. It staggers as well, being the big push as to why people use it so much. Great weapon for basically everything. The Pulse Rifles aren’t much, although useful, the long pause between bursts aren’t fun while in a Raid or Strike. Other weapons I don’t see much use would have to be the Sidearms and Submachine guns. I can see why since some side arms have a huge recoil gap while aiming. For those who don’t know, Recoil Gaps are the time between shots while aiming, the small gap that the player has a straightened and controlled shot to fire again. Sides arms don’t do well while aiming, but have a great hipfire. Same goes for the Subs, since it’s just a recoil mess, you might as well not aim at all. Sidearms I would prefer be used in Strikes or Raids, but not in Crucibles. The complete opposite goes for the Sub, seeing that the unpredictable player can be stopped by the wide spread of the Sub. It feels like you’ve been cheated, but it’s been programmed that way, so it must be.
The Power Weapons are pretty simple having the Sniper, Shotgun, Rocket Launcher, Fusion Rifle, Sword and Machine Gun. The devs thought it would be cool to add one new Weapon Subclasses so we now have the Linear Fusion Rifle, being a more accurate Fusion Rifle with the same power and damage as one. If you ask me it’s cool, but acts like more of a Sniper Rifle more than anything. Anyways, they have a high damage rate that can kill anything in one shot or within at least two. The shotguns primarily used in only Crucibles or maybe in Strikes if you can do some sick tricks with it. Hard, but is do-able. Sniper Rifles aren’t really used, but are still fun to use, just this game doesn’t have the greatest mechanic for long ranged attacks. I mean every AI in the game moves into cover if you try. You can pick some off when they don’t notice you, but they’ll go to cover to lure you in to perform close ranged attacks. I’d say the best weapons to use is the Machine Gun, Rocket Launcher and Fusion Rifle since they all have such great damage at almost every kind of range. Swords can be fun, but you would have to make sure you don’t get yourself in a cluster f**k while you do it.
Now that we’re done with the weapons, the loot is fun. Of course the first game was bad because of how glitchy the loot spawn was, but this one is actually fun to farm. A lot of games like to make Grinding or Farming part of the core Leveling and Gears findings, but this one puts all of that a part of the missions and story. If you ever want to get great loot, you must go fight for the Light or do tasks people assign you. You can get loot by killing people in the same spot where every enemy spawns, but it seems that only happens when you need to level. If not, you will kill everything and get ammo, nothing else. Of course, out of random there will be an Engram, but that only happens in a 1 in 50 chance in doing so. At least that’s what I experienced. Other than that, there is also the Region Coins. I know that might not be what they are called, but I call them that. The coins can be found by doing missions of any kind in any region and can give you great rewards if you get a lot of them. The mechanic to this is to encourage players to keep playing and get awesome loot in certain regions. Of course this can seem like a grind once you do all the missions, but god, some of the armor and weapons are awesome as hell. Devrim’s rewards are one of the bests for a titan in my opinion. The only bad thing about it how rare they are if you done all the missions in that region or you looked for too many chests. That’s one mechanic I don’t like about the loot system, which is the chests. If you are going out to Chest Hunt, you will find less and less everytime to the point they give you nothing. No, not glimmer, not coins, not even some consumables to scavenge. You get nothing. The bad part about this is how there’s a consumable item that marks every Chest near you for about four hours. Sounds cool until you drain how much the game can give you at one single time. I wish they would at least degrade it as you go on with the Chest Hunting, making you have consumables that are worth something, but basically nothing, but still worth the trouble. Or maybe just give me Glimmer, make me feel like I found something instead of nothing. In Bungie’s defense, they said it was to make the player do more than just Chest Hunting, but why spawn them in the area if you get nothing out of it?
Besides all that, there is a new thing that I would like to complain about, which is the very low diversity of the Armor and Weapons. In the first game, every piece of armor was rare, if you had it, you were the only one who had that set and the shaders made it look even more rare. And what made them so much different than the last piece of armor were there effects. This Chest Piece has every kill with the Scout Rifle adds additional recharge to your grenade. These shoulder pads has faster reloading and deals more damage when you have an Auto Rifle equipt. That made each piece of armor feel so unique to your playstyle and it helped make the armor feel more than just a style. This game, however, made them in a fashion trend. You each armor had the same effects, nothing else to make the one right next to it unique, just clothing for the player to wear and upgrade. If you ask me, this is a major downgrade to the last game, just destroying how fun it was to grind for Armor. It’s now considered a the lowest piece of loot now, the only thing mattering being the Light level. I really don’t like that, but I can get past that. It’s something that most can since it only changes minor things in the gameplay.
Now that we’re done with the armor, now the shaders! I know many have said that the new Shaders are just the worst and all, but we all know that. I won’t go in depth since it’s been said in a lot of articles on this site and many videos discussing the game. The one thing I want to talk about is how the Devs defended it. The first game had you do missions to get rare ones or hope it comes in for drops from Crucible or Strike. It was always different and they all were great for almost anything and anyone. This game made Shaders a mechanic to get you to keep playing. Cheap to say the least, but the worst way to defend something like that. Since it destroys itself once you take it off, so you can’t put it on Rare Armor or anything below Legendary Grade equipment. It’s something you don’t wanna get use to when you played the first game for about two years, but you can easily gloss over it. And before you haters start telling me that the shaders are an act to get you to buy, you’d be wrong. If you level up while Level 20, you get a Bright Engram, something you can buy in the shop with real money. Of course this is another thing to make you keep playing, but it doesn’t mean you need to buy it in order to get it. You can get any Shader with those Bright Engrams, whether you wanted it or not. If you don’t care about making you armor a certain color in this game, the shaders won’t matter even if you did.
Gameplay and It’s Physics
If you ask me, the game is fun. Each mission was made by great level designers that know what they’re doing. Some can be short, but I think that was the point of the game, to keep you wanting more. If you ask me, I hate that when a game does that. “It was fun, but I wish it was longer” is the common quote said about the game. It’s great that it makes you want more out of the game that you feel is fun, but it happens constantly throughout the game, the player can take notice and find that kind of mission design bad. This sounds like one of those things that is more of a “Me” feel, so I guess you can ignore this one for now. I just want longer missions out of this game.
Next to that, there is the Strikes, the game’s highlight that seems to never get old. The missions you may find are just fun, well designed and have so much lore to it builds so much of the world. I love these missions in the game, but the only thing bad about it is how you’re restricted to whatever mission you are given. It’s like spinning a Roulette Wheel or rolling dice and hope you get what you want. It’s not like the first game where you were given choice to do a random mission in this region or a specific mission to get this type of loot. They don’t do that anymore, you have to take what the game gives you and it’s so annoying when you finish the worst Boss in the world and have to do it again trying to find that cool Strike Mission you got yesterday. It’s an easy fix that they could do, but I don’t think they won’t be doing that anytime soon until the first DLC is released. The same goes for the Crucible, having the Randomizer Mode on whenever you want to play that one fun Mode that you will never get. If you don’t like Capture the Point of Survival, you won’t have a great time in that mode. Then there’s a lot of maps that have lots of vantage points that are just bad. One map has this large box in a hallway that can be used to camp a lot. And before you Destiny haters start to complain about a game you haven’t really played, no this is not the core part of the game, you can completely ignore it and play something far more fun than the Crucible which you have a lot to choose from. And trust me, there is a lot to do in this game than just the Strikes.
The gunplay is pretty fun, every shot feels so satisfying and powerful. In both Strikes and Crucibles it’s very good when you land that hit and kill. It’s mainly what the first game was like, but the sounds are pretty much different and are so pleasing to the ear. Instead of of a lame sound for this awesome looking gun. Other than those facts, there’s not much to talk about with the game’s gunplay. There is the new Climbing Physics that help a lot when that jump doesn’t have a great distance. Sometimes it agrees with, but sometimes it wants to ruin your life. It’s easy to get use to, so you can tell what ledge or jump will trigger the player to climb. I think this was the response to the Iron Banner DLC secret, where you had to climb lots of ledges and risk yourself through large jumps. They might be planning something later, I mean who knows what they might do?
There are the more difficult Strike Missions in the game like the Exodus Black mission right now and the Raid. I’d say that this one mission isn’t great. It’ hard and I will say it’s rightfully fair with its difficulty, but why time it. I’m not saying take it out, I think the mission should be, but why make it so short? Once you get to the final boss, you have little to no time to do it and the Waited Respawn is very unforgiving. If they could at least try to make the spawning twice as long as a normal respawn area (ten seconds), I think I would like this mission a lot more. Don’t tone down the game’s difficulty in these missions, but make them possible. As for the Raid, this is a “Me” opinion, so you can ignore me on this one if you want. I’ve played two or three raids in my time playing the game, but this one is kind of hard. I’ve done some alone and this one alone is like trying to hammer a nail with a feather. Enemies are just bullet sponges and are too frustrating to deal with. If they could change difficulty of the player’s fireteam numbers, I think this would be do-able, but I can see this being hard to code and may cause some bugs to the enemy stats or change the game’s overall fun. Otherwise, I want to see Raids being dropped a little in difficulty or maybe make an adaption of the enemies. It’s fun with friends, but I want to be able to play the mode by myself. I’ve only found myself in one which is the Exodus Black mission, the most boring and irritating one out of the list we have. The mission is okay with some variety of enemies and lots of lore to it, but the boss is so frustrating to fight. Everything else is do-able and tolerable, but the boss is the worst concept in the entire game. The boss is a bullet sponge that is both difficult and fun. They have advantages against the players and use them in a smart and well made way, no hiding, nothing that can seem so frustrating or anger inducing. This boss is an invisible Fallen guy that sneaks up on you with his megaton hands and rocket launcher and do a massive amount of damage that it can makes his little minions and shock floor finish you off in seconds. I don’t know who thought of this idea of a boss being able to do that, but that guy or girl should be put to do something else. This would have sounded great on paper, but it deserves to be in a different game. I mean, there is no other way to actually get away from this guy, there is so many enemies that can kill you. There’s freaking Shock Shanks that make the floor around them do damage to anyone that steps into does damage and on top of that, takes away your jump and speed power. This can totally stop your flow of the game and make you panic and die. No one can help Revive you because you died in the shocky floor. You just become this *** that just died and have to wait to respawn as your Teammates try to defend themselves. I know this can give the Fallen some characteristics that they’re a cowardice or Honorless bunch of warriors that will do anything to make you easier to kill, but I’ve fought Fallen Bosses in the first game that were bullet sponges, but were still holding the same characteristics, teleporting around a corner to regain their shield or just teleporting right into the mix to do more damage and make you panic. You can still beat him as easy as other bosses below 200 Light, but the way this fight was programmed and planned is just awful. You don’t need to change it in anyway, just give me a choice to choose my favorite strike mission. I can’t talk about the mode besides it can be fun, because I haven’t played any other mission besides that one, Exodus Black. Bungie, if you are looking into Game Informer for some stupid reason and looking at the blogs, please make Strikes Individual Choice or make a checklist for the player to go down. Do something that will make me not play the same Strike everytime I want to have fun. This is one of the only things to do once you finish every mission, story mission or even faction quest, you have to make this Strike option a lot different or it will destroy the game’s replayability!
Now let’s talk about Leveling. I really don’t like it, but it was fun while it lasted. Along with the story, it felt like they wanted this part of the game to be done with in the first few hours of the game. Grinding isn’t a pure factor of the game, but it’s fun when you see that bar get to full and the screen shows this awesome particle effect with the text appearing: Level [insert number here]. I don’t know why, but it was satisfying to see that. It actually made me want to play more to reach that level cap, but because the cap is twenty and it takes about a few hours to get there, the fun is short lived. I wish they made it something along the lines of difficult, but fun, making you want to see that bar get like three Exp or more. Borderlands did the same with the leveling system, making it kind of difficult, but it was fun gaining that XP. But since the game allows the player to gain Region Awards and Legendaries and your first Sparrow once you hit twenty, the fun feels like it just began. To most this is a f**k up to say the least, but to me? I would have to agree it was bad to make it easy to reach the cap, but I think it’s a nice reward to reaching such… An… Easy feat… Okay I can see why. I guess they could have given the player the Sparrow right in the beginning since the first game did that and getting somewhere is a pain when you don’t have the vehicle, but then the goal to get one and keep playing to reach the level would be gone. I do see where they are going, but I wish they could have changed it up or at least made it like Borderlands, difficult, but fun.
I know Grinding isn’t fun, that’s obvious, but you can make it satisfying to make it fun, reward the player lightly, but make it feel like an impossible feat. Not to the extent of Dark Souls, but you get it what I’m saying. I think the most scummy thing about the game is how they don’t allow the player to get Region Awards or Legendaries until they hit Level 20. I kind of felt scammed when that happened, but you can get past it.
Player Characters, Factions and the Clan
If you played the first Destiny before you started playing the sequel, your character will carry on with some new HD Graphics. I will have to say the draw to distance on the character is less chopping that the original, the shadow starts clipping around the player once you try to get a good look at him. I guess the only downside would have to be how you don’t have any new features to mess with, no new faces, no new features, no new hairstyles, nothing. I guess there wasn’t enough time within development to create them, but they could have at least put in some new things to mess with. I guess this is a stupid thing to criticize, so I guess you can ignore this paragraph or not, I don’t care.
Staying on the topic of your character, I said that the player character is being voiced in this game, but apparently no, that’s not true. I wish they could since they hint at it a lot in the game’s cutscenes, having the player being interrupted before they could speak by their Ghost. This kind of annoys me since all Races chosen by the player is completely voiced and was in a minor sense in the first game, but was not utilized in this game. I know they couldn’t use old sound clips, but they could have asked the original voice actors to do VA work as the Player. I bet they were busy at the time, but they got real famous people in this game doing minor voice acting roles in this game, why not get people back like Matt Mercer, Peter Jessop or Susan Eisenberg to reprise their roles in this game as the Guardian, the hero of the game? I think I would have liked the game a lot more and many more if they made the main character talk more instead of become a bystander in a war your Ghost put you apart of. It feels like you’re the puppet of the Ghost’s ideas and actions, having you do what he thinks is right. I want to cut these strings! I want to cut them and unseal my lips and scream to the heavens and tell you, you little piece of what is left of the Travel, that there’s no strings on me! Okay… Maybe gotten carried away, but you get the gist.
Right next to that is the Factions. If you ask me that addition to the game is strangely amusing to me. I know it’s just a faction that does nothing to the story at all or the game itself, but it’s a great upgrade to the last game’s factions. Before you had to collect items that would help the faction, like Ammo, Weapon parts, Armor Scrap, things that seemed to be more useful elsewhere making the factions in the game feel like a buddy that only hangs out with you because you have what he wants. This time, you are given Faction Tokens whenever you do a mission that act like Region Coins, depositing it as reputation and giving you rewards for doing so. And it’s easy getting these coins, even getting them in the Crucible or random moments in a region, you can get Faction Tokens just about doing anything that’s beneficial to the player. I think the only downside is how the Faction’s Daily quests are so repetitive sometimes. Go kill these enemies in this region and you get something rare from me! Things like that are Faction missions and add nothing else to the game than that. I think they could have made them a quest hog, where you get randomly generated quests that give you rewards or more reputation. I think that would have been more fun to the player and would add more content than just plain Kill-This-Thing-In-This-Way Missions. Before the Factions inclusion, there was clans. This kind of like joining a CoD clan in most games, but it’s more official. You get random invites from players or friends, you join a clan and you do stuff for the clan to improve their reputation in the community. To most, this would be an easy ignore on the game since it plays such a small factor in the game, but if you’re a High School teenager that has friends that have no lives, you want to join a clan. If you have a friend that plays on and off with Destiny, you won’t be able to join his clan until he is on the game, so you would have to wait a while to join or until he finally invites you as Clan Founder. If you were thinking that there wasn’t a clan search, you are correct, making joining a friend’s hard if they aren’t on or invites you. I hope they put in a clan search so I can finally join a friend in his clan and do a raid for once without dying to the first enemy alone.
Enemy Diversity
The game, to put it simply, doesn’t have much new enemies to fight, just the Cabal, the Fallen, the Hive and the Taken. Yes, technically the enemies are a different breed of such, but they are still the same kind of enemy types as the first game. There are some crazy redesigns and a very low list of new kinds of enemies in each enemy type, but there’s nothing more than that. This topic of the review will be short since this wouldn’t be worth three to four paragraphs of me talking about the enemies. As I said in the Beta Review, they focused a lot of the attention of designing each character on the Cabal. Of course they would because they are the main freaking enemy in the game, the killer of Light, the kind of thing that the first game didn’t hold. The only problem I have about that is how it shows. The Vex, Taken and Hive are pretty much the same kind of enemies as the first game, with barely any changes to them. The Fallen went through some noticeable changes that made them more interesting. They adapted as animals, so they have spider legs instead of a second pair of arms, so they like to crawl around instead of run. There is one new enemy type, which is the invisible enemies, being very creepy and edgy. The Cabal had a complete redesign, replacing the shield enemies with energy shield enemies, and have about two new types as far as I can see, being the Butchers and Flamethrower Legionaries. It kind of sucks for how much diversity there is in the enemies, having this feeling in your chest that makes you want to fight something new, but overall this can be easily ignore to the player, having no need to whine about it in the future.
Conclusion
Overall, this game is great, not perfect in every way and definitely has plenty of room to improve, but I would recommend this game. I know this was a long read and I think my editors won’t want to read this in one day or at all, but I enjoyed this. The game is pretty bad in some spots at it’s current state, but I hope the next update or DLC fixes most of the problems we face in the game. I enjoy it a lot and my dad loves everything about this game. It’s just beautiful to look at and is fun to play. Of course this game isn’t for all, but if you enjoy shooters with an insane amount of enemies, guns and gear, this game might be for you. I know there is a lot of people rating this game too high for its current state, almost hitting a 10/10, I think this game would deserve an 8.5 or 7. It is fun and is a great game all together, but it needs some improvements to earn a higher rating. I know my opinion doesn’t matter, but I just want to say it at least.
I hope you liked this read as much as I liked writing it, taking up to 11 pages on Docs, ‘til next time…
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