Destiny 2: Lightfall Review: Stuck in the Middle

The biggest struggle of reviewing a live service game is that you can never properly evaluate it as a complete product, only as an object at a temporary fixed point in space that will eventually go on to bigger and sometimes better things. That’s especially true of the successful Destiny 2, especially given where it was just a few weeks prior to Lightfall’s release.

The narrative side of The Witch Queen had blossomed into some of the best storytelling in this game’s history, going from a succession of ghost stories that indicted Destiny’s heroes and villains for their sins in a weekly series of tense morality plays, to a beautifully tragic tale of artificial intelligence needing to independently decide the value of human life, and vice versa.

The final season of The Witch Queen ended on a tense inhale, leaving players in anticipation of the coming of an all-encompassing cosmic terror known as The Witness, and of The Traveler—the galaxy’s silent, ominous, moon-sized defender—finally rising into Earth’s orbit to meet it, along with an armada of the planet’s best warriors. And when Lightfall starts, that inhale turns into an awkward choke before setting itself up for, well, bigger and hopefully better things.

That awkwardness is mostly due to the campaign, which takes all of The Witch Queen’s built-up dread and quickly pivots to a quirky jaunt to Neptune. Humanity’s early interstellar colonization efforts took a much different turn on Neptune than they did on Earth. Our main hub city, Neomuna, a place bathed in neon colors and dotted with holograms, is protected by a race of eight-foot-tall non-binary cyborgs called Cloud Striders. They’re gatekeepers to the CloudArk, a virtual reality space into which everyone has uploaded their consciousness until the whole Witness thing blows over (shades of Black Mirror’s “San Junipero” episode). When Lightfall starts, players end up hitching a ride with the newly resurrected Emperor Calus of the Cabal to Neptune, and wind up bringing an invasion to the Cloud Striders’s doorstep.

If the Neptune stuff represented a mid-year break in the action, a la The Witch Queen’s wacky space pirate shenanigans some months back, it’d be more appreciable, especially given our main new NPC, Cloud Strider Nimbus. They’re like the futuristic non-binary progeny of Kronk from Emperor’s New Groove, bringing a delightfully goofball contrast to the grim overarching story. And, yet, there’s something askew about their presence, which should function as a kind of respite. Instead, they just feel like a comedian in a trench during a war that their side is losing.

Lightfall’s campaign begins and ends with intergalactic horrors, with the gaudy, mandatory Neptune business sandwiched in between. The tonal roadblock does a disservice to the Neptune material in general—and to the game’s narrative momentum, but especially to its new elemental subclass, Strand. Once the campaign is done, and Strand can be fully upgraded, it’s easy to see the beauty in the new power set. More than the other four classes, Strand feels the most like a magical martial art, with multiple abilities that are meant to be chained together to have maximum effect. But the campaign doles out your new abilities in an awkward, staccato fashion throughout, which is very much unlike the way that previous updates, such as Forsaken and last year’s 3.0 upgrades, have let players indulge in newfound power with little to no restrictions.

Meanwhile, the narrative that should have been this game’s first impression is relegated to the weekly Season of Defiance arc, in which players must team up with shipsmith Amanda Holliday and Reef Queen Mara Sov to wage guerilla warfare against The Witness. At the moment, there’s only a week’s worth of gameplay available for the season, but already the stakes feel high. The missions are tough but exhilarating, and the character beats are written with the grim determination and gallows humor that the overarching story demands. The path forward looks bright for the game, but the main campaign stands clumsily in its way.

Thankfully, grinding your way through it all remains deeply enjoyable, with every player able to choose their own level of involvement with the activities in the larger galaxy. And as is the case with the Destiny of recent years, it’s a three-steps-forward-one-step-back situation. The steps forward generally fall into the overarching ethos of streamlining the player experience, with far fewer resources to farm, and so many more ways to obtain the ones that you still need when trying to upgrade weapons, armor, and powers. Many of the game’s more advanced functions are only gated by needing to actually play the game in an ambitious way.

The biggest step forward, though, is that, at long last with Lightfall, you’re allowed to create loadouts, saved sets of weapons, armor, and elemental classes that you can swap to at a moment’s notice without having to spend an eternity in the menus. That allowance makes plain that, as opposed to the vast, sad majority of live service games, Destiny very much wants players to spend time actually playing the game, and kindly encourages them to do so freely.

The step back here is just how many of the new activities ramp up the difficulty, where many of them put enemies in your path some five-to-20 levels above where you actually are. It is, to the game’s credit, a logical way to keep expert players from plowing through to the new power cap of 1800 too quickly, but it also means that a chunk of the game is soft-gated off until weeks, maybe months, down the road. It’s hard to revel in your power when, in many of the game’s activities, the player’s revelry has all the hard-hitting impact on enemies as a hug from a teddy bear.

More than any other Destiny expansion since Bungie split from Activision, you can feel the developers pulling the reins a bit on Lightfall. All the right elements are in play, and the way that Destiny feels so sleek and streamlined compared to not just other live service games but its own cumbersome past remains impressive. But first impressions are everything, and Lightfall pays so much attention to the gleaming horizon that it trips over its feet trying to get there.

This game was reviewed with code provided by ÜberStrategist.