Destiny 2 Review

I have played Destiny 2 for a total of 4 hours, and I don’t want to play any more.

Currently, Destiny 2 is available in a format where you can supposedly play the base game for free and pay to play the expansions. It seemed like a nice opportunity to dip my toes in the water and see what it was like and if it would be worth paying for any of the content. As the game stands, the answer is a resounding ‘no.’

Upon further research, I discovered that Bungie has locked away aspects of the storyline that they don’t want to support anymore. Apparently this includes the entire introduction. For a brand new player, you are dumped into this world, no explanation, eventually handed a gun, and told to go shoot things. As an aside, before I was given the gun and the accompanying reticle appeared on the screen, I was quite sure that I was going to get motion sickness from this game. The “tutorial” doesn’t even tell you that the green things on the ground are ammo for your green ammo powered guns. I thought they were health packs (your health system also doesn’t have any explanation whatsoever), until I connected the dots.

This disaster of a tutorial reflects what they have done to the storyline. I have absolutely no idea who I am, what I am doing, or who I am shooting. The shooting gameplay is solid, but I like to have at least a premise behind my RPG and I have been given none after 4 long hours of clicking through hidden menus.

Another thing that appealed to me about Destiny 2 was the idea that I could play it co-op with my husband. How wrong I was. As a design feature, all missions must be done with the max number of players, even if it says “1-3 players” implying that you could do it with fewer than 3. No, even if you turn all of your party sessions to private, you will have a rando for your mission. I could forgive this if we could do the storyline co-op, but as mentioned previously, there is no storyline.

The one shining spot is that the gameplay is well-done, much like I have come to expect from a Bungie game. I was able to sit back in my chair, controller in hand, and feel like I could hit things with the right amount of work. Of course, it was a Bungie game, so the vehicles felt very Bungie-esque too, and that is less of a compliment.

I could see how one might enjoy Destiny 2 if they had been there from the beginning, but for a person new to the game, it didn’t create a favorable enough experience for me to want to return, let alone spend money on it.

(Also, not the game’s fault, but Steam borked the 70 GB download too and I had to download it twice on our painfully slow internet— 7 mbps unthrottled.)