[Review] DESTINY 2: FORSAKEN

[Mark-x]

Destiny 2 was not the game many players wanted at launch. It was a fun shooter, but it was shallow and painfully easy to put down. And in the past year, it's seen blunder after blunder after blunder, from lackluster DLC to baffling design decisions. So it's a relief to say that Forsaken is the second wind Destiny 2 needed. It's a full-fat expansion for Bungie's shared-world space opera of a shooter, and it comes with everything you'd expect: new story missions and quests, activities, enemies, game modes and environments. But Forsaken also delivers expanded RPG elements and quality of life changes which make Destiny 2 more compelling and less frustrating. 

As you may have heard, the expansion opens with a big story beat: the death of Cayde-6, the chattiest of Destiny's Vanguard trio, a sort of PvE council of leaders. Cayde bites it at the hands of Uldren Sov and the eight Barons who lead the Scorn, a scrappy new enemy faction loosely based on the four-armed Fallen. So begins a good old-fashioned quest for revenge: The Man Who Shot Cayde-6 is somewhere out there in the badlands and you've got to go through his oddball gang of henchmen to get to him. 

The bulk of the campaign consists of Baron hunts, which are more than simple boss fights. These hunts are unique missions which reflect the personalities and powers of the Barons. Though these ‘Adventure’ missions are pegged to different recommended power levels, you’re largely free to tackle them in the order you want.

 start with The Rider, the leader of a hoverbike gang. To lure her out, I hijack one of her precious ‘Pike’ vehicles and use it to slaughter some of her riders in her own territory. Thoroughly pissed, she rolls up in a souped-up Pike and challenges me to a death race through an acid-filled Thunderdome. As I dodge missiles, steal replacement Pikes, and evade the trail of fire that the Rider leaves in her wake, it occurs to me that this fight doesn't feel like Destiny at all. I mean, I've hardly shot anything with a regular gun. But it feels great. Memorable, flavorful, and above all, unlike anything I've done before, which also describes much of Forsaken. 

The next Baron to really stand out is The Rifleman. Blind but for a single cybernetic eyeball, this bastard played an especially big role in Cayde's death by killing his resurrection-granting Ghost. As you may have deduced, he's a sniper, so what better way to get his attention than to take potshots at him from his own nest? Eventually he gets tired of playing tag and lures me to an arena where he and his army of hologram clones have the upper hand. I'm fairly under-leveled for this hunt, so keeping up with The Rifleman's clones and cutting them down to get to the real version isn't easy. But while the actual fight is a fun challenge, it's The Rifleman's dialogue that elevates the encounter. He's a marksman who delights in mocking my aim, which brings home one of my favorite parts of the Baron hunts: they're not just about killing the Barons, but beating them at their own game. 

I beat The Rider in a death race and I out-shoot The Rifleman. Likewise, I take out The Mad Bomber by defusing his explosives and hunt The Machinist using a tank stolen from her personal arsenal. I'm genuinely surprised I can rattle these Barons off from memory, because going in I didn't expect to remember them at all, let alone so vividly. Incidentally, The Machinist is my favorite Baron, again because of what she has to say rather than the fight itself. She talks about the other Barons like they're family, and she reveres Uldren as a benevolent leader. The Barons stick together, she says. I can kill them, but never break them. Which is the first line in all of Destiny to ever give me pause. That's what the victims tell the bad guys, 

For the first time arguably ever, Destiny's story has become a bit ambiguous, and it's a massive improvement. Destiny 2 has spent the past year telling players to fight The Darkness and save the solar system, but maybe these Guardians aren't the golden heroes they’re made out to be? After all, we’re reanimated corpses. Our enemies revile us as the zombie warriors that we technically are, and it feels like Bungie is finally ready to tap into that. This kernel of doubt is further explored in Uldren's storyline, which delivers a more conflicted, interesting villain than anything the series has seen so far. 

New characters like Spider, a sarcastic and self-serving black market merchant, are likeable and help sell the Spaghetti Western-inspired setting. Even the optional quests are better than ever. The sidequest to reclaim Cayde-6's beloved hand cannon, the Ace of Spades, ends with a particularly touching moment and rewards one of the best guns in the game (with one of the best reload animations in history). 

Even so, it's nice to want to grind again, and to be doing so using new subclass trees. Forsaken didn't add new subclasses per se, but the supers and ability nodes—clusters of skills that define your play style—that each subclass gained in the expansion feel like new classes in their own right. They're more creative than the original subclasses, and many of them feel more powerful. 

My favorite so far is the new Hunter subclass tree Way of a Thousand Cuts. Hunter's original Gunslinger branches are mashed-together messes of super and grenade abilities with no real synergy to them. In contrast, the Way of a Thousand cuts branch has a proper combo built into it: my flaming throwing knives recharge my dodge ability and my dodge recharges my throwing knives. If I get multiple kills with my knives, they can also reduce their own cooldown to a frankly absurd degree. And if I equip an old, previously useless piece of Exotic armor called Young Ahamkara’s Spine, I can add fast-charging sticky grenades into the mix for even stronger synergy, enabling an endless chain chain of knives and nades. Get good and you can run whole missions without firing a shot.

And then there’s Hunter's new Blade Barrage super. This involves a volley of exploding throwing knives which can decimate groups of weak enemies or shred singular bosses. It's flexible and incredibly fun—I defy you not to smile after melting dozens of enemies in a flaming Olympic twirl. Much the same is true of the other supers and new subclass paths too. The new void Titan and its buff-giving shield super will surely be invaluable in endgame content, and I'm eager to test the dedicated support Warlock tree which can heal and empower allies. Forsaken doubled the number of supers in Destiny 2, so there are lots of cool combinations to try. I get the feeling that several of the original supers and subclasses will still be relevant too, though I don't think I'll stray from the Way of a Thousand Cuts for some time.  

While most of the campaign is set in the Tangled Shore, a Western frontier made from asteroids lashed together with chains and infested with every variety of bad guy, my grinding has taken me all over the solar system. That said, the main attraction is the Dreaming City, Forsaken's go-to end-game zone and the best source of powerful loot. Not that I need a reason to go to the Dreaming City, mind, because it's worth it for the views and atmosphere alone. Stepping out of the mist and onto its eerie shore is like walking into an airbrushed ‘70s prog rock album cover. The Dreaming City is far and away the most beautiful environment in Destiny—no small praise, given the quality of the art elsewhere—and easily one of the best-looking vacation spots in all of games. 

The City's lush green mountains are contrasted by deep blue crystalline rock and dominated by towering alabaster structures, while the outskirts are draped in ominous fog. The guts of the city are an irresponsibly detailed labyrinth of marble statues and catacombs home to countless secrets which players scour for every day. The whole thing also has the kind of cod-religious, portentous soundtrack that could only come from the makers of Halo. And according to Bungie, the Dreaming City's layout and activities will change as new content is released. I'll take any excuse to spend more time there, and I can't wait to see what effect the raid has. 

The trouble is, hanging out with friends in the Dreaming City is a bit of a hassle since Destiny 2 still lacks appropriately-sized parties. For some unknown reason—possibly a technical one, to be fair—you're still limited to having three people in your fireteam outside of raids and PvP, which is a huge bummer since exploring the city with buddies is a blast. To say nothing of the Blind Well horde activity, which is way more fun with more people. Destiny 2's previous expansion, Warmind, ran into the exact same problem with its Escalation Protocol mode, and we have made zero progress since. 

Then there's the obvious pine cone in the fruit salad: PS4-exclusive content. PC Destiny 2: Forsaken players will miss out on a new strike, an Exotic trace rifle, and three armor sets for the next year or so. Platform-exclusive content in multiplatform games is inherently annoying, but considering Forsaken only added a handful of new strikes and the trace rifle count is already incredibly low, these omissions are especially disappointing. 

Forsaken is still fresh out of the gate and has a lot to prove. We have a raid to see, for one, and the true test of any expansion is how it feels after a month or two. At the same time, it has already proven a lot. It had a lot of mistakes to correct, and between an engaging campaign and an engrossing endgame, it's managed to right almost all of them. I'm coming up on 100 hours logged in the expansion and I don't even feel close to done, nor have I slowed down a bit. My friends and I have been burning the midnight oil and playing almost every night, which would've been unthinkable before. After a precarious first year, I'm finally enjoying Destiny 2 again. It feels good to have it back.