Bungie and destiny have both had their ups and downs over the years and i have put off writing this review for months, caught between the fond memories and the bleak reality.

i am going to be breaking this review into the categories of Price, Gameplay and Story that should hopefully help to give a sense of whether you should bother.


Despite claiming to be free to play that is nothing but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ since the latest expansion that gutted away most of the former expansions (yes, they screwed the people who needed to pay) that were the largest part of this free to play chunk. i am not exaggerating when i say there is nearly nothing for a free player to do in terms of progression.

If, on the other hand, you choose to buy all of the expansions you will be in a constant loop of hope, disappointment and regret. expansions are almost never worth the prices and usually only have around 10-12 hours of new content (outside of grind) and maybe a new activity or raid in some of the better ones. the latest expansion is the price of a AAA game for ♥♥♥♥♥ sake.


Gunplay is the speciality of bungie and that mastery is on full display, destiny is fast paced and strongly encourages you to be constantly moving, when you hear people comparing it to warframe this is what they are talking about.

Beyond gunplay, destiny has a horribly grindy gameplay loop that boils down to this: "find stronger weapon/armour piece, replace old, find new, replace old." this is then regularly raised to promote going after equipment from the latest expansion and results in the older equipment obsolete at all stages of the game (and hurting the playability of older content in general, this was nowhere near as bad in destiny 1). what i just described is why you will find so much backlash for the lack of weapons in beyond light.

Bungie killed any sense of progression. instead of putting new players at the start of it's base game campaign and encouraging them to follow in the footsteps of players before them (like literally every good MMO or RPG and slowly opening the game up to the player digestable chunks and giving them the context of what is happening bungie decided to implement new light and haphazardly start the player at a high light level (power system based on the sum of all of your equipment) and dump everything on them at once and hide all the old content and context inside what amounts to a closet. when i got into destiny 2 it was as part of this "new light" wave, where there is no sense of direction and no obvious objective to work towards.


This category is going to contain "plot" and "world" points.

If you are looking for great storytelling then you are in the wrong place, characters are paper-thin outside of lore tomes, campaigns are usually generic and lack any depth or impact with only a couple of exceptions like forsaken (an expansion) and the red war (the base campaign they buried in an obscure place). a big and consistent problem have is not making the room to build any kind of attachment to what is happening or properly explain the context of the perticular story (for players reading this. YES, they might explain this in some of the lore entries. that is not an excuse). on top of all of this they tend to start more than they finish in every single storyline.

Another big problem that echoes throughout all of these issues i mentioned... they expect you to have been here from the start, bungie expects that the player be familiar with everything that happened over the course of 6 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ years worth of destiny content while making most of that hard to access... who had that bright idea?

But, for all of the many problems the storytelling has, bungie does not fail to offer world-building that shows their care and thought in every detail of the environment. the lore is full of stories about the many characters you meet and the locations you go to were built around, more often than not you can look at anything and find an answer for why it is there. unfortunately these are not weaved into the plot where they would go a long way to resolve some of the issues i have expressed.


Bungie and the work they have put into destiny since 2014 are the epitome of wasted potential, by poor choices they have taken the ingredients to what could have been a great game and soiled them... i stood by it for the best part of those 6 years, across both D1 and D2 i had hoped that they could pull through.


time and time again they have failed and promised to do better...
time and time again they have broken their promise, no more.






Thank you all for reading the entire review and i invite you to comment with improvements and corrections to the review, i am also open to discussion but you can go ♥♥♥♥ yourself if you come looking for an argument (or in a nicer way, be civil)