On the chitin-covered heels of the impressive Witch Queen expansion and a relatively strong year of live-service support overall, it seemed like Destiny 2 was finally gaining momentum as it headed toward the conclusion of its epic saga. Sadly, my optimism for a game I’ve put thousands of hours into has come crashing down like a Cabal drop pod after spending 80 hours with its latest expansion, Lightfall. The story is so shockingly incoherent that even someone who has spent countless hours reading Destiny’s lore like me couldn’t understand its nonsense, the new destination on Neptune feels as lifeless as the real planet, and the passable endgame/seasonal activities have so few surprises that they give me deja vu in the worst possible way. Thankfully, there are a number of things Lightfall excels at as well, like the new Strand subclass, which is an excellent addition to Destiny’s sandbox. Many of the expansion’s new campaign activities and Nightfall Strikes are refreshingly challenging too, and the most recent batch of quality-of-life improvements largely succeed at making my time shooting space rhinos in the face a less bumpy ride. Still, even Lightfall’s best parts can’t disguise this significant step back from The Witch Queen.
The opening moments of Lightfall are some of its best, as Destiny’s long-awaited final villain, The Witness, arrives in our solar system to deal a blow against humanity and our allies. But any excitement is quickly swept into the vacuum of space as you’re bizarrely and inexplicably redirected from the action to take part in a seemingly unrelated sidequest in the Neptunian city of Neomuna. Not only is the story a decidedly low stakes diversion that draws you away from the real conflict happening on Earth, but it flatout does not make sense. That’s not just me saying that either; some of the Destiny community’s greatest lore minds have been completely stumped by the utter nonsense of Lightfall’s story.
The events on Neomuna surround a macguffin called The Veil, a mysterious artifact that you’re told is super important, but nobody ever, ever tells you what it is or its purpose, even a little bit – ever. Your enemy is Calus, a stack of pancakes cosplaying as an air fryer, who serves as the least intimidating antagonist in Destiny’s history. As you wage war against an incompetent moron for control of an artifact you know nothing about, you’ll also discover the dark powers of Strand, a green elemental subclass our heroes spend half of the campaign trying to figure out how to use in a process so dull they literally skip over some of it by giving you a Rocky-style training montage at one point. Yikes.
Along the way, you also meet the Cloud Striders, Nimbus and Rohan, who are 12-foot tall cybernetically infused humanoids with personalities that were apparently drawn randomly from a basket of cliches. Rohan is an elderly Cloud Strider who all-but stares directly into the camera to tell you he’s a day away from retirement (I wonder what will happen to him), while Nimbus is a young gnarly surfer who makes cringey jokes as humanity’s holocaust unfolds. Staying on brand with the rest of the campaign, the writing for these two is so extraordinarily bad it makes interacting with them a painful chore, especially Nimbus, who manages to make the low stakes of Lightfall’s story feel even more laughable with their irritating adolescent hijinks.
Just as quickly as it began, the story wraps up a mere eight hours later while resolving none of its greater questions and kicking the can down the road for any actual story developments to be dealt with at a later date, neatly putting all the pieces back exactly where they were at the beginning. The storytelling is so dreadful it makes me nostalgic for the days of the infamous “I don’t have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain” line uttered in vanilla Destiny – but worse than that, it undermines the approaching finale by trivializing the arrival of The Witness and slamming the brakes on any momentum or goodwill Destiny gained from The Witch Queen’s excellent writing. As a longtime Destiny fan, I was utterly heartbroken by both the disappointing whiplash in quality and all the wasted story potential by the time I finished Lightfall’s campaign.
It’s not just the plot that disappoints, either. The levels themselves feel decidedly less unique or memorable than The Witch Queen. The interesting puzzles and diet raid mechanics featured in last year’s campaign have been replaced with irritating battles taking place in an arena where you’re often running in circles to survive, stopping to take shots here and there while you can. Instead of fighting interesting new enemies like the light-bearing Hive, Lightfall has you mostly fighting the same burly Cabal we’ve been at war with for nine years, which have always been one of Destiny’s less engaging adversaries.
Thankfully, Strand does help ease the monotony of the campaign’s action, representing the biggest shakeup to Destiny’s sandbox in a long while. The powers themselves aren’t revolutionary to Destiny: you get a new melee ability, new supers for each class that all deal huge DPS, and some new buffs and debuffs to play with – like Suspend, which lifts enemies off the ground and entangles them briefly, or Sever, which causes the enemy’s damage output to become significantly reduced. But despite that somewhat familiar framework, after spending dozens of hours optimizing my Strand builds on each of Destiny’s three subclasses, I’m hooked.
The main reason to pick Strand over other subclasses is in its unmatched mobility, since by default it replaces your Guardian’s grenade with a grappling hook that allows you to swing around the environment and pull yourself towards enemies to follow up with a devastating melee hit – both of which are a lot of fun. It’s definitely an interesting tradeoff since losing your grenade is a big deal, and that adds some much-needed variety to the sandbox. The grapple hook is a great option to help navigate the vertical nature of Neomuna’s skyscrapers (or surprise your enemies in PvP).
Destiny has used big updates to add subclasses or adjust powers since the beginning, but Strand’s amped up movement is the first thing in many years to really change a meta that sometimes feels stuck in the mud. Paired with 12 months of impressive updates since the Witch Queen , the personality of each subclass finally feels more defined and the build potential of them is better balanced and more interesting than ever before. That’s fantastic news for people like me, who will likely sink hundreds of hours more into Destiny over the next year after the sour taste of the campaign has left my mouth.
You’ll be spending most of that campaign on the neon-soaked streets of Neomuna, a city that’s been peculiarly hidden from the rest of the galaxy until now, yet houses massive buildings and technology that surpasses even that of Guardians during the golden age. Unfortunately, this setting is as flimsy as its lore, and is barren and lifeless despite supposedly thriving up until the recent Cabal invasion. Each area of Neomuna contains a handful of featureless buildings and plenty of Cabal and Vex enemies to battle, but little else to engage with aside from the standard fare of patrols and public events that we’ve seen in every Destiny location since 2014.
You might be thinking: “but shouldn’t this thriving city on Neptune be full of people to talk to?” Of course it should, right? It’d be crazy to make the whole thing look like a derelict corporate park with no intelligent life in sight. Well, as you’re conveniently told early in your visit, all of Neomuna’s citizens have been uploaded to a virtual network to achieve immortality, so they only appear around the city as blurry, ghostlike outlines. The only physical beings occupying the meat space of Neomuna are our duo of Cloud Striders, who apparently follow the Sith’s rule of two so there’s no chance of you meeting a third, maybe more interesting character even by accident.