Destiny 2: Forsaken, our review

One year on from Destiny 2, Destiny 2: Forsaken has arrived, an expansion that kicks off year two of the Bungie home title.

Version tested: PlayStation 4

Destiny 2's new expansion, Forsaken, turns the game into something people can play as much as they want without running out of to-dos. If nothing else, its enticing new objectives, designed to satisfy the appetites of the most voracious players in the series, may be too long.

Seen from the outside, Destiny 2 looks largely the same as it did a year ago when it launched. You still play a space warrior called the Guardian, who fights to protect the earth of the future from a variety of alien races and peoples. You still have to grind to level up, repeat tasks over and over to get gear powerful enough to get through an elaborately designed six-player raid, all in search of better and even better bits.

Despite those superficial familiarities, Forsaken and Update 2.0 update a myriad of content. Changes that may seem minor have huge repercussions, some of which are still unfolding. The way the game handles weapons, for example, has been reworked to give players access to more powerful gear at the same time. This change, along with several new and powerful "super" class abilities and a generalized increase in the amount of damage dealt by weapons, has had a profound effect on every activity in the game.

In fact, it made PvE challenges more charged and chaotic and PvP matches in the Crucible spicier and faster. Both changes were largely better, although both introduced imbalances that Bungie programmers would need to adjust to keep the game fair without robbing it of its newfound explosiveness.

A story of revenge. Or some kind.

Forsaken is a more personal story than the great space adventures players have gone through before. The expansion immediately features cinematic that begins with a scene in a prison and ends with the death of one of the main characters. The set-up puts the player on the path of revenge, with the aim of eliminating the Assassin and each of the Barons who have helped him in his plan.

The Guardians head for the "lawless frontier" of Tangled Beach, a set of asteroids tied together, to hunt down the Barons and kill them. Here, your goal is to eliminate those who killed your friend, abandoning the role of protector of humanity for a personal crusade.

Additionally, Forsaken focuses on boss fights. It's great how this expansion ensures that each of the fights has a unique and fun peculiarity; despite this, the Barons have little or nothing in the way of characterization, aside from their descriptive names.

The campaign culminates in the hunt for the Fallen. History suggests that it has to do with the Taken. Here, however, Bungie is unable or unwilling to fully embrace their ideas and premises, resulting in a dull result culminating in the City of Dreams.

The lack of closure turns the climax of the story into a frustrating and meaningless battle and does not offer a satisfying conclusion for this tale. Players who want to understand what is going on basically have to find out for themselves through end-game descriptions and dialogues.

City of secrets.

While Tangled Beach is a beautiful and overwhelming new location for players to visit in Destiny 2, the same cannot be said for the City of Dreams. This end-game position, in fact, is not even available to players until after finishing the story of Forsaken. Basically, it's where Bungie goes all-in to sharpen the title's cosmic perception, story, and best ideas.

The City is very similar to other areas in Destiny 2, with public events, patrols and rewards to complete. Yet it is also full of secrets: almost nothing about the City of Dreams is explained or clear at first, which makes it a fascinating place to explore. Finding out what's going on in the City of Dreams is constantly rewarding in Forsaken, with tons of new knowledge, challenges and loot to discover.

Thanks to the fact that the City of Dreams is the place where the new raid is set, it seems that for a long time it will be a strange and interesting place. Completing the first raid of “Last Wish” unlocked new content, and it looks like Bungie is set to continue this tradition for many more weeks.

A winning bet for Gambit.

The other notable addition is Gambit, a new hybrid and often dramatic PvE / PvP mode. Although it is beautiful, it will take many months to fix the strategies as the players grow. A given Gambit game can be fun, maddening, exciting and cathartic. It also adds a welcome degree of diversity to the plethora of options that are presented each time the game updates.

Each of the Forsaken activities has been carefully placed along a reward ladder. All to maximize the amount of time a player could spend in the game. It's all part of Bungie's plan to please the hardcore crowd, initially disappointed with the lack of long-term incentive structures in Destiny 2.

The fun part is the gamble risk. If you are killed, in fact, you lose all the particles that you have not delivered. However, there is an incentive to deliver them at the same time; in fact, by doing so, you can send a "blocking" enemy into the opposing team's arena, which they must stop and kill before they can put any move around. So to make it really spicy, a member of one team can jump through a portal to invade the other team's arena and try to kill them. The mode is full of risks that reward skill.

Everything works to make Gambit a lot of fun. It's a perfect use of Destiny 2's PvE and PvP elements, and it's excellent for diversifying the multitude of modes available to players. Gambit is fast-paced, fun, and competitive - a perfect combination of those gameplay mechanics that make Destiny 2 so captivating.

Changes for the better.

While there are many more classic modes in Forsaken, the most surprising (and welcome) things in this expansion are its changes to how Destiny 2 works. In fact, it now tracks pretty much everything you do in the game in a list called “Triumphs. Which is basically a great snapshot of Destiny 2 players' career. It's a useful thing for the organization to have, but more than that it is full of goals that players must achieve even after working through all of the Forsaken content. The triumph list should help keep people engaged longer in title transition periods, and that's great news.

Also great is the “Collections”, a list of weapons and armor found in Destiny 2. Of great organizational help, the “Collections” menu allows players to get rid of all the junk they don't need.

A lot of blocked content can be fetched for a certain price from the "Collections", allowing players to hang on to the best things. This is an improvement that should make Destiny 2's entire loot side a bit cleaner, adding an extra incentive by showing players exactly what's missing, so they can go back into the world to find it.

At first some of the changes felt like a frustrating reintegration of Destiny systems; however, after digging deeply into the new Forsaken progression system, it seems that everything is working out for the best. Bungie has set up multiple ways to increase player power levels once they hit the limit at the end of the campaign. This means that while Destiny 2's end-game grind still exists, it's less of a hassle to participate in it.

Conclusions.

Destiny 2: Forsaken is an expansion with some ups and downs, but once you move on, the high points far outweigh the lows. The tale of revenge that Bungie would have hoped to shoot pushes halfway, like most storytelling in the Destiny universe, despite an abundance of weird and interesting curiosity to touch.

The boss fights, on the other hand, are wonderful. Destiny 2 always gives its best when Bungie injects creative changes to the shooter formula; fortunately, many of these are present in the new expansion. The storyline becomes mysterious as the game takes over, and Forsaken holds a welcome stream of new environments and game modes.

Meanwhile, the changes to Destiny 2's systems have proved almost universally positive; in fact, although there may be a little more grinding in this new expansion, the game has been profoundly changed. The work done made it less repetitive and less frustrating. Plus, the end-game finally gives you that sense of fulfillment that was missing in this title.