Bungie’s Des­tiny 2 is in full swing and com­ing up on its first week­ly reset tomor­row. We decid­ed to com­plete as much of this game as we could before we did our review, as there is a lot going on. Below, you will see the opin­ion’s of two writ­ers, as well as an overview for Des­tiny 2:

Sto­ry

The sto­ry of Des­tiny 2 is about a pow­er hun­gry, cabal lord, named Gauhl. He seeks to take the Trav­el­er’s light and attach­es a machine to it to extract it ([spoiler]which is successful[/spoiler]). Since we are not going to ruin the sto­ry for any­one, we will not men­tion any fur­ther details.

Overview

Bungie did make some need­ed qual­i­ty of life changes to Des­tiny 2 that real­ly help its over­all feel. These adjust­ments seem sim­ple, but they real­ly do make the game way eas­i­er to maneu­ver and enjoy:

• The num­ber one improve­ment made is the fan­cy new Fast Trav­el option you have while putting around on des­ti­na­tions. Get­ting to Pub­lic Events and just basic trav­el­ing is much easier.
• Pub­lic events are actu­al­ly use­ful and give you tokens that you can hand in to all the “ven­dors” on each plan­et. Events also have a chance to give you high­er gear, leg­endary engrams, and exot­ic engrams (if the event is turned into a Hero­ic Pub­lic Event your chances of get­ting an exot­ic are increased).
• Tokens, which you receive from doing Pub­lic Events, Side Mis­sions, killing a High-Val­ue Tar­get, fin­ish­ing a Patrol, com­plet­ing a dai­ly Chal­lenge on a plan­et, doing Strikes, or com­plet­ing a match in Cru­cible, can lev­el up your rep­u­ta­tion with all the ven­dors. Lev­el­ing up each ven­dor will net you some leg­endary gear and most like­ly bump your light level.
• Anoth­er much need­ed addi­tion, is the abil­i­ty to vault an object after you’ve jumped. You don’t need to press a but­ton to vault, if you are close to an edge your char­ac­ter will auto­mat­i­cal­ly vault up.

Ivana’s View

Though I played Des­tiny like it was a reli­gion, Des­tiny 2 is only slight upgrade from the orig­i­nal. It is still very playable and has that orig­i­nal feel that Des­tiny did, but the grind is almost a nui­sance. Even with the upgrad­ed Pub­lic Events and the var­i­ous Strikes in the playlist, it still makes the game too much about those two things. Or you can go grind your life away in the Cru­cible, which isn’t some­thing I would­n’t rec­om­mend, because it takes too long to lev­el Shaxx’s Reputation.

The eas­i­est way to lev­el your gear after get­ting hit­ting lev­el 20 is to go to each of the sep­a­rate des­ti­na­tions, Earth (Euro­pean Dead Zone aka. EDZ), Titan, Nes­sus, or Io, and lev­el up the rep­u­ta­tion of each ven­dor there. I don’t like that you have to go to each dif­fer­ent ven­dor in their sep­a­rate place to give them their Tokens. You should be able to lev­el up these fac­tions with­out hav­ing to trav­el to them. You can also lev­el up the Van­guard by doing Strikes in the playlist. Each time you lev­el them up, you will get leg­endary gear and even­tu­al­ly you will be high enough light lev­el to get into the Nightfall.

The Night­fall itself was a real pain, even with the great Fireteam we had here at Fix The Meta. Accord­ing to Bungie this first Night­fall was bugged, where the Prism (which rotates the burn dur­ing the strike) was bro­ken. You can read more about that here. We did man­age to get through it before Bungie fixed the Night­fall, so screw that Strike, we win.

Anoth­er prob­lem that seemed to plague us, was the var­i­ous mis­sions, chal­lenges, Pub­lic Events, Adven­tures and Lost Sec­tors we could do. There was so much to do along­side sto­ry mis­sions, that we even­tu­al­ly aban­doned the extras and just went for the sto­ry. There were Adven­tures right at the begin­ning when you are in ear­ly lev­els, but it becomes very time con­sum­ing to do so many. These Adven­tures don’t wield you any­thing that you can’t get any­where else, faster. Oth­er than that, just get­ting dis­tract­ed by Pub­lic Events and HVT is pret­ty easy when you know you have a chance of get­ting gear you need at any lev­el. They also have spe­cial side quests for weapons that require you to do the same old crap that the orig­i­nal Des­tiny did. Shoot some ene­mies or go on some long tedious quest.

The rest of Des­tiny 2 feels like Des­tiny. The guns act the same. The armor is slight­ly dif­fer­ent from the orig­i­nal, espe­cial­ly in the way you infuse it. Armor that has a 5 armor defense or 10 armor defense, you have to take into account, when infus­ing. Your Ghost no longer counts towards your Light lev­el, but they do help you with cer­tain things, like find­ing Loot Box­es eas­i­er on the EDZ. You don’t need to lev­el up your weapons any­more, which is amaz­ing. Weapons have also been changed to Kinet­ic as Pri­ma­ry, Ener­gy as Sec­ondary, and Pow­er as your last weapon.

In Des­tiny 2 you can’t give your­self more mobil­i­ty, recov­ery or resilience through your class set­up, only your gear. This is very irri­tat­ing, con­sid­er­ing the gear does­n’t always give you what you need. Tess Everis does have gear mods that can give you 5 or 10 defense on your gear, as well as mods that give you a high­er recharge rate for every sub­class­es. As far as sub­class­es go, the only real change is now you have to choose from a set of four “Attune­ments”, one on top and one on bot­tom. For example:

All and all, Des­tiny 2 is alright. It’s not going to blow your socks off and I could def­i­nite­ly live with­out the sto­ry, but it’s not a bad game. If you like the grind of the RPG, then you will enjoy spend­ing time count­less hours try­ing to acquire the gear need­ed to get into the Raid. Des­tiny 2 still shares the great game­play from Des­tiny and if you enjoyed the first one, the sec­ond one will fall right into place.

Taco’s View

Hav­ing spent way too much damn time play­ing Des­tiny 1, I pret­ty much knew what to expect from Des­tiny 2. The core game­play has­n’t changed much so you will slide right back into form. The sto­ry was good in my opin­ion, though some parts could of been told bet­ter. There are quite a few Quest and Adven­tures to do on top of the usu­al patrols and the Red­war Campaign/Story mis­sions. Strikes in Des­tiny 2 are not includ­ed dur­ing the sto­ry, They are only avail­able via a playlist after you have unlocked them with the vanguards.

I have spent a fair amount of time in D2’s cru­cible, I real­ly have enjoyed it. The 4v4 match­es I have played in have been pret­ty lag free on my end and were excit­ing and com­pet­i­tive for the most part. I hat­ed the cru­cible in D1 and also in the beta for D2, I was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised that when I went into the cru­cible for a mile­stone quest, It was very enjoy­able and I will prob­a­bly be play­ing it more down the road.

Ivana and I both share a lot of opin­ions about Des­tiny 2 but over­all we both like it and most of the changes that were made. The Night­fall was actu­al­ly frus­trat­ing me because of the rotat­ing ele­men­tal burns and very short on screen noti­fi­ca­tion. Bungie has said it was fixed. Reset is in a few hours from now. I guess we will see.

The Bottom Line

If you liked Des­tiny, than Des­tiny 2 is a slight­ly bet­ter ver­sion of is pre­de­ces­sor. The sto­ry was decent, but lacked some­thing that tru­ly made it look as grand as it did back at E3. It could have been the long mis­sions, with no strikes (or any­thing) to break up the monotony.

How­ev­er, past the sto­ry are four spa­cious des­ti­na­tions to roam, where you have a num­ber of activ­i­ties to com­plete to lev­el up Fac­tion ven­dors, and get that glo­ri­ous loot. Like any RPG it’s all about the loot and lev­els. If you’re into the dai­ly grind, shoot­ers, RPG’s, or all of the above (espe­cial­ly if you played the orig­i­nal) Des­tiny 2 is worth the pick-up.