Destiny 2

Release: 2017
Developer: Bungie
Publisher: Activision/Blizzard
Genre: FPS, MMO

Gameplay Stats: 3 characters level 25

I finished seeing most all of this content a while ago, but it took me a little bit to settle on how I felt about the whole experience. I'll elaborate a bit more at the end.

Visual: This game looks really good! The environments are actually stunning and the player models are extremely interesting. Each armor set and weapon has it's own look to it. A lot of them are probably re-skins, but they aren't super obvious. The different planets look distinct and the styles are pretty striking. There isn't very much variety in the enemies though, and that's kind of jarring compared to the variation in everything else in the game. You might have 20 identical enemies on screen at the same time in this wildly beautiful, alien landscape.

Audio: The music in the game is pretty good. I don't know that I will revisit any of the tracks, but they all fit very well into the feel of the game. The guns sound pretty good, but they're also pretty generic. There's not noticeable difference between gun sounds within the same family (i.e. an SMG will sound like another SMG). The rest of the sound effects are pretty lacking. They're mildly distracting, but don't pull you out of the experience. Which is more than I can say for the voice acting! The voice acting is actually terrible. It's hard to take characters seriously because of the poor writing and the poor acting.

Plot: The plot is so bad. I just alluded to the writing being bad, so I'll explain a bit more. The entire game is made to feel like pay off, but there's no build up. *Spoilers* They make a big deal about the guardians losing their light at the beginning of the game, but it literally changes nothing. Characters in the game make a point to say that you're on your last life and that you can't respawn, but you can absolutely respawn like normal. There was some potential there, but no effort to explore what it would be like losing your light. There is no exposition about the characters (even the new ones), and you just seem like you're shepherding every single support character throughout the entire game. It seems like no effort was put into the plot at all.

Gameplay: This is where Destiny 2 really shines. The game is fun to play. There are a lot of questionable game design decisions that impact this area of the game, but the act of shooting enemies and jumping around is extremely fun. Its feels snappy and like your choices have some weight in the realm of combat. At its core, the progression in this game is tied to the strength of your gear. They make a point to demonstrate that after a point you can only progress by completing certain quests that refresh every week. Instead of giving a chance for every drop to progress your character, you have to wait for a few weeks to get high enough level gear to get to max level.

Overall the game is fun, but kind of a mess. There's definitely not enough content to justify the $60 asking price. It seems like this game was built around micro-transactions but they got cold feet and stripped most of them before the game shipped. That being said, they keep all cosmetic items locked behind micro-transactions. The recently released a free update with all of the items locked behind micro-transactions. It's billed as a huge free thing, but you can only earn a single lootbox per day and they aren't exclusively full of winter themed items. It seems like the game is growing in a direction that I don't like, so I'm likely done with this game. [7/10]