The game plays like your classic MMORPG, most quests are fodder with dialog you can snooze through. If this game has meaningful lore somewhere I guess it's behind some hidden scavenger hunt mechanic.

Movement is a special case, being able to move uniquely and awkwardly where sometimes you'll get all the height or distance you need and other times, nope.

The combat is where the game shines, shooting is as polished as any shooter should be, there's a nice variety of neat and useful weapons. Most enemies are pretty basic with some minor tricks so there's plenty requirement not to be careless, especially when you get to bossier enemies.

Abilities are like a joke, you have'em but 99% of the time you won't use them and if you even think about choosing one of the other ability sets you'll be "pleasantly" surprised to discover they're just as lackluster as the rest. Beyond emergency situations it feels like they shouldn't exist. (I can't even decide if that's a good or bad thing.)

Overall the game just feels cheap, the base game was really lacking to begin with, the majority of the content isn't worth going back to, the actual story feels too spread out between filler, and now that you're boosted ahead in gear-score they don't even want you acknowledging the beginning of the game. It has the true mark of a Korean-MMO, having no clear path so you are always wondering how they're going to ruin the content or progression for people next. Most often for new players.

Feels good to shoot waves of things in this game while you ignore the characters blathering on about some poorly explained, context-free mess of cosmic stories and listen to a podcast instead.

Truly, if you didn’t play Destiny 1 the narrative here is indecipherable nonsense. The game doesn’t even tell you what missions out of the gazillion available missions you’re supposed to do next to advance the “main story.”

But the guns do feel good to shoot, that much is true.

Excellent looter shooter with one of the most interesting fictional universes I've ever experienced. Unfortunately, this game is mismanaged. Deeply mismanaged. Plagued with bugs, pvp cheaters, and exploits that take away from some of its most fun encounters. I love this game, I love this franchise, I love the universe that Bungie has created. It could be a 5/5 if only it functioned better, but beneath the layers of bugs and mismanagement there is a game that is truly unique, and incredibly deep. The new player experience is simply not good, getting into the game now it is confusing and hard to learn. I reccomend you find a friend thats in already, and lacking any of those, convince some friends to give it a try with you. There is a lot of fun to be had, but it does require some patience to truly see why this game is special. The raids. 6 player, endgame activities, some of the best content I've ever played in a game, requiring a massive level of teamwork and coordination, and they are so, so rewarding to complete. If you've been driven away by the bad rep this franchise has, or by the shitty launch of this game, I recommend you give it another shot.

(Note: This review is updated as of Season of Arrivals. This also only covers The Red War + content that came with it, and the new player experience in general. Raid content not included, review will be updated as soon as I finish Leviathan)

Destiny 2 base content actually infuriates me, almost entirely due to how good it actually ends up getting on paper and in execution yet holds itself ludicrously back. Combine that with the general awful new player experience and quality of life of Destiny 2 current you have to go through, and it makes the start of this game stumble and fall on every step. Despite that, there is actually something I can see here, underneath the Activision-forced rubble.

The campaign is fine, and it also shows the biggest elements of how easily stuff can be fixed. Enemy designs are all solid conceptually, each with strengths and weaknesses that are intuitive to understand and majority of the projectiles can be dodged, which in theory would make for an elegant dance which combined with your pretty good toolkit of movement and gunplay should make for some awesome combat right? Nope, because almost all of the encounters are way way way too easy. Like it's actually pathetic how you can turn your brain off and not care through it all, enemies do peanut damage and it's not an issue of gear, enemies scale in the campaign with your power level. This leads to a lot of frustration in my mind because something as simple as tuning the damage could make the content legitimately super fun to go through, because the levels are solid enough and there's a lot of variety, even if the enemies are almost entirely from D1 with no new stuff otherwise.

The presentation in contrast is really great. The music slaps, and the art style and scenery is just excellent at bringing you in. I honestly found myself immersed at times, with certain highlights etched in my mind when I touched down on Nessus or drove in my vehicle through parts of the DMZ. I wish it was attached to a story that earns that presentation though, because the story is laughably rushed and incredibly shallow. Character quips range from decently humorous to groan worthy, and while personalities are distinct none of it rung with me because there's no engagement with them outside their already established importance. Story elements just happen with pacing way too fast for any scene to sell it either, the setting is totaled in front of you despite literally just getting into it. It expects you to care from Destiny 1, but from what I've been told it was hard to care that much too (you go from like, powerlessness to full power in the span of 10 minutes it's super sloppy).

And then there's the endgame/post-campaign content, most of which is a grindy mess. Strikes are just as easy if not worse than the campaign without the immersive attachment, basically hitting off a checklist of shoot thing and continue on with nothing else exciting to them. World and weapon quests are locked behind grindy enemy waves and the story of them are not worth the tedium you have to do to get them. Although, as a stark positive, the lore is actually rather incredible and I highly recommend reading or watching through it to get caught up on the setting. It's not a requirement at all but stuff like the origins of The Hive are raw as fuck.

But alas, this, and pretty much everything positive about Destiny 2 base, is buried under a mountain of new player experience that is simultaneously frustrating to parse and it is to go through. New player experience would have you go through old content without any context to finish New Light, and then have you do raids that DO NOT HAVE A ROULETTE AND YOU HAVE TO GET A TEAM FOR, leaving a lot of content, some of which is even considered the Good part of Destiny 2, behind a series of lacking QoL to get to. I for one haven't been able to get my group just to get one raid done, and LFG has been a nightmare.

Overall, I do not recommend playing Destiny 2. I enjoyed myself with The Red War and had my moments, but it's definitely not good and 100% worth skipping over.