Destiny 2: Beyond Light (2020) review
Strong fundamentals keep Destiny's latest metamorphosis feeling familiar.
If Destiny 2: Shadowkeep set the template for where a newly-independent Bungie wanted to take their lucrative science fiction looter-shooter next, Beyond Light sees them double down on what worked, sand away some of the sharper edges and – more or less – stay the course. It’s probably not going to surprise you but there's a good chance I'll still manage to lure you back in to the series' core conceit of loot, shoot, repeat.
In some ways, what follows is less of a typical review and more of an annual report. The broad-strokes formula and moment-to-moment gameplay that won me over when Destiny 2 first came to the PC haven’t exactly undergone a reinvention. Beyond Light is largely more of the same. The gunplay remains tight and while the series’ motley crue of enemy designs are a little overly familiar at this point, they’re still a delight to blast away at.
This time around, the Fallen take center stage amid the encroachment of the long-awaited and consistently-cryptic force known as the Darkness. Former foes become allies in the face of a new threat and, as opposed to their portrayal in earlier expansions, Beyond Light actually goes out of its way to give your insectoid adversaries a bigger role to play. More specifically, the campaign centers the character of Variks and draws out some of the more intriguing subtext found in of the series lore.
Without getting too into the weeds, the main hook here is that – for the first time – you’re forced to fight fire with fire. In order to take on a new foe armed with the power of the Darkness, you’ve got to embrace it.
Though utterly predictable in light of the larger narrative train tracks that Bungie have been laying out for the past three years, this twist still manages to feel like a refreshing riff on the usual formula.
Through darkness – or Stasis as it is also known – all sorts of things become possible. Rounding out the previous trio of Void, Arc and Solar, each of Destiny’s three playable classes now has a handful of crunchy new Stasis-based abilities at their disposal.
To me, the most tactically playful of these is a new grenade that creates large crystals that can both encompass and trap enemies or act as sort of spontaneous cover. Across the board, Bungie’s bag of new Stasis-based tricks injects new life into the somewhat stale status quo that preceded it.
Even if the developers are clearly having some teething issues, the arrival of Stasis does a lot to help make Beyond Light feel like a dawn of a new era’ for the series. Even so, that vibe is undercut by the aging context in which these fresh new mechanics present themselves. Traversing the slopes of Europa – Beyond Light’s most-visible addition to the game – sometimes felt a little too similar to the cratered topography found in Shadowkeep.
Of course, Beyond Light doesn’t just add content to the Destiny experience. It also subtracts from it.
In a move that’s earned Bungie comparisons to Disney, the team behind the game are locking away a significant amount of older content with the arrival of the game’s latest expansion. Locales like Mars, Mercury, Io and Titan have been removed outright, as have a considerable amount of the guns, quests and end-game activities.
This maneuver raises a ton of really thorny questions. On one hand, it’s a bold measure to try and reel back in the bloat that’s been incurred by three years of expansions and seasonal content that gradually expanded what Destiny 2 offered at launch by leaps and bounds.
On the other, a lot of labor went into that content. Bungie’s attempts here to create a sense of artificial scarcity to the content that’s in the game represent a distressing escalation of the video game industry’s prickly relationship with preservationists – not to mention the artists, designers and developers who actually worked on and built this content.
In any case, as someone who stopped playing Destiny 2 regularly because of the overwhelming number of end-game tasks on my to-do list, this streamlining was something I did appreciate – though I remain irked by how much of Destiny’s exotic quests aren’t all that solo-friendly regardless.
The Bottom Line
The shift here by Bungie towards a more ephemeral kind of end-game feels like an uncertain experiment but the new content and mechanics brought by Beyond Light make it a great excuse to jump back into the action for both regulars and relapsers alike.
Fergus Halliday
Fergus Halliday
Fergus Halliday
