Destiny 2 Lightfall just a stopgap? The beginning of the end is weakening

Too bad. Bungie has promoted the recently released Destiny 2 expansion with the usual epic trailers and created the almost obligatory hype. But Lightfall can’t quite live up to this anticipation and even left me a little disappointed.

A prelude just for the sake of the prelude

Anime viewers know this. The story is just getting really interesting and suddenly the story wanders off. A filler episode. You watch it for the sake of completeness, after all you love the series and have been loyal to it for years, but you would rather do without this filler material.

That’s how it felt for me with Lightfall. Except that this isn’t a small weekly episode, it’s the big, expensive content that Bungie Destiny 2 donates only once a year and promotes with appropriate enthusiasm.

Most recently, with the Witch Queen, Bungie easily managed to live up to the hype that they built up around the expansion. Overall gameplay and story felt right and rewarding. Each bit of story advanced the Guardians.

It is precisely this important point that Lightfall fails to meet. The campaign is just the prelude to the final installment in the saga of light and shadow, The Final Shape, and offers little fodder for what is actually a great story.

Lightfall would not have been necessary for the story

In the campaign we learn little that is new. The witness, the mysterious antagonist, is rarely in the limelight and rarely speaks more than two sentences. All the questions that have been piling up in recent DLCs will remain after the campaign ends. So Lightfall doesn’t really get us any further.

We end up in motley Neomuna, where we work directly with the residents without complications, which seemed a bit unrealistic to me. The new cloud walkers also seem a bit too relaxed and funny for the fact that things are about to get really serious.

We also get to know the new strand focus and use it against the challenging opponents. Gameplay-wise, everything here is solid so far, just not particularly motivating.

At least the strand focus is fun. Unfortunately, after defeating the last boss, the cooldown hammer hits our newly acquired skills and we have to wait well over a minute to swing through the air with the grappling hook.

As a Warlock, I can summon green homing minions, Hunters brandish a green whip frantically, and Titans gain poisonous green bladed hands that deal serious damage. Design-wise, Strang would have fitted better into the Witch-Queen expansion and looks a bit out of place in the neon city.

The beginning of the end isn’t an asset to Destiny 2 – at least when it comes to the campaign. Luckily, players who have been around for a while know that Bungie can do much better and can still provide many breathtaking moments with the final expansion.

It’s the little things

Even if the campaign isn’t entirely convincing, Bungie has come up with a lot of little things that make life easier for the guardians and also feel good and right in practice.

For example the new mod system, which gives you free access to all mods and correspondingly extremely flexible builds. Saving loadouts is also a welcome change.

But that doesn’t really make up for the mediocre campaign, which can only bridge the time to the real finale with good gameplay but irrelevant history.