TLDR review of Destiny 2: If you loved Destiny 1 right up until the very end, you’ll probably love Destiny 2 as well. If, like me, you eventually grew bored of Destiny, there’s not much here to erase that stale feeling. It all feels very familiar.

I got to level 11 and visited all 4 of the new environments, so clearly this isn’t a thorough review: keep that in mind.

Basically Destiny 2 is Destiny 1 with new maps/story. They gave us 4 new locations to play in but took away the old 4. The same enemies return though here and there you’ll encounter a new type within a species, but it’s nothing earth shattering. For instance the Vex have a new unit called Fanatic who explode when shot. They’re basically Corrupted Thralls for the Vex.

The story starts out really strong and impactful but that quickly fizzles into a series of “Go here and flip that switch…oh wait, now there’s another switch.. oops and one more.” quests. Lots of pseudo-platforming. Environments that feel very familiar. Encounters that do too. So when you’re facing the Hive at some point there WILL be a wave of thrall screaming and running at you.

The big game play change is in the guns. Now your primary and secondary slots hold the same styles of guns, except primary is for purely ballistic weapons and secondary is for guns with elemental effects. So depending on drops (at the start before you really have much choice) you might be rolling with a ballistic auto-rifle as a primary and an auto-rifle with fire damage as a secondary. It’s kind of dull, IMO. Elemental effects do seem enhanced. If you match the element of your round with the element of an enemy’s shields you’ll tear those shields down really quickly.

But that means sniper rifles, grenade launches, shotguns and swords all go in the “special” slot and have very limited ammo. As someone who enjoys using a sniper rifle while heading to an objective and switching to a shotgun when I get there, this sucks. Switching loses the ammo in the gun and there’s not much to begin with.

On the other hand I feel like they improved beta issues with grenades being under-powered and special ability cool-downs being too long.

And the open world areas do have a lot more to do in them and I found them more interesting and fun than the Story Missions. This is fine since in the long run you’ll probably spend more time in the open world than re-running story missions.

I haven’t done any strikes yet; I’m sure they’re still fun but for the most part I play Destiny solo.

I’m the one guy who misses having to take Engrams back to the Cryptarch. I never had a reason to visit “the Farm” (the new social area) in my time playing and when I was there, only a handful of players were hanging around. There’s no reason to go there now.

For me, the minute-to-minute experience of fighting the same Fallen, Hive, Vex, Cabal and Taken enemies that I fought for years in Destiny 1 just doesn’t feel that exciting. I wish they’d given us a new race to fight. Maybe they did and I just haven’t gotten to it, but I don’t think so. I don’t have buyer’s remorse or anything, but I put Destiny 2 down because I’d had enough of it for now. It was fine. Nothing all that special for me.