‘Destiny 2: The Final Shape’ Full Review – An Unparalleled Achievement

While I wrote up my thoughts on the initial campaign missions about a day after Destiny 2 released its huge Final Shape expansion, I knew that was not going to be my full review. There was so much left to come including a raid, a finale mission and secrets that have just been revealed as of this week. But now with it all on the table, it’s time to do a full breakdown of everything.

This is the best expansion Destiny 2 has ever made. Possibly the best campaign story, the best destination, the best raid and would you look at that, maybe the best exotic mission they’ve ever done. I remember hearing about how, internally, Bungie wanted, needed this to blow all other expansions away, even The Taken King and Forsaken, and it simply seemed impossible. It was not impossible. They did it. Here’s how:

The Campaign – This is the part I covered already, but Bungie crafted an excellent narrative focused on the core three Vanguard members, plus new addition Crow, in addition to our own Guardian. They managed to do something I thought would be impossible, making Cayde’s appearance important and impactful rather than a marketing gimmick, and turning The Witness into a compelling, hate-able villain you want badly to see dead.

The missions themselves are excellent, starting perhaps a bit slow with a “reassemble the scattered team” intro, but by the end? The final two missions in particular are certainly the best the series has ever done in a story campaign. I am not sure there is anything in the story itself that matches the “Savathun and the Traveler” moment of The Witch Queen, but on the whole, this is the better story, especially once you get to the finale mission that was unlocked later.

Prismatic – The ultimate fusion of all our Guardian powers has been a blast to play with, and that has only escalated further as of this week with the release of exotic class items combining two perks at once.

I have not taken Prismatic off any of my subclasses since the season launched, and it feels like every day the community is coming up with some new, creative use of all the different potential combos of skills, aspects and fragments that are very fun to build and test. It feels like it’s still evolving as everyone gets deeper into it, and the unlock process was far better than what we saw from Strand and Stasis in the past.

The Raid – Easily the wildest raid Bungie has ever done with a World’s First race that blew by past ones’ lengths as players struggled heavily with certain segments, namely encounters one and four. The raid race was eventually sort of a bust with top players blacking out their screens so no one could actually watch, but that’s not on Bungie.

The raid itself is brilliantly creative, with that infamous encounter four especially one of the most mechanically impressive things Bungie has ever done. It’s not exactly going to be the most accessible to the average players before some serious strategies are learned, but it makes perfect sense for this to be the most insane raid the game has gotten after all this time, and that’s precisely what they delivered.

The Finale Mission – Easily the best moment in the game’s history. A Helm’s Deep moment from Zavala in the intro, the rush of every NPC we’ve ever played with into the mission, and then the game’s first 12 Guardian assault on The Witness and his forces in total, utter chaos. NPCs warping in to give us relic weapons, 12-man DPS phases in front of the monolithic Witness. Fun, but not actually difficult so that every player can experience it.

The ending cutscenes are just…out of this world. (Spoilers) Cayde’s sacrifice to revive our ghost is the most emotional moment of the entire series, and Crow’s ascension as Hunter Vanguard is the resolution of a storyline that’s essentially been a decade in the making. I cannot think of how this finale could have been better handled.

The Pale Heart – We’ll circle back to the location where all of this takes place, The Pale Heart, which is definitely my favorite destination Bungie has done. That’s both in terms of its aesthetics, which goes from paradise gardens to hand-based horror deeper into the Witness’s corruption, and I have never stopped to take so many screenshots in my life. But past the visuals, the Overthrow system and using the space as a solo instance is the most engaged I’ve been with a patrol mode since Escalation Protocol. A really stellar setup and a brilliant endgame location for all of the above to take place.

The Exotic Mission – But wait, there’s more! As of this reset, players did a Whisper-like patrol quest to unlock a Whisper-like secret mission, Dual Destiny, which is used to get new exotic class items. The forced-duo mission is extremely creative, the first that forces you to work with one partner alone, but with mechanics that are easy enough to eventually speedrun the thing, provided you’re communicating.

I know that some decry the mandated multiplayer, but it is easily one of the best exotic quests we’ve seen from Bungie and I appreciate the risk they took experimenting with a PvE concept we have quite literally not seen in ten years. I want to see more like it in the future.

This is as close to perfect as a Destiny expansion can get. If my biggest complaint is “I don’t love the new shader icons” and “the Ritual Pathfinder system should be tweaked,” I think we’re doing well. Instead, The Final Shape represents a stunning finale for a plot arc a decade long that’s not just a huge event for Destiny itself, but the entire industry, as I simply do not think that has another comparison point in the history of gaming, provided you’ve been on this ride for this long. Bungie left everything on the field and delivered on all fronts.

It’s a 10/10. The most emphatic 10/10 I can give.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.