Guardians Gone Wild – Destiny 2 PC Review

Pardon the mess and delay on this one, Destiny 2 is an addicting game. No, really it’s super easy to get wrapped up in this game, especially with friends of an equally dedicated mindset. If you were paying attention, I kind of referenced this last week with my Throwback Thursday post on Halo 2 and you likely noticed yesterday the topic of CmdrCluckCluck’s TBT was Destiny. We here at BAYOG have found this game to be a fantastic way to kill time and enjoy hanging with each other, and while we haven’t gotten the world record on soloing or speed running the raid, we’ve gotten it down to under a 3 hour process and that’s with lots of alcohol and stupidity. But there’s so much more to Destiny 2 than just end content, and thankfully so.

So I’ll start off with a quick synopsis of the story/main campaign of Destiny 2. I also want to preface the rest of the review with the fact that I never played original Destiny, and I was glad I didn’t for the very reasons CmdrCluckCluck listed above. The story was nigh non existent but I sure as hell enjoyed it here, gunning through in about 2 days, and even re-doing on a second character in a single day. It follows the story of your guy as a guardian that went to fight off the undefeated Red Legion and its leader Ghaul, only to be struck down when your light is stolen and the Traveler locked away. The whole reason why your guys were so awesome is because of the light, which the Traveler provided to you and your guardian buddies providing power and most of all, infinite respawns. One of the largest tropes you’ll ever find is the Halo-esque respawns upon death. Unlike most games, we actually have the story explaining why you come back and that’s why its absolutely horrifying for the guardians and their leaders, the Vanguard, when you suddenly can die again. In the story and in conversation you find remnants of guardians who without power or immortality simply die. Some rise to the occasion as heroes and others unfortunately find themselves wanting. My personal surprising favorite aspect is the vanguards, who are portrayed uniquely and best of all, very perfectly voice acted. The Titan voice actor is the stoic and borderline terrifying Lance Reddick, with the Warlock and Hunter vanguards being the combo from Firefly, Gina Torres and one of my personal favorite actors, Nathan Fillion.

The story ends with a fairly cliche we beat the bad guy and free the Traveler, but without it being boring or stale. Onto the gameplay itself, its all pretty damn good stuff with a very MMO-esque feel to it. The loot system follows the standard White-Green-Blue-Purple-Yellow tier of quality and a numerical item score gear rating metric. It even has a small yet fun enhancement system bumping up your score by 5 and the ability to “feed” in your items to upgrade lower level gear. The gearing up has you practicing with dungeons or “strikes” with your party or “fireteam,” later on doing weekly dungeons or “nightstrikewingtiercrawlerfalls,” and even heroic mode or “prestige.” These being three man events, we also have a six man raid or “raid” where we play through a series of encounters culminating in a final multi-phase boss fight. When originally doing it, we rocked a massive 8 hour marathon that we managed to narrow down to a reputable 3 hours.

We managed to get a much better timetable for PC gaming opposed to console gaming. My brother and his friends were unable to beat the final raid boss, Emperor Calus, and even got locked in at the lower 290’s for gear level. Beyond that the first expansion pack, Curse of Osiris, is only now coming out mid December, leaving console gamers pretty screwed over in general. The best part of this for me is again, the raid with me enjoying the end game with friends. Beyond that, I love that feeling of managing and organizing raids and it reminded me of plenty of times back in undergrad playing WoW. MrSok and I were the only ones who had seen the entire raid and even then it was weeks ago, but we co-led the 6 man run and I had a blast. This is coming from someone who used to run two or even three 25 man raids in the midst of Wrath of The Lich King, but it was still a good jump that made me contemplate getting back into the world of MMOs and raids. What do you think of Destiny 2? Enjoy that mix of FPS and MMO? Hate getting knocked back into a wall and wiping due to stupid bugs? Let me know in a comment and don’t forget to subscribe and leave a like otherwise you might get hit with an enrage timer!