What's Good About Destiny 2 Lightfall's Campaign
The new Destiny 2 expansion, Lightfall is out now. Aside from feeling like my life has a purpose again, I’m taking a different approach to my writing on Destiny. For the next few weeks, I’m gonna be talking about the campaign, the new season and Strand in separate posts. This works out because I get to go more in-depth with specific parts of the expansion launch. And because Strand is mostly time-gated and won’t have all of its best toys unlocked until after next weekend when the new raid goes live. So it works out. Anyways, without any further ado, let’s get this show on the road.
(There are obviously going to be some spoilers, so don’t read this if you haven’t finished the campaign or are at the final mission)
Picking up almost immediately following the end of Season of the Seraph, the Black Fleet and the Witness have finally arrived in our system to fuck our shit up. And it’s not just them, as they are backed up by his newest Disciple, the deposed Cabal Emperor Calus and his Shadow Legion, his Loyalist army infused with The same technology as the Black Fleet.
From there and following an interception of Earth's forces and the Black Fleet, you find yourself at the until recently undiscovered Neptunean city of Neomuna, a neon-soaked metropolis that trucked along as if the Collapse never went down. The main objective is to aid the Cloudstriders, Neomuna’s cybernetically enhanced protectors that are a mashup of Robocop and the Silver Surfer, in protecting an artefact of importance called the Veil.
As an opening chapter, Lightfall does a decent enough job to get the ball rolling on the year’s story. It leaves just enough stuff unanswered that the game and I assume the seasonal content is also going to cover over the next few months. From a tone standpoint, I don’t like it as much as The Witch Queen. While that is a bit unfair to say because Witch Queen is the best campaign in Destiny’s History, Lightfall just didn’t hit as hard for me. But I still like it.
I will say that the individual characters are still a strong point. While we mainly interact with Osiris this time around, you also interact with two of these Cloudstriders a lot over the course of the campaign, Rohan and Nimbus. Rohan is the grizzled veteran and mainly serves as the straight man of the two and Nimbus is the dipshit rookie out to prove themselves. It’s a nice contrast that shows the differences and similarities between us Guardians. And while I’ll admit that I haven’t exactly been big on Osiris post-Savathun bamboozling, he still offers a great mentoring role when it comes to the development of our Strand Abilities over the course of the story. And while I’ll admit to not liking them nearly as much as Savatun as antagonists, Calus and the Witness are great. It’s our first time seeing either of them in the flesh and their dynamic is definitely one that steals the show whenever they show up. The latter in particular because they were introduced at the literal end of the Witch Queen’s campaign and are so…unlike anything we’ve seen in Destiny at this point. I know the word “alien” gets thrown around a lot in contexts like this, but the Witness does feel genuinely alien.
But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. The way Lightfall introduces Strand into Destiny is an admirable approach, but kind of feels a bit shoehorned in at times. I’m not saying it’s bad, but I wish the onboarding was a bit smoother. I was under the impression that we’d unlock it early on and get more and more of its tools as time went on as opposed to specific parts of a few missions and an entire mission on top of it. I could see what it was trying to do, but it didn’t entirely work for me. I will say that it’s better than Stasis where you didn’t get the class until after you completed Beyond Light’s campaign and then have to grind out all of Stasis’s components without much of a tutorial to speak of. But that’s my main thing about how the narrative has been handled so far. Now onto the actual missions
Like Witch Queen before it, Lightfall has an eight mission campaign that comes in Classic and Legendary difficulty modes. You find yourself fighting the Shadow Legion across Neptune with encounters with the Vex to break up the monotony. The curve of difficulty is tuned differently in that you deal with less bulky enemies when going it alone, which I appreciate. But it also leads to the campaign in Lightfall feeling like it needs to compensate by throwing way more enemies at you. Compared to Savathun’s brood, you fight Shadow Legion by what feels like the dozens here. A rude awakening if you tried to tackle I underleveled like I did. It’s a me thing, I know but I like to do stuff like this as self-imposed challenge runs because I’m a masochist.
While the Cabal you fight are largely still the same aside from some having Pyramid tech backpacks that also make force fields, the big standout was the Tormentors. The Tormentors are boss level enemies commanded by the Witness. They are big, hulking monsters that use equally big scythes and void suppression abilities to ruin your day. As a solo player, they are fucking terrifying and I love them. I felt like I needed to constantly think about my placement on the battlefield and what weapons and abilities I had when facing them, it was great. It could be a bit much to fight multiple of them at the same time, but that’s what freezing them with Stasis is for. They’re ultimately what I wanted the Hive Guardians to be: ultra-tough combatants that would get me to re-think my usual tactics.
Lastly, I wanna talk about Neomuna itself for a second. Its name is derived from the Korean word for Excess and it shows. The city is dripping in neon-soaked lights, futuristic skyscrapers, and a sense of Sci-Fi mundanity that’s almost foreign to Destiny’s usual Space Fantasy fare. It’s an interesting glimpse of what humanity could have achieved had the Collapse not hit them in the metaphorical jaw. It gives me New Mombasa vibes, a city that’s occupied by alien invaders patrolling the streets, but unlike with the Rookie in ODST, you won’t be sneaking around. There’s also a lost sector set inside a Neomuni arcade called the Thrilladrome and it’s probably the coolest thing in the city.
As far as first impressions go, Lightfall does a decent enough job of setting things up for the year to come. While its campaign wasn’t as engaging as The Witch Queen, it sets out to serve as a good experience and introduce new mechanics in the process. I’ll be back next week to talk about the current season, Season of Defiance to see how it’s shaping up.
