Destiny 2: The Final Shape Review

Regularly playing Destiny for the past decade, through all its unforgettable highs and painful lows, has been a tremendous leap of faith for me and my fellow Guardians. This uneven saga hasn’t always felt like it was leading somewhere worth following, but with Destiny 2: The Final Shape, our faith has been rewarded at last. The campaign ends a tale that started way back in 2014 on a high note, the new Prismatic subclasses are exactly the badass shock to the system its sandbox needed, the fresh set of weapons are a literal blast to mess around with, and the fearsome Dread enemy faction add welcome variety and difficulty to the battlefield. Even the raid, which I only managed to best after days of getting my teeth kicked in, is one of the most impressive and devilishly challenging activities developer Bungie has ever produced. Destiny 2 might still be quite messy, with its hodgepodge of long running issues and the Milky Way’s most confusing RPG systems and menus, but it’s also more fun to play than it's ever been right now, and that’s just about enough to bring a tear to this veteran player’s eye.

If you’re arriving extremely late to the space opera party, The Final Shape is the latest and greatest expansion in Bungie’s ongoing, magically-infused multiplayer FPS. As an immortal and homicidally-inclined Guardian, I’ve had the privilege of defending humanity against all manner of alien threats over the years, from evil sorcerer insects to an extremely boring robot army, all while looting cool weapons and armor, unlocking sweet space magic abilities, leveling up, and juggling so many currencies, menus, and ill-explained RPG systems that your head is liable to explode Arc of the Covenant-style if you don’t have a friend to initially walk you through it all. After seven years of expansions, patches, and seasonal updates, Destiny 2 has grown into one of the best and twelve of the worst games you’ll ever play, all wrapped into a live-service package unlike anything else out there. It’s great; I hate it.

The Final Shape has the unenviable task of concluding the main story of good vs. evil that’s haphazardly played out since the first Destiny. Although that story has mostly been a veritable jambalaya of overused tropes, sci-fi gobbledygook, and lore so convoluted one player had to make a ten hour YouTube video to explain it, it occasionally brings the heat with some genuinely compelling characters and meaningful moments, like those found in 2022’s The Witch Queen. Thankfully, The Final Shape counts itself among those rare instances of solid storytelling, finally focusing on the big bad that’s been alluded to from the very beginning for a showdown with the fate of the universe on the line.

That archenemy comes in the form of The Witness, and although I wasn’t impressed with the character’s initial reveal or the setup that’s taken place over the past two years leading up to this finale, The Final Shape’s campaign, packed with hard-hitting cutscenes that explain a whole lot, finally sold me on this existential horror. I won’t go into details to spare you any spoilers, but The Witness ended up being a much more interesting villain than I’d anticipated, the threat humanity is facing finally feels real instead of like some distant shadow we have an appointment with, and I’m thrilled we’re finally getting some actual answers to the questions we’ve had all these years.

That said, there are still plenty of points in The Final Shape where Destiny’s usually sloppier storytelling continues in that tradition, like when the middle act pivots to some drama with the stoic and stalwart Commander Zavala, who suddenly (and with only the scarcest whiff of justification) becomes an emotional loose cannon to add a bit of unearned tension into the mix. There’s also some side stories with obscure characters returning from seasons you might not have played or lore entries you probably didn’t read, which mostly pulls focus away from the conflict at hand without adding a whole lot – the kind of par-for-the-course wonky Destiny storytelling that’s irked me since 2014.

But The Final Shape manages to succeed in its most crucial mission: actually delivering a satisfying ending to this epic tale, and I’m genuinely shocked by how well they managed to pull that off. There’s still plenty of loose threads and unanswered questions that will presumably be addressed in whatever comes next for the series, but we finally got a proper conclusion to the main plot we’ve been following all these years, with some really epic fights and emotional moments wrapping things up much more neatly than I thought possible.

The levels you’ll play and new areas you’ll explore while enjoying the campaign are also some of my favorites yet. Delving into the body of a God, you’ll explore The Pale Heart of the Traveler, a bizarre reality where one’s memories, desires, and fears manifest themselves in the physical world. What starts as an idyllic but peculiar world begins to shift into a horrific landscape, as the twisted wishes of The Witness corrupt it, with a bunch of gross hands and faces filling up the environment. That gives it an uncomfortable and surreal quality that’s a massive departure from the mostly grounded areas our Guardians have visited so far. It’s also fantastic that we finally got a map that isn’t just a loop with a few small areas to explore, instead favoring a fairly linear layout that feels like traveling from the Shire to Mount Doom on an epic quest to put the world right. I’m still exploring its nooks and crannies, shooting and looting everything I can find, but it’s already easily my favorite destination to date.

Similarly, its missions follow in the fantastic footsteps of The Witch Queen by adding light raid mechanics and challenging combat encounters, which provide more than the mindless shooting hallways that Destiny sometimes finds itself reduced to. In one level, you’ll hop between two realities to solve a puzzle in order to kill a massive boss, and in another you’ll battle to the top of some icy peaks, taking advantage of gale winds to propel yourself across massive gaps. Each level does a great job of teaching you a new mechanic here and there, slowly adding to the complexity of gunplay and puzzle solving, until somehow you’re juggling half a dozen things at once by the final battle, taking out an army of foes in one of the most badass showdowns so far.

One of the things that makes these missions so enjoyable is the first new enemy faction Destiny has gotten in six years, called the Dread. Even the two other enemy factions added in previous Destiny expansions were mostly remixes of existing enemies, so one could argue that the Dread are the first fully original faction so far, and what a difference that makes. The Grim, batlike creatures that fly around pelting you with blaster fire and screeching at you to slow your movement are overwhelming in large groups, while the Husk are melee bruisers who rush in with deadly blades and send explosive creatures flying at you if you don’t kill them in a specific way. Most of these additions are completely awesome, injecting some desperately needed variety into a sandbox that has stagnated over time. That said, there are a few that are less inspired: Attendants and Weavers, for example, appear almost as reskinned enemies from an existing race and pelt you with irritating abilities, including one that makes you move extremely slowly for way too long, which resulted in more than a few deaths that felt a bit cheap. Still, these are minor qualms I have with a faction that’s been a ton of fun to fight.

As always, the latest Destiny expansion comes with a whole arsenal of unique toys to loot and bring to bear upon your foes, and The Final Shape has some really nice additions. The Call, a small sidearm that shoots mini rockets, is absolutely phenomenal to goof around with, while Lost Signal is a grenade launcher that shoots a smattering of explosives that do damage over time. My personal favorite new item is an exotic called Hazardous Propulsion that launches a flurry of missiles from your back whenever you use your class ability, which has gotten me out of so many tight spots lately – I’m completely obsessed. Destiny has always been renowned for its gunplay, even when other aspects of the shooter have come up short, so none of this is particularly surprising. But even for a game that’s known for its great weapons and armor, The Final Shape is a standout in what it offers. They really cooked on this one, folks!

The Final Shape also adds to Destiny’s space magic repertoire with a new subclass called Prismatic, which allows you to mix and match certain Light and Darkness abilities found in other subclasses to create interesting combinations. It then adds some new abilities of its own on top of that, from grenades that combine different damage types and status effects in order to do things like suspend enemies in the air and electrocute everything in the vicinity, to new super abilities that might let you throw giant exploding axes onto the battlefield, then pick them up to wreak havoc on the enemy. Being able to wield a mix of elements and abilities that were previously locked behind their own specific classes is a major game changer, and takes buildcrafting to the next level in terms of customization and playing around with different possibilities. After many hours of trying out the subclasses and unlocking all the different customization options, I still feel like I’m only just scratching the surface of what’s possible with this super unique and deeply configurable new toolset – that goes a long way in a live-service shooter that can often feel stagnant after so many years of lobbing the same sparkly magic abilities.

The badass Prismatic toolkits couldn’t have come at a better time, either, because you’ll sure need them in The Final Shape’s raid, Salvation’s Edge, which serves as the ultimate test of your skills, your buildcrafting prowess, and the weapons and armor you’ve looted. This raid is the most difficult challenge Bungie has ever created, and after sweating it out for over 25 hours in recent days to get my first clear, it easily tops my all-time raid list. The mechanics are complex and require intense precision and communication from those on your team, the constantly spawning enemies push your skills to the limit at nearly every moment, and for the first time in Destiny history, there’s no room for a few players to take a backseat and get carried by their friends – if you don’t have all six members of your fireteam playing their role to perfection, you’ll find yourself repeatedly and utterly crushed by the enemy. As someone who really enjoys a challenge, mastering each encounter of this raid was a peak Destiny experience for me.

Finally, there’s the episodic content called “Echoes” that recently started rolling out, alongside more optional activities like Exotic Quests, which aim to keep you engaged well beyond the expansion’s central campaign. The stuff that’s currently available as part of the first post-Final Shape episode mostly follows the same tired model of running matchmade activities every week to unlock small bits of story and new loot, but the Exotic Quests and other surprises that have been added have really impressed me. I doubt any of this piecemeal content will keep me invested in the same way The Final Shape’s campaign and raid have, but it’s definitely a step up from the previous seasonal model that opted for more frequent, less meaty updates.