Destiny 2: The Final Shape Review

With its character-driven story and gameplay enhancements at nearly every level, "The Final Shape" feels like what Destiny 2 has been striving to become all along. It's impossible to consider this eighth expansion without reflecting on the last decade, encompassing the seven other Destiny 2 expansions and the original four Destiny expansions. This journey, marked by Bungie's experiments, recalibrations, and adjustments, culminates in The Final Shape. While previous additions haven't always consistently built towards a definitive vision, there has been a clear, mostly positive evolution, shaping what The Final Shape means for Destiny as a whole.

A Leap Forward in Every Way

I've often noted high points in Destiny 2's journey, but The Final Shape is a leap, not just a step forward. Through its campaign, new destination, activities, and post-campaign story, The Final Shape embodies the original promise of a shared-world sci-fi fantasy shooter set in a distant future. This isn't just Destiny 2 at its best—this is Destiny 2 as it was always meant to be.

A Captivating Campaign

The story campaign plunges you into the Pale Heart of the Traveler to stop the Witness, Destiny 2's ultimate villain, from rewriting reality. Bungie has clearly learned from its consistently strong seasonal stories, focusing more on the humanity of the characters than confusing sci-fi concepts. The Final Shape pulls together the best elements of all Destiny 2 stories, setting clear stakes and motivations for the antagonist and focusing on Destiny 2's main cast as they head toward a potentially world-ending confrontation. It is easily the best story Destiny has ever told in an expansion, laying out the stakes and emotional weight, and setting players on a journey from point A to point B to a final showdown with the Witness.

The Pale Heart: A New Destination

The Pale Heart, located inside the Traveler, is a destination manifested from the memories and emotions of the people within it. This creates a melding of familiar locations from Destiny's history, recombined in strange ways or twisted by corruption. It offers a ton of different places to fight, run, and climb, providing new gameplay scenarios and combat encounters that feel fresh and interesting despite players doing more or less the same thing for the last 10 years.

Mechanically Intensive and Engaging Gameplay

The campaign is mechanically intensive, with big encounters featuring extra layers like toxic air requiring specific objects to gain a protective buff, or enemies dropping runes that correspond to locked doors. These elements, usually relegated to Destiny 2's tougher raids and dungeons, are simplified here for solo players but still complex and engaging, adding a cerebral layer to blasting through hordes of aliens. The sheer number of new and compelling mechanics in The Final Shape makes most activities seem interesting and different from what players have grown accustomed to.

Introducing the Dread

The Dread, a new enemy faction, adds several new enemy types to battles, rewriting the calculus of Destiny 2's firefights in significant ways. These enemies focus on debuffs that slow you down, freeze you, or yank you out of cover, making fighting them fraught with tension. They change the makeup of fights in significant and surprising ways, supporting a bunch of new challenges.

Prismatic Subclass: New Synergies

The Prismatic subclass combines powers from other subclasses, allowing you to create new synergies and find cool new ways to enjoy the existing sandbox. Though not as drastically new as previous subclasses, recombining Destiny 2's different powers and abilities feels great when you get the right mix. It doesn't drastically change the game but adds new perks for buildcrafting, giving you exciting new moments.

Character-Driven Storytelling

The campaign's standout feature is its focus on characters, centering them and engaging with their feelings and conflicts. Bungie trusts its worldbuilding and audience, expecting you to either know the characters or pick up dynamics from context. The Final Shape uses cutscenes, monologues, and conversations to push characterization to the forefront, making missions feel important and meaningful at every step.

Post-Campaign Excellence

The focus on character-building continues into additional story missions and activities in the Pale Heart. Leading up to The Final Shape's raid, Salvation's Edge, you work through individual stories with your most important allies, fleshing out their positions and personalities. These post-campaign moments are as rewarding from a story standpoint as they are fun to play through.

Engaging New Activities

The Pale Heart includes Overthrow, a multi-stage, escalating battle against enemy forces with a variety of objective-based activities. It's highly engaging and rewarding, whether played solo or with a team. Dual Destiny, a special Exotic mission requiring two players, is a standout experience, demanding communication and teamwork akin to Destiny's raids.

Salvation's Edge and Excision

The Final Shape's raid, Salvation's Edge, demands a high degree of cooperation and communication, delivering smart new mechanics, tough fights, and beautiful locations. It also introduces Excision, the game's first 12-player PvE activity, giving an appropriately over-the-top feel to the story's climax.

A Bright Future

The Final Shape improves on nearly every aspect of Destiny 2, from combat design and inventive enemies to puzzles and platforming, to creative encounters and fun abilities. It centers its best characters in the campaign, giving you a reason to care about this war and what it’s doing to them. The future of Destiny 2 has perhaps never been less clear, but if Bungie can maintain the excellence of design and clarity of focus demonstrated in The Final Shape, that future has never been more exciting.