REVIEW: Destiny 2: The Final Shape

June 27, 2024

Written by Donald Duong

The stakes for Destiny 2’s latest expansion, The Final Shape, could not be any higher. This is the culmination of the Light and Darkness Saga, a capstone on the past decade of Destiny content. Moreso, it comes after a year where the game – and Bungie – were on uncertain footing: The previous Lightfall expansion was widely panned, and amidst sagging engagement numbers Bungie laid off around 100 of its employees. This expansion could very well shape Destiny’s and Bungie’s future.

Thankfully, The Final Shape is one of the best instalments in Destiny’s history.

The Witness, a being of pure Darkness merged from an ancient civilisation, has spent aeons pursuing The Traveller, our mysterious paracausal sphere which has sown Light around the universe. At last, the Witness has caught up and it has embedded itself in the Traveller. The Witness now aims to use the Traveller’s powers to eliminate all life, calcifying the universe into the titular Final Shape. It is up to you and the Vanguard to travel into the Pale Heart of the Traveller to stop The Witness and save the universe.

For longtime Destiny players, the story provides a deeply satisfying conclusion to this conflict between light and darkness. We get answers to questions posed many years ago, as well as a new look at these massive god-like forces that have loomed over us since the earliest days of Destiny. And then there’s the final showdown, which is appropriately over the top and fist-pumpingly cathartic, which leads on to a finale that brought many veterans to tears.

Just as compelling are the smaller stories told amongst your Vanguard party members. At the forefront of this is Cayde-6, who was killed back in 2018’s Forsaken expansion, but has been brought back to life in the Pale Heart. Though he was originally the comic relief character, his story arc in The Final Shape is poignant and emotional; both the game’s characters and the player are given the time to deal with the ramifications of his unexpected resurrection.

Indeed, Cayde-6’s story is one of many amongst the Vanguard underpinned by grief and loss. The highlight of these is Zavala, who is not only reckoning with the death of his family and his friends, but also the loss of faith in the Traveller, his only beacon in the constant darkness. There is a cruel real-life layer to Zavala’s story: His original voice actor, Lance Reddick, unexpectedly passed away in 2023 and is now voiced by Keith David, who does an impressive job trying to replace the irreplaceable.

It is these smaller stories which present a human (and Awoken, and Exo) side to the universal scale of the main campaign. The storytelling and writing is some of the best we’ve seen in Destiny’s run. It allows even newcomers to have some emotional stakes amidst the wall of Proper Nouns as they embark on their mission.

No matter your experience level going into this expansion, it is one of the most cleanly structured campaigns in the franchise. The Witness’ monolith looms in the horizon throughout, and all momentum is directed forward towards this goal. It’s a simple yet effective trick. There isn’t even a deviation to grind power levels. In previous expansions, the campaign would come to a screeching halt as the game demanded that you increase your light level through ritual content such as Strikes or competitive multiplayer. These segments always derailed any narrative momentum and made the experience worse as a result. The Final Shape does away with this forced stop; the only detour is to visit the Pale Heart’s lost sectors, and even these are contextualised with story and bookeneded with narrative beats.

The missions themselves are as varied and interesting as we’ve seen in the franchise. There isn’t a token vehicle sequence like previous campaigns, but it wasn’t missed when there is such a focus on unique mechanics. One recurring motif involves glyphs: locked doors have four auras in front of them, each with a mysterious glyph, with the aim being to kill certain carrier enemies which will confirm the correct auras to step in to unlock the door. This may read as basic, but the campaign effectively incorporates it into the missions, weaving them in with other mechanics or higher-stakes battles. These add flavour to the first-person platforming and first-class gunplay, and ease you into endgame Destiny content such as exotic missions, dungeons and raids.

The campaign also manages to lift the already-astronomic bar of Bungie’s production values. The visual design has consistently been the highlight of the Destiny franchise; however, even on fantastical sci-fi planets and biomes, there has still been a grounding in reality. The Pale Heart, however, is a reflection of the memories and unconscious thoughts of those that inhabit it – including The Witness, which is depicted in increasingly abstract and discordant environments. The level design in the later stages can be genuinely unsettling.

One of the new tools to undertake all this is the Prismatic class. Well…it isn’t strictly a new class, rather it incorporates elements from the other five classes. You can, for instance, have a Strand grenade, a Solar melee and an Arc super all in one character. In theory, the buildcrafting potential has been blown open, but in practice the Prismatic class is the epitome of ‘jack of all trades, master of none’. It has augmented my previous Punch Hunter build, but it hasn’t shaken up my years-long loop of punch-dodge-punch. It’s even worse for Titans: From all reports, their Prismatic options are strictly worse than most existing builds. Nonetheless, the building blocks are there, and Prismatic may be buffed into relevance in the future.

Indeed, the future is looking bright for Destiny after The Final Shape. All the components of the campaign – the cathartic culmination of the narrative, the smaller heartfelt stories, the very structure of the missions and the Pale Heart – combine to create one of the best experiences in the series’ history, one worthy of the saga finale.

Back in 2014 at Destiny’s launch, Bungie released a collaboration with Paul McCartney, a song called ‘Hope for the Future’. It was naff, it was half-baked, and yet it has stuck in my head to this day. I could have said the same thing about the game itself, especially during its lows. However now, after this expansion, my hopes for Destiny’s future have never been higher.

RATING: 5/5 [Masterpiece]

Destiny 2: The Final Shape was reviewed on PC with a code provided by the publisher.
Follow Donald Duong into the future at @An_Bear.