Destiny 2 Lightfall review-in-progress: "There is no redeeming this campaign"

I've played Destiny 2: Lightfall for about 12 hours, so this review-in-progress is going to be my gut reaction to an expansion that's meant to be played over several months and reinvigorate the game for the year ahead. I've cleared the campaign on my main character, Warlock, and filled out my new Strand subclass with the Fragments that are currently available. I dipped my toes into the Season of Defiance loop and I'm working on a collection of post-campaign pursuits for loot and achievements. I'll tell you right now that those pursuits have some real powerlifting to do, because Lightfall is alarmingly bad so far.

FAST FACTS: Destiny 2 Lightfall

Release date: February 28, 2023
Platform(s): PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, Xbox One
Developer: In-house
Publisher: Bungie

Forget the bounds of Destiny 2 for a minute; Lightfall has one of the worst campaigns I've experienced in any video game in recent memory. How on god's green earth did we go from Destiny 2: The Witch Queen, handily the best story Bungie has ever produced, to this? Lightfall is a staggering downgrade that makes me worry for The Final Shape, the expansion meant to cap off the game's Light and Darkness saga in 2024. Big story arcs like this are about time and momentum, and Lightfall has simultaneously wasted everyone's time and all but killed the hard-won momentum from the past year. The Witch Queen demonstrated the true potential of Destiny's universe, but Lightfall repeats its greatest failures. It's infuriatingly random and inconsistent, and it flounders in vague MacGuffins during what should be clear and critical moments.

The Lightfall campaign

*Lightfall campaign spoilers ahead. You've been warned.*

Destiny 2: Lightfall whisks us to the Neptunian city of Neomuna in search of a mysterious device called the Veil. We'd very much like to find the Veil before the Witness and their newly appointed Darkness disciple Calus, as they plan on using it to connect to the Traveler. And that's... bad. Along the way, we partner up with the Cloudstrider warriors defending Neomuna from Calus' Shadow Legion and hordes of opportunistic Vex, though our greatest ally is the newfound power of Strand, Destiny 2's fifth subclass.

The campaign misses every single mark but one, and that's combat. I cleared Destiny 2: Lightfall on Legend difficulty with two friends and, like The Witch Queen's campaign, it felt good to play. Enemies are a reasonable threat and don't just fall over if you so much as look at them – a phenomenon seen in many activities which me and my friends call "baby mode." It was annoying to occasionally run into ultra high-level enemies on Neomuna that can just one-hit you if you get too close – I call this the Xenoblade Chronicles experience – but these hiccups were rare and admittedly kind of funny. As a sequence of combat encounters, Lightfall's campaign is adequate. I still wish the new Tormentors were more threatening, but at least they're a different enemy, and they could be a proper danger in harder activities.

All over the place

That is where the positives end. Every other component of the campaign is either uninteresting or actively harmful to the overall narrative. For starters, Neomuna is not a living, breathing cyberpunk city. There's basically nobody living here – the citizens were uploaded to the cloud, you see, and I wish I were kidding – and even enemies are disappointingly sparse. It's a lifeless and empty technological wasteland with little to no character or personality. I suppose that makes it the perfect home for all two of the Cloudstriders we meet: Rohan and Nimbus. Rohan is the grizzled veteran and Nimbus is the plucky, cocky youth, and I hold the deepest dislike for them both.

I hate the way Rohan's obviously foreshadowed death is presented as some great tragedy, not just because I don't care about him, but because I didn't even have time to begin to care about him. My guy, I care more about the Exotic machine gun you left behind, and it's worse than my Legendary one. It feels like Rohan was killed off just to reinforce Lightfall as a war story, but it doesn't feel like a war story at all. There's nothing special about the setting or storytelling, and there's no cogent theme to tie things together like The Witch Queen did with its psychological mysteries.

Meanwhile, Nimbus demonstrates Lightfall's issue with tone. They feel like a comic relief character cut from another, much more boring franchise or perhaps a cinematic universe. Nimbus is a bottomless well of embarrassing dialogue and undeserved boasts, constantly ruining otherwise engaging scenes with one-liners that got honest-to-god groans out of me and my clanmates. And they aren't the only character with this problem. Osiris, one of Destiny's most legendary Warlocks, is written like three entirely different people. He's clueless and desperate in one scene and all-knowing and controlling in the next, not to mention inexplicably attached to the Cloudstriders we just met.

Nothing in Lightfall makes any sense because none of the characters even try to make sense of it. What is the Veil? What does it do? Why should I care about it? What is the Radial Mast, which I swear is mentioned in every other sentence, that Calus, I think, brought to Neomuna? How and why is the Veil related to Destiny 1's infamously stupid Black Heart? How have we retconned the Cloudstriders into the Vex Black Garden? Why do Zavala and Ikora say the Traveler is "gone" when it clearly hasn't moved since the Season of the Seraph finale? I was asking these questions throughout the entire campaign and I never got a single satisfying answer.

Lightfall is a daisy chain of plot devices with next to no context. I get the sense that even Bungie doesn't know what's going on, which is immensely disconcerting. After the triumph of The Witch Queen, we have gone right back to clumsily gesturing vaguely at unknowable entities which we really should know more about. The best parts of the entire campaign are brief cutscenes featuring Calus and the Witness, but we have no part in them. Almost everything we do as players feels unrelated or fruitless, and the campaign's climax is a cheap twist that cannot be compared to Savathun's trickery in The Witch Queen.

At least we have Strand, right?

I said the campaign is at least a satisfying combat challenge, but we haven't even gotten to one of its biggest problems: you don't unlock Strand until after the last mission. You get to play around with it in certain limited areas, but you can't properly buildcraft with Strand until everything is over. This subclass is the primary selling point for the expansion! Why is it so delayed? I can't even have fun with my new grappling hook to take the edge off the god-awful story, which I truly dread replaying on other characters. And after all the build-up for this metaphysical power, this undiscovered aspect of Darkness, we just... get it. Like, from a book. Press E to get Strand. Wow, awesome. I really could've used this seven hours ago.

The good news is that Strand is fun to use. The Warlock fantasy of summoning minions called Threadlings is unique within Destiny, and despite most of the best Strand Fragments being time-gated, the subclass already feels fairly potent. It's also an immense relief that, compared to Beyond Light's Stasis abilities, Strand Fragments are easy and simple to acquire. The audio-visual spectacle is there, and I always look forward to using my Strand Super. My Titan friend also tells me that the much-maligned Berserker class is pretty good, actually, though I still need to play it myself. That said, there is currently zero chance I bring Strand into the new raid over Void or Solar builds, which to me suggests Strand may be buffed in the near future.

I do have some issues with this new power, on top of it being unlocked too late and time-gated too severely. The grappling hook that's so central to Strand is incredibly fun to use, but it's also oddly punishing. Even with high stats, the cooldown on the grapple is so long that you're discouraged from using it for exploration or just for fun. I realize Bungie can't let players spam it in combat because it can trigger a lot of powerful abilities, but I think the grapple should be mostly refunded if you use it without dealing any damage. I just want to swing around, man. Likewise, the cooldown on the Warlock melee feels excessive, like I should get all three charges back in the time it takes to regen one. That would probably be a bit too much, but something is definitely off with the cooldowns overall.

Strand does benefit immensely from Destiny 2's new in-game loadout system, which is almost everything I was hoping for. It displays your gear in a very legible way, equips new loadouts instantly even mid-activity, and makes changing play styles painless. I've seen some grumpy chatter about the mod system being neutered, but the flow of 'generate then spend resources' seems mostly intact, albeit balanced around dramatically stronger Artifact mods which are now essentially free. We are unquestionably weaker than we were pre-Lightfall – an intentional balancing decision on Bungie's part – but we're still so strong that I'm not bothered. Granted, I still have a lot of tinkering to do here, as some armor mods are seemingly tied to tier seven of the new Guardian Ranks, and that's what I'm currently grinding.

The best thing I can say about Lightfall right now is that it's more Destiny 2. It's more stuff to grind, more guns to chase, and more dudes to shoot in what is still the best-feeling FPS around. But it's a markedly worse version of Destiny 2 than what The Witch Queen delivered, and it does not bode well for The Final Shape. For my money, it is currently competing with Shadowkeep for Destiny 2's worst expansion, and I don't see it ever making the top three. The new grind seems fine, but there is no redeeming this campaign. Lightfall needs Strand to be good, and the new raid coming March 10 had better be a banger.

Destiny 2 Lightfall is being tested on PC, with a code provided by the publisher. GamesRadar+ will update this page with our full scored Destiny 2 Lightfall review in the coming days.