Destiny 2’s Lightfall Expansion Starts With Negative Reviews Due to the Campaign

It’s a big week for Bungie and Destiny 2 fans as the latest expansion Lightfall has dropped with fans already expressing their disappointment over the game’s campaign. It’s only been a couple of days but a good number of players have finished the latest campaign and they are not happy with the outcome as it currently has Steam reviews at “mostly negative”.

Scanning through social media and the user reviews of the expansion on Steam, the reason is mostly focused on how they executed Lightfall’s narrative as many were highly optimistic as the game was coming from a high thanks to last year’s Witch Queen expansion, which is considered the best expansion the game has received in a long time. 

I too was pretty excited about what they had planned. A bright new city and the confrontation between The Witness (the game’s big bad) and The Traveler. The moments before Lightfall was exciting. It was going to be the start of the end, and everybody wanted to see how everything will unfold, which is why the 6-year-old live-service game reached a lifetime peak of over 300k concurrent players on launch day on Steam alone. 

“Lightfall’s campaign is a mess, both from a story perspective as well as gameplay perspective. It tries to do too many things at once.” one user wrote in the Steam user reviews section. Another user even said that “It is the worst state the game's narrative has been in since d1 vanilla.”, pointing out the vague and weird campaign they released in the first game.

Everything seems to have fallen flat for a good number of players and we are just left with more answers, answers that will slowly be given (hopefully) throughout the rest of 2023. We then have a new location called Neomuna, our first visit to Neptune, which is bright and colorful but lifeless. I’ve finished the campaign myself and mostly agree with what people are saying about the campaign’s story.

The reaction to the expansion’s story is so loud and clear that it has overshadowed everything else at the moment as there are a variety of changes from how mods work, Guardian Ranks, crafting, loadouts, and more.

Strand feels great, but only during the campaign

Another culprit to the player’s disappointment is the new subclass, Strand. This new power Guardians can wield gives players the ability to grapple to anything, giving you a lot of movement and verticality, something never seen before in the game. During the campaign, you are given multiple chances to use this new power and it’s easily the best highlight for the campaign missions that have them. The only problem is, once you’ve officially unlocked the new subclass, your movement is restricted due to a long cooldown, so the feeling you had in the campaign can’t be replicated, which was a big letdown. 

It’s a shame that the campaign’s story turns out the way it did as I did have fun going through these missions, especially in Legendary difficulty, a feature they introduced last year in the Witch Queen expansion. 

Outside the campaign, there are tons of activities to do, and players have just scratched the surface of what’s now available, especially the new Season of Defiance seasonal content that launched alongside the expansion. 

Destiny 2: Lightfall is now available on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC.

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