
Lightfall is a testament to Destiny’s legacy. Not the new fantastic legacy that was set with last year’s The Witch Queen, but more like one established by the vanilla Destiny experience from 2014 — a game with a lot of great content that’s cloaked in an incomplete story with weak writing. Thankfully that’s all forgotten about because you can also use a grapple now. The grapple is incredible. The grapple is fun. My love for the grapple can never be understated.
The place you can grapple the most is Neomuna, a secret city hidden in Neptune’s clouds and the new destination for Lightfall. Neomuna is so advanced that its citizens live virtually, and its protectors are the Cloudstriders. These are towering superhumans augmented with Neomuna technology to become even more powerful than Earth’s guardians, but at the cost of only living for 10 years after their upgrades.
The new environment is beautiful, with its streets dripping in purple and neon hues, contrasting against the active warzone where Emperor Calus’ ship, the Typhon Imperator has slammed down to lay siege. And then there’s the Vex network trying to connect with the city’s infrastructure, resulting in a few missions delving into the alien AI’s cyberworld that’s similar to what we saw recently in Destiny’s Season of the Splicer. Neomuna is a fantastic setting for a whole new campaign experience.
We won’t delve into specific spoilers, but the campaign gameplay is great, swinging between buildings, exploring the imposing Typhon Imperator, and delving into Neomuna’s underground tech facilities. The combat is challenging too, as fighting the final boss on Legendary difficulty was the most difficult solo campaign moment I’ve ever had playing Destiny.
The new Tormentor enemies are a great difficulty spike throughout the campaign. They act as Calus’ lieutenants on the battlefield, blasting you with vortexes of energy, suppressing your powers, and draining your life if they get close enough to grab you. Expect heart-pounding moments whenever they arrive into combat with their massive scythes.
Unfortunately, the backdrop to all this goodness is the campaign’s story — far and away Destiny’s biggest disappointment in recent years. The developers at Bungie say they took influence from The Empire Strikes Back, a blockbuster movie that raises its stakes even higher. But the result is more akin to The Last Jedi: a few good ideas lost in a lacklustre mess that leaves you feeling like the studio didn’t actually know what it was doing.
Lightfall spends too much time setting up a mystery that everyone else in the game seems to understand except the player. And by the end of the campaign, you get no answers and even more questions are raised, along with underdeveloped characters. It’s the most frustrating and vague plot since the original Destiny had us fight a mysterious glob of floating black sludge for its final campaign boss. Oddly enough, I still think The Final Shape will have a fantastic story, if only because it feels like Bungie has kept all of the good story ideas for that campaign and the next 12 months leading up to it.
The one selling point to Lightfall’s plot is the two main villains. Emperor Calus, the ex-leader of the Cabal and humanity’s best frenemy is back as a disciple of the Darkness and as bombastic as ever. There is something so delectably unique about Calus as a villain; he oozes gluttony and narcissism that never feels threatening, and yet he fits so well and is a delight to fight. Plus, it has been fantastic to see him argue with his daughter, Caital, a big payoff to the character development she has had since allying with humanity over the course of last year.
But it’s when Calus is interacting with Lightfall’s other villain, The Witness, that Lightfall’s story manages to shine. We’ve only had glimpses of Destiny’s ‘big bad’, but The Witness brings the threat that Calus lacks, capable of staring down humanity’s one source of power, the Traveller and leaving Calus trembling in his gilded armour. The Witness shows that Bungie can do mystery in an engaging way; I want to know more about The Witness, its history, and its motivations.
It’s just frustrating that the rest of Lightfall’s plot wasn’t as enjoyable, because essentially every other element of the expansion is great. Even the writing in the post-campaign missions is much better overall, and there’s a lot to do after the campaign.
By far the greatest addition with Lightfall is the new Darkness subclass, Strand. The new subclasses for each character class are cohesive, strong and flashy. But there’s one part that stands above the rest. The grapple. If Sony’s Spiderman and Titanfall 2 have taught us anything, it’s that games are always better when you can swing through the air. Whether your using Strand’s grapple to grab a ride on a friend as they Thundercrash into a boss, or just to save yourself after falling into a pit, grapple is just an incredibly fun (and occasionally lifesaving) addition to the sandbox.
Of course, the grapple is just one part of the new strand kit. I’ll admit, when the Strand supers were first revealed, I thought they looked weak and boring. But after slinging a rope dart around for hours on my Hunter, I’m a convert. The new powers are slick and fluid, allowing you to suspend enemies helplessly in the air or do surprisingly hefty damage to bosses. Even when I’m not using the grapple, Strand feels so good that I’m upset whenever I need to use a different element’s subclass.
But it really is the grapple that elevates the Strand kit to a whole new level. My favourite thing to do now is create a Strand bomb out of an enemy, and grapple it as I throw it across a chasm to take a high-speed shortcut. Even typing this has my heart racing with glee.
Speaking of heart-racing, it wouldn’t be a Destiny expansion without a new raid. Lightfall delivers the ‘Root of Nightmares’ raid, pitting players against the ‘Final God of Pain’ inside a pyramid ship affected by the Traveller’s power. The resulting environment is a stunning amalgamation of Destiny’s Light and Darkness designs, with orchids and pearl-like roots growing wild across the ship’s deep black stone.
The raid is full of wide, open spaces and focuses more on action, rather than memorising symbols like some recent raids. The final boss also takes the right design cues from last year’s raid boss, Rhulk, being a roaming boss that even more aggressively hunts players in close combat. Although the new boss is a lot easier due to his surprisingly low health — assuming your team is good enough at communicating how to make him vulnerable in the short amount of time available before he kills you all.
I can still recommend Lightfall for veteran Destiny players as everything besides the story works well: the campaign gameplay is great, post-campaign content is very solid, and the game just feels even better to play thanks to small updates like loadouts and THE GRAPPLE. But if you’re a new player, I would play last year’s The Witch Queen first, as it has a fully realised campaign story that is light-years ahead of Lightfall.
Although I’ll understand if you get it just for the grapple.