‘Destiny 2: The Final Shape’ Review: The End Is the Beginning Is the End

There was a time, back in 2014, when people heard of Activision and Bungie’s plans for a sprawling first-person shooter sci-fi space epic live service—before we even truly had the term live service—they balked at the thought of those two companies in particular being able to sustain such an enterprise in the long term. The people were right to, really, because Destiny has been a series of incredible highs and aggravating lows since the very beginning.

But stubborn as ever, Bungie has been shepherding us along an unstable road toward the events of Destiny 2: The Final Shape for the past couple of years, a final destination for the enormous, nigh-inscrutable tale of intergalactic heroism gamers have been fighting since 2014. At long last, Bungie has brought gamers to the promised land. And the promised land is beautiful.

That’s both literal and metaphorical, as The Final Shape gets down to business fast, with the various alien armies of Earth’s Tower chasing the Witness into the gaping transdimensional wound that he cut into the Traveler at the start of Destiny 2: Lightfall. The inside of the Traveler, a new hub world called the Pale Heart, is home to some of the most audacious, fractal level design ever crafted for a video game, with the recollection of all the galaxy’s various biomes swirled together like living memory, itself then increasingly corrupted by the Witness’s influence: pocket dimensions of recursory architectural nightmares, decorated in frozen, tortured human body parts reaching out for respite that will never come.

That hellscape, as it turns out, is a taste of the eponymous Final Shape. The Witness’s ultimate plan is to utilize the Traveler to end all entropy, placing the universe in a final state of unholy stillness and silence. It’s reminiscent of the chilling, atomist threat at the center of Remedy’s underappreciated Quantum Break, but the chaos in that game was relegated to two contained stages. In The Final Shape, vast claustrophobic labyrinths, featuring intricate yet accessible puzzles and diabolical platforming, will have you traversing the horror in real time.

Of course, from a mechanical sense, it’s just another planet for Guardians to get through the usual collection of activities. But the most laudable thing about this expansion is how much Bungie has trimmed all things unnecessary from the process of progression, and organically linked all of Destiny 2’s various systems together. Those mechanics now intertwine in a way where no activity feels fully out of reach for any player, and exploration and curiosity in those areas where players may be woefully unprepared still offers rewards.

The Overthrow activities in the Pale Heart make the act of simply wandering aimlessly through the new open world worth even minor effort. All the while, the Pathfinder system presents a constantly refreshing set of passive goals, many of which players will complete just through organically playing the game, with abundant rewards waiting at the end.

One might expect, based on previous expansions, that there would be another hamster wheel of leveling waiting at the end of it all, but The Final Shape somehow splinters its post-game into a half-dozen smaller stories, bound under the single heading of Episodes, which keep the game fresh day in and day out. If there’s a minor stumble of note, it’s with the new subclass, Prismatic, a grab bag of the existing subclass powers, allowing players to pick and choose from a collection of their favorite abilities, which isn’t the game changer that Strand was for Lightfall.

Still, it cannot be lauded enough just how much of the breathtaking groundwork for The Final Shape comes down to its campaign, a surprisingly intimate reckoning for all of the Tower’s major figures for the sins portrayed in Destiny expansions past, their failures amplified and perverted to the point of near-insanity by the Witness. Even without the late Lance Reddick bringing Vanguard leader Zavala’s story to its ultimate conclusion (Keith David admirably takes up the mantle), these stories pay off every ounce of the player’s work from the last few years.

It’s due to all those narrative and mechanical successes that the big blowout climax of The Final Shape’s campaign hits as effectively as it does. Accessing the final mission of that campaign was a community effort—which was unlocked for the entire player base back on June 8 by the first team in the world to beat the new Raid—and it’s wonderful for the way it makes high-level players feel just as much a part of the universe as its lowest level scrubs. But beyond being the final beat of a decade-long story, the final mission is a bombastic technical marvel—an astonishing 12-player fireworks display of a boss fight on par with the climactic, all-encompassing war at the end of Avengers: Endgame. It’s a victory lap, and Bungie knows it. More importantly, over the course of 10 long years, Bungie has earned it.

This game was reviewed with code provided by ÜberStrategist.