Among the long list of anticipated titles this fall in the video game world, Destiny 2 was among the first to grace us with its presence earlier this month. In terms of story, the sequel picks up where Destiny left off, shortly after The Tower (the hub city for all guardians) is attacked by the Red Legion with their fearsome leader, Ghaul.

     You lose your light along with all other guardians when Ghaul steals the traveler from the guardians and attempts to capture its light. Due to mystic circumstances, you are called to a shard of the traveler that broke off and presto, you have your light and your powers back. So naturally you become the spear-head for this operation to take down the Red Legion and liberate the light for all guardians.

     I’ll stop there in terms of story so I don’t ruin anything for anyone. Talking game play, Bungie delivers again with that great feel from the first game where it’s a bit of a mixture of Halo, Battlefield and Call of Duty with some RPG elements tossed in the mix. The three classes are back: Titan, the tanking class, Hunter, the assassin class and Warlock, the damage/support role.

     Within those classes, each has three sub-classes that are unlocked through story missions which all offer a unique twist on the characters’ core abilities as well as small side abilities. Each class was awarded a new sub class alongside old favorites that were brought back with different pieces thrown in their respective skill trees.

     Destiny 2 does a lot of things better than its predecessor in terms of content and replay-ability. There are now several things to do on planets for players to explore on their own. This wasn’t the case with the first one; I felt personally that often times you needed a full team to truly get your money’s worth.  

     Among them are lost sectors, or portions of the map that are hidden that you must find within a given area marked off on your map. When finding these you are presented with a small dungeon that features an elite boss at the end to clear. Along with the loot you get from beating the boss, you (and your team, if present) will be rewarded with a chest full of sweet, sweet loot.

     I found these not only rewarding to find and reveal but the gear at the end often was worth the fight. Also marked off on each planet’s map are special hidden chests, where the idea is the same in that they are within a given marked area out of sight and must be discovered to collect on the rewards. Both of these additions feel like they are worth the effort to find while they also reveal a lot of the interesting planet map designs.

     Another thing to do within the public map regions are Public Events. These are temporary missions that pop up in different spots on each map at different times. Often it is defending a point or having to take down a very high-level boss. These also offer a lot of great loot and an opportunity for a mass amount of people to come together and make you truly feel like you are in an enormous battle.

     Finally, when you reach the base level cap of twenty and complete the story you unlock Strikes, Patrols and Raids. The nice thing about the Raids this time around is that you can matchmake with people online without having to have a large group of people you know personally online. This is still in a “beta phase” but is promised to be fully released soon.

     The strikes and patrols are familiar to anyone that played Destiny in the past and pretty much sticks to what they did well the first time around. Another thing that was big for me personally is the fact that they “fixed” the system of tokens in the game. Before you had to represent a certain thing with a certain equipped item to earn tokens and you barely got any at all it felt like.

     The process was also very hard to follow, with all the various allegiances and different types of tokens floating around. Now the process seems to be a lot more streamlined, as every planet has their own tokens that are turned into the same NPC for legendary engrams or the games form of random loot chests. You seem to accumulate the number of tokens needed to receive one of these a lot faster and all you have to do is go turn them in to the correct NPC in the hub area or public map which the game highlights for you with a flashing icon.

     Overall, Destiny 2 is more of a patch/expansion on the original Destiny, which isn’t a horrible thing. Bungie made their content more accessible for the casual player as well as keeping the great mechanics that the hardcore fans loved. I personally was a very big fan of how they eliminated all of the ambiguity of a lot of things such as patrols, the token system and essentially everything in the game seems to be a lot easier for the player to find and understand with total clarity.

     I didn’t touch much on the online but I feel like if you are a competitive first-person shooter type of person then it speaks for itself. They added new interface with casual and competitive playlists that involve a domination mode and survival mode where each team is granted limited spawns.

     In total, Destiny 2 isn’t going to give you some revolutionary gaming experience you can’t afford to miss out on, but what it will do is give you a solid shooter/RPG that distinguishes itself from the vast copy-cat wasteland that is the first-person shooter genre with great gun play as well as catering largely to fans of both player vs environment and player versus player.

     Destiny 2 is available now for the PS4, XB1 and PC.