Destiny 2: Curse of Osiris, the game’s first major expansion, is a mess. In fact, it does not deserve to be called a major expansion as it feels like a content update that should have been coming all along. Most of the new content the expansion added feel that same way, nothing.
Platform Reviewed: PC, PS4
Platforms Available: PS4, Xbox One, PC
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Bungie
Release Date: December 5, 2017
MSRP: $19.99
This review is based on a review copy provided by Activision and Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Read our Destiny 2 (PC) Review here.
Curse of Osiris brings you to Mercury, at the request of Ikora Rey, to learn the whereabouts of Osiris. The Mercury play area by itself is small, not as small as Titan’s, but small as the main draw is the bigger play area hidden behind Vex technology: the Infinite Forest, the Vex’s simulation of reality. On paper, the Infinite Forest is cool with its randomly generated interior which means everything changes every time you exit it. In actuality, it is not that exciting.
The first couple of times I entered the Forest I would take my time and go clear level by level, but eventually, I noticed that every new section is always below you. This is a big changer, one you are in a vantage point, and two is that your enemies are all out in the open. If you want to save bullets you do not even need to kill the enemies. Simply run up to the next “door” to load in the next section. Sure at times, you will need to kill specially marked enemies to proceed, but as I said you can just stay up on the high ground and shoot them. It is so easy that it makes the randomization moot. On the plus side, it is really pretty with Bungie doing another great job with the visuals.
Now, where does the Infinite Forest lead? Depending on your mission it is either the past or the future, both of which have Vex in it. The past would bring you to a simulation of Mercury when the Vex has just arrived and are all shiny and new and the future will bring you to a world that is only really old Vex and just Vex. Once again I applaud Bungie on how they nail the visuals down, they really are masters of eye candy. That aside, it is in the past or the future where you will spend your time doing one of three Adventures and I do like them. Think of them as an evolution of Heroic Strikes, you have modifiers and a timer, and added to that are the randomized locations they happen in. No two Adventures are the same, but they end up being because there are only three of them and three map pools to pull from. Honestly, this new mode has a lot of potential but it’s hampered by how little of it there is.
Speaking of little, the new story missions add even less. You get to finally meet the notorious Osiris, a character hyped up so much in the lore, but the story ends in pleasantries. It was not bad enough that the big bad fight was a disappointing hand held as cool as it was to have an actual character of the game help in the fight. I was also having a good run with the missions prior to that until that sudden ending. Is that really it? We meet up with Osiris in the flesh and he just turns around and goes back into the Infinite Forest? Really Bungie? Playing the story missions three times on three different characters did not help at all.
There are some additional gems in the expansion, aside from the visuals and Adventures, such as the introduced Raid Lair and new Strike. The Raid Lair is not what I originally thought it would be. It’s more of what we had in the original raid. It is short, sweet and compared to the original is more about the shooting than it is about solving puzzles. Someone should really take puzzled away from Calus *shivers*. The new Strikes are solid as they are taken from the best of Curse of Osiris’ missions. Yes, you heard that right they recycled the missions. As much as they are good, that is pretty lazy.
That is the word I would describe this paid for expansion: lazy. It seems like the work of a student working on their thesis and aiming for a passing mark. Sadly I am not a lenient professor and I cannot let it slide. It is such a shame that we are retreating a path that was once taken in the previous game, but this time we have loot boxes. The selfie emote is pretty cool.
