4/5 ★ – omegaoxide's review of Destiny 2: The Witch Queen.

Destiny 2: Witch Queen - 8/10 A light in a dark place Gameplay: A bit more nuanced like the newest final shape expansion usage of symbol memorization in some of the levels. The rest are a bit more samey compared to the rest of the expansions. New to this one is the crafting system for shaping weapons and pick out perks from the available pool. With it is weapon leveling that gets xp on mission completions and kills. I would’ve preferred a new subclass for the darkness, but this is a nice alternative. Newly added in this expansion was the light infused hive which have very similar low ranks, but they now have an arc butterfly that will buff the enemies or make an explosive last ditch charge towards you when no more enemies are nearby. High ranking guardian hive wield the light just as you do and throw one of the three elements at you in an effort to vaporize you. Being guardians to they have ghosts which will resurrect them after a short time forcing you to quickly close the gap to crush their ghost before it can do so. This puts you into very intense situations where you must be way more aware of your placement in comparison to your enemies and is by far the best and most substantial change to the combat loop with this faction. Progression: The last sensible progression of story and missions, unfortunately the next two just make very little sense from mission to mission compared to this title. There is a bit of an issue of the game forcing you to go to the same location deep within the map, with only one drop zone. It is the most repetitive part of getting through this story and drags it down a ton. We do have a system wide progression introduction with weapon xp. Now you can Level weapons to get the better perks that could’ve taken you hours and hours to obtain. You have a chance to get a red outlined version that can be used to gather data for the crafting recipes for all the seasonal and expansion unlocks since this one released back in 2022. It adds a ton to the overall stagnate weapon progression that plagues the current 2024 version. Difficulty: It was only difficult when you faced light bearing hive as they are truly a test of one’s own self preservation. Even though they are not nearly as dramatic in the differences between normal hive and regular hive like the fallen and the scorn were for Forsaken, they spice up the enemy pool just enough to be a little more of a challenge. This was the first legendary campaign so it is hard to a degree, but I felt that only the beginning and the end were really a true test of my own skill. Level Design: Mediocre. It takes the boring pyramid designs and uses them for quite a bit of the strikes and even main missions. The darker parts of the hive sections of the map are enclosed and enemies are just anywhere they want, probably only slightly better than the pyramids. The hive light world sections are the much more dynamic part of the trifecta. It has interesting platforming and good enemy placement that make it more of a challenge. Atmosphere: The above ground is a beautiful and expansive garden that just looks gorgeous, but if you move to the darkened section in the northwestern parts of the map that all goes away. Up in the darkness is a swamp that feels dead and abandoned by whatever gardener was taking care of the world. The pyramids influence can be felt to such a significant degree and is probably the best usage of the whole light and darkness contrast in the entire game. You see the hive light construction broken and more bonelike as the normal hive walls tend to be. It shows how the villain has done a complete 180 of the original darkness influence from the ,at the time, recently revealed supervillain behind all the nefarious acts that plague the Sol System now. Story: On the note of the supervillain comes the much more persistent hive goddess that has been teased for at least since the beginning of D2. That Hive is none other than Savathûn the Witch Queen. She disguised herself as the guardian legend Osiris and gathered enough information on the light to take it back to her own Throne World. She gets discovered before she can make a clean getaway and the Tower finds out wishing to track her down to stop such information from getting out. Eventually that led to some changes to Mars which takes you and Ikora there to investigate, finding the new hive guardians and crushing them within your hand. The campaign is mostly about uncovering the how on the way the hive are able to wield the light, and where the Witch Queen went after escaping the tower and coming back here. I don’t think it was a good use of the initial story progression of the expansion, and I personally believe the ending to be the strongest point of the narrative and the best characterization of the villain who is like twenty times better than the true series villain that the Witness is. (Personal Summary) Best Parts: Savathûn is probably the best villain since Oryx the Taken King. She is just so smug and talks down to you the in the missions where she is a present party. Hive guardians are a very fun thing to fight and shake up the combat just enough to be an interesting faction to be added. Weapon crafting is genuinely phenomenal and makes grinding much less of a punishment for wanting to play the game. Worst Parts: The investigation plot of the campaign just doesn’t hit when you pretty much can guess as to how Savathûn got the light. The exotic quest immediately after the campaign spells it out pretty quickly as to how and why making me wonder why the true answer was locked behind optional content. Revisiting the memory chamber like four times was absolutely the worse trek in the story and dragged it out a ton with how long it was to get to even with grapples and a movement sword. Final Thoughts: Narratively I love that a bad guy finally got to use our own greatest weapon against us in a campaign. It was only done once before by Gaul in the base game story where he only used it after dying and was absolutely demolished in a cutscene. Savathûn is the goat villain of the current game and I am so glad they didn’t kill her off so easily like they do with another great villain in the expansion that came immediately after this one. Even with its progression and level design flaws it is the second best currently available campaign, but that is like comparing flowers to a junkyard. How did they screw up Lightfall so bad after this. - 8/10