Destiny 2 (2017) (PS4) (Bungie)
0Destiny 2 begins as a proper space opera should. There are swelling orchestral soundtracks, planet-invading battle cruisers, evil aliens with subwoofer-obliterating baritones and a sassy ass-kicking robot voiced by Firefly's Mal Reynolds doing a passable Nathan Fillion impression (or was that the other way around?). It's definitely what you'd expect from the developers who created Halo, but this level of crowd-pleasing pomp and circumstance was also notoriously absent from the studio's first multiplatform pseudo-MMO, a curiously meager and grim-faced shooter which went out with a whimper at launch exactly three years ago now (although subsequent expansions apparently alleviated some of its initial problems).
The troubled production process of Destiny 1 has been well-documented, and everything about the first few hours of the sequel feels like Bungie is overcompensating to the point of parody - albeit mostly with enjoyable results. The actual loot-driven gameplay loop - and especially the focus on multiplayer, which doesn't fit with the way I consume games - does leave me a bit cold, but there seems to be enough spectacular scenery and set pieces in the campaign to at least warrant a complete playthrough of all the main missions (and the same couldn't be said of the first Destiny, which I gave up on halfway through the singleplayer content).