After a few months away from Destiny, I spent my first day with Rise of Iron as if I were joining anew. I was curious; how would a new player jumping into Rise of Iron via the Destiny Collection fare? It might take a bit to learn the difference between character level and Light level, sure, but I was immediately impressed by how quickly it brought me up to speed without sacrificing a challenge for the veteran Guardian. That aside, the new two-or-so-hour campaign feels short compared to its actual plot and doesn’t really introduce new mechanics to Destiny — it’s plenty of fun and has more of everything I already like about Destiny’s story missions, but it also does little to improve upon its strengths or fix its problems.
After some time away I was worried about my trusty Hunter being too underleveled for the main story, so I shredded an old character I never used and made a brand-new Titan. Equipped with a Spark of Light — which raises one character to the max level of 40 automatically — I started Rise of Iron’s story the way a newcomer might, totally bereft of my favorite weapons but with good enough gear to bring me to Light level 280. (If you’re new to Destiny, Light level is based on the value of all your equipped items. The recommended Light for Rise of Iron’s first mission is around 280, so I was ready to go right away.) Developer Bungie offered the same shortcut for last year’s The Taken King expansion as well, and the process is especially seamless this time around.
The first mission isn’t alienating to lower-level characters, but it isn’t easy, either. It actually ends in a boss fight, and like a typical boss fight in Destiny it’s mostly about staying alive while taking down waves of spongy enemies. The difficulty mostly comes from a mysterious virus-like nanotechnology called SIVA enhancing the power of the Fallen, which obviously makes them harder to kill. The campaign is balanced really well for players of different skill levels, but it also relies heavily on the increased power of the Fallen and your positioning in the area of combat to be challenging rather than doing anything we haven’t seen from Destiny before.
There are new and clever additions that make existing areas fresh rather than samey.
While the enemies are just reskins of existing ones — even the first mini-boss is an enhanced but otherwise nearly identical version of Year One boss Sepiks Prime — the environments are familiar in a more interesting way. Some of Rise of Iron’s campaign takes place on Earth in areas we’ve seen before, but now that SIVA’s literal tendrils cover the land there are new and clever places to take cover that make it feel fresh (or as fresh as a neurotechnology-infested ruin in what used to be Russia can possibly be). The new zone, Plaguelands, is a SIVA-infested expansion on the familiar Cosmodrome and complements the reimagined areas well, which makes it a compelling area to explore. I haven’t had a chance to experiment much with the new weapons or gear, though, since a lot of that will come with side content.
The story itself unfolds more clearly than most in Destiny, which was refreshing, though it’s not a terribly good story in general. It’s a lot to cover — the truth of what happened to the once-immortal Iron Lords and how the Fallen found SIVA in the first place — but Rise of Iron does it succinctly. The letdown is that without any original twist or surprises it falls a bit flat by the end.
Combat fails to match the scale of the threat as it's portrayed by the plot.
It’s also a little short, and a lot of that is how combat in the campaign fails to match the scale of the threat portrayed by the plot. SIVA seems far too easily subdued considering how much it’s built up. Of course, like with other storylines in Destiny, you’re not supposed to totally eliminate the threat or there’d be no point in doing all the sidequests and grinding against those new enemies. But the big reveal and subsequent (really fun) boss fight happen too close together, almost as if something was cut out. One mission, we’re just trying to get more information about SIVA, and the next we’re suddenly facing the baddies head on. Rise of Iron definitely didn’t need to be nearly as long as The Taken King’s eight-hour campaign, but it was strange to go from a few missions of fighting regular waves to a much more intense, strategic boss fight.
Luckily, that pacing problem doesn’t take too much away from that fight itself. Up until the end, combat is more about positioning than anything else, and it’s difficult because the waves of SIVA-infused Fallen can quickly overwhelm an area — those initial missions are fun because I had to move constantly to cheat death, but they’re one-note in that what happens in any one mission is pretty similar to the next. The final fight required me to take what I’d learned about positioning and apply it carefully, and it was the only time during the campaign that I felt like I needed a concrete strategy.
I’ll continue to power through side quests and grind for better loot until the raid launches tomorrow. You can expect IGN’s final Destiny: Rise of Iron review early next week.
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