Destiny: The Dark Below review (PS4): An underwhelming, frustrating update

Release Date: December 9
Platforms available on: PS4 (reviewed), Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360
Developer: Bungie
Publisher: Activision
Genre: First-person shooter

This review was originally posted as an in-progress article on December 18, 2014. It was updated on January 9 with expanded final impressions and a score.

Value is often hard to discuss when it comes to reviews - since £20 means more to some people than others - but with 'The Dark Below', Destiny's first expansion, you can't help but feel it's a bit of a rip-off.

For £20 - or when bought alongside the next expansion for £35, so around £17.50 - you're getting three story missions, a new Strike (or two on PlayStation platforms), three new multiplayer maps and the Raid, alongside a host of new weapons and armour up for grabs.

When you consider that you're paying a third of the game's original value for a fraction of the content, it feels like a poor proposition.

At least, that's on the face of it, since the addition of a new Raid is a big deal. Leading up to the release of 'The Dark Below', I put more hours into the game's original Raid, Vault of Glass, than anything else in the game.

The end-game challenge was a dramatic change of pace for the shooter; instead of casually, and often easily, blasting through straightforward missions, you and five other players faced a brutal gauntlet of enemies and puzzles, each with a surprising twist that everyone has to work out, and subsequently work together on, to overcome it.

The new Raid is an excellent challenge, and one well worth putting the effort in to reach, but this time the road to get there has seen a spot of controversy.

It was also something players would come back to time and time again. With the way Destiny's levelling and upgrade systems worked, the Raid bestowed the best armour to make you stronger, and despite its lengthy run time (a first attempt will probably take at least six hours) it was also the fastest way to get rare upgrade materials.

The Raid was something worthy of the lengthy grind required to unlock it, and so 'The Dark Below' offers the same carrot and stick; the level cap has increased, and in order to remotely stand a chance in this new trial, you need to get higher level armour to get there.

Thankfully, the Raid is of a similar quality, making it worth putting the hours to get there. While 'Vault of Glass' had a couple of refreshing non-combat scenarios based around stealth and platforming, 'Crota's End' is based almost solely around enemy encounters, but retains its flair for clever objectives that require players to perform new and unexpected tasks against overwhelming odds.

Without spoiling specifics, this change to more combat-filled situations works because thematically the enemy Hive is a less calculating foe than the robotic Vex.

The opening is a mad scramble that uses one of its enemy types perfectly, while the end battle against Crota is perhaps the game's most epic yet, in part because of the way the new story missions have built him up to become perhaps the game's only identifiable nemesis to date, and also because of its soaring music and doomsday backdrop.

The new Raid is an excellent challenge, and one well worth putting the effort in to reach, but this time the road to get there has seen a spot of controversy.

You can now buy high-Light armour using Marks from the Tower's vendors. Both this form of currency and these shopkeepers became useless during the end-game before the expansion, and while buying this armour isn't as straightforward as it sounds - you now need Commendations, tokens earned through levelling up factions and which basically act as another barrier to slowly level towards - the decision to use these elements to help get players on the Raid sooner is initially a welcome one.

While the decision to increase the level cap to access new content makes sense, it's one that has rubbed many players the wrong way when they toiled away for countless hours in the old Raid to get special armour, only for it to become second rate to purchasable, higher-level equipment the moment the expansion launched. The same applies to recent changes to Exotic equipment, though their levelling trees can be redone to reach these new higher levels.

These changes make the previous hard work from running the Vault of Glass count for almost nothing, and the lack of communication from Bungie in the weeks leading up to these changes has left some players rightfully upset.

It's also something that might happen again with the second expansion 'House of Wolves', and when the end-game is built around reaching the level cap through re-running the Raid, it makes you reconsider your effort this time round, especially since you can get to the close-enough level 31 - just one level away from the new cap - from purchases and a chunk of Ascendent materials alone.

There's more to the expansion than the run up to the Raid, though. The three story missions are as scant as they initially sound, taking less than an hour to complete, and offer little in terms of new areas, all starting in existing locations on Earth and on the Moon, before concluding in small but freshly-made areas with familiar-feeling encounters.

A small tease by Bungie addressing story concerns is slightly true, in that there is a new character, Eris, with an axe to grind against the god-like Crota, with all the missions and Strikes tying into this goal. As mentioned previously, it does a good job at making that final encounter more meaningful, but there's no story payoff once it's done. Her quests are very much a minor side-story, and don't expect this to solve any story problems found with the game initially.

The Strike is similar in its approach of repurposing areas before a finale in a new area, and while all this content is probably more challenging than anything before it (access requires a character in their mid-20s, meaning this is only really accessible for players on their way into the end-game) it's essentially more of the same.

The quest line for Eris is more than just story missions though, giving you a series of Bounties that task you with various fetch quests and 'kill x enemy' objectives. There are some unique challenges mixed in there, such as meleeing five of the exploding Cursed Thralls without dying in the process, but ultimately they feel drawn out for no real reason other than to pad out what little story content there is in there - especially when the quest line requires you to visit Xur, a shopkeeper that only appears in the Tower a few days a week - and drag the quest line out longer than should be the case.

Ultimately, the missions and Bounties don't take up much time, but their quality and quantity feel more suited to a free update to keep people ticking over between expansions, rather than anything meaty or worthy of a premium purchase such as this.

As well as missions, Eris has daily Bounties themed around these new missions and hunting the Hive - the race that's the focal point of the expansion - as well as a store with unique weapons and armour. Like other vendors, she has a reputation and currencies of her own that are required to buy and subsequently upgrade her wares. In a game that's already crammed full of different meters to fill and items to collect, cluttering your inventory only complicates the levelling process even further, even if all of these are optional.

'The Dark Below' has its moments, but it's ultimately an underwhelming and frustrating update.

The surprise of the package, though, are the Crucible maps. It was something I initially overlooked when coming to the expansion - I consider competitive multiplayer more of a side event to the rest of the game, using it to occasionally jump in to fulfil an easy Bounty or two - but the three new arenas are probably my favourite yet, and had me sitting in their new dedicated playlist at launch longer than I would otherwise.

Pantheon, based on the Black Garden, has a strong mix of lengthy corridors perfect for long-range battles and close-quarter junctions, while The Cauldron is constructed of more open arenas, requiring more teamwork and planning than relying on sneaky attacks or sniping from afar.

The highlight is the Skyshock, a large map that feels closer to Halo's huge chaotic arenas than anything else in the game, with complexes that draw in players and act as conduits for skirmishes, and thematically it feels like an area ripped straight out of the Cosmodrome Patrol mode, sitting alongside the core game far more neatly than the other arenas we've seen.

'The Dark Below' has its moments, but it's ultimately an underwhelming and frustrating update. The Crucible maps are a pleasant surprise, and the Raid is excellent, but the story missions and Strike are short-lived and more of the same.

However, Destiny is not really a game about a tangible amount of missions or modes, or a campaign you play through just once - and if you've played it that way, then this expansion really isn't for you. It's about the metagame of obtaining the best gear and working out how to best traverse its convoluted levelling systems in order to reach its attractive end-game content.

The lure of a new Raid and higher level cap gives renewed purpose to Bungie's excellent social shooter. But by so thoughtlessly wiping away the hard work players put in with the previous end-game, we're now a little reluctant to do the same hard work again this time around. Hopefully, March's expansion will be approached more carefully to restore some confidence.

3