Review: Destiny 2 – Expansion I: Curse of Osiris
On paper, The Infinite Forest sounds like a fascinating concept. Bringing in procedurally-generated dungeons would be an exciting way to invigorate the endgame like with Bloodborne’s Chalice dungeons. Sadly, even this concept is ruined thanks to asinine levels of repetition. All the Infinite Forest is is just a linear set of platforms populated with generic enemies players have been fighting for the past three years. The sad thing is, there’s not much of a challenge here. It’s possible just to skip the enemies and head towards the door. On occasion you do need to kill an enemy to unlock the door, you can accomplish it by just hanging near the last platform and shooting them from afar.
Bungie is not the same developer that created Halo; that much has been clear ever since the early days of Destiny 1. Ever since Destiny 2 was announced, though, it’s as if they’re not even the same developer that made Destiny 1. The first Destiny had many flaws, as did the company that made it, but Bungie made up for those flaws with real improvements to the game and a passion for it that poured through their announcements, trailers and developer diaries. Fans were willing to stick around because they could feel that passion and the game really did get better.
The Forza series has never been my cup of tea, at least not until Forza Horizon. Driving through the beautiful scenery of Colorado in a semi-open world environment really made me appreciate the mechanics behind the series, while at the same time had me lightly touching upon the more hardcore tuning aspects. Turn10 Studios and Playground Games were able to expand upon this, bringing us to the luscious and visually breathtaking Southern Europe. It’s the interconnected world that ties into Xbox Live’s social features that really brings the world to life, as driving through the vast open world will never make you feel alone. If there’s one racing game you need to play, it’s Forza Horizon 2; it’s certainly the closest we’ll get to another Burnout Paradise.
To add insult to injury, you can’t even play in the Infinite Forest whenever you want. After beating the three adventures, players can only access the Infinite Forest through additional Adventures acquired through Brother Vance, which you can only get once per week. For being a key feature of this DLC, players aren’t allotted a lot of time with the Infinite Forest.
In the same year we got great expansions like The Frozen Wilds for Horizon Zero Dawn , Defiant Honor for Nioh and In The Name of the Tsar for Battlefield 1 , it’s amazing how dull Destiny 2 – Expansion I: Curse of Osiris is. Filled with half-baked ideas, repetitive mission design and the smallest explorable area yet, Curse of Osiris feels as empty and meaningless as The Dark Below. The expansion’s campaign fails to push the overall narrative forward and does little with its interesting setup, the Crucible is a mess until Bungie patches it, and the Infinite Forest feels like it needed more time in the oven. Add in some extremely-questionable business practices and you have the most disappointing expansion to hit the Destiny franchise. Though the expansion is as beautiful as ever, and the gunplay as solid as before, Curse of Osiris fails to provide Destiny 2 or Bungie with a new lease on life.
We think that a lot of players are going to be pretty surprised about how 4v4 changes the landscape. In terms of being on a big team in arc charge Destiny 2, that’s the Raid. The pinnacle activity in our game is all about being in a Fireteam of six and solving the biggest mysteries in the game together.
We’ve created a game that has its own culture now and every Destiny player has adapted to the current classes. What we wanted to do was strip those powers away, make players think about their characters in some new and exciting ways, and then embrace new forms of fighting within each subclass.
Who would have ever thought a mobile game would end up on my list? As a big fan of the Hitman franchise since its second iteration, when it was announced that Square Enix Montreal would be working on a mobile game in the same universe, I was no doubt concerned. To my surprise, it ended up being one of the best games of the year. It takes the scenarios we’ve come to love in the full-fledged stealth games and creates bite-sized puzzles. There’s no game on my Nexus 5 that I played more of this year, trying to master each mission, while doing so with the least amount of turns or picking up the optional briefcase. While it’s not what I hope the series will move towards in the future, it is a nice side activity that will distract you for a couple minutes at a time.
While I didn’t mind Dragon Age II, it still was a step down from the incredible hardcore experience that was Origins. BioWare was able to meet in the middle, creating a more modern Action-RPG while maintaining an old school essence. There was no game on this list that I spent more time with than Dragon Age: Inquisition, and for good reason. It’s an RPG of the highest caliber, introducing us to Thedas like we’ve never seen it before, and some of the most affable characters to ever grace the Dragon Age fiction. There’s so much lore packed into this sixty dollar package that you’ll be engrossed in the story, not to mention the vast expansive world that has been finely crafted. The branching paths and party specific dialogue also give Inquisition an incredible amount of replay value; never before directly after finishing a game did I want to replay it an entirely different way. That’s not to mention the fights with dragons are some of the most satisfying occurrences to be found. Dragon Age: Inquisition has it all, and while I would like to see BioWare expand upon the addictive multiplayer mode, its campaign drove deep into my addictive personality.
