From Archon’s Keep and Archon’s Forge to twisting maintenance tunnels, crawling with Siva’s weird bio-tech tendrils, Rise of Iron packs in strong locations, powerful enemies and challenging objectives.īungie rediscovered its level design mojo with the Taken King, and it hasn’t lost it down the back of the sofa for the new expansion. The first mission takes you through a series of skirmishes on the way to the top of a wind-blown mountain temple, setting a strong, cinematic mood for later efforts that’ll see you assaulting Splicer fortifications and delving into claustrophobic tombs, which do a fantastic job of mixing Destiny’s sci-fi style with a Diablo-esque gritty fantasy vibe. Beyond that, though, it’s a goodie, pitting you against a more potent brood of Fallen in a series of missions that showcase an impressively alien variant of the area around the Cosmodrome.
Rise of Iron doesn’t have the most inventive or original campaign, with echoes of Halo in its “alien forces meddling with powers they can’t control” storyline, and it lacks the central villains that gave The Dark Below and The Fallen King their impact. Well, actually there’s you, Saladin and roughly 30 million other players who might pick up this expansion, but let’s not even go into all of that. Now only two things stand in the way of Siva, the Splicers and their creepy apocalypse: Saladin, Destiny’s immortal grump and the last of the Iron Lords, and you, by now a legendary Guardian.
Thanks to the efforts of the Splicers – a bunch of gene-tweaking, power-crazed Fallen loons – the creepy artificial tendrils of this technology, Siva, get to transform a chunk of ex-Soviet real estate into the Plaguelands. Here a group of diabolical Fallen have reawakened a long-dormant technology, which both corrupts and enhances everything it touches. The new expansion brings the action back from the spooky dreadnoughts haunting Saturn and the war-torn sci-fi exotica of Mars and Venus, and to the ruins of Old Russia. It’s not quite up there with The Taken King, but it’s easily the second best of Destiny’s four expansions. But if you’re hooked and you’re looking for more of what you love, then Rise of Iron is an absolute no-brainer. You’ll find the new campaign short, the re-use of existing material annoying and the whole package lacking any drive to push the game forward. If you’re not a fan – or simply dog-tired of Destiny – then Rise of Iron probably won’t change your mind. As a result, Rise of Iron feels tight and clearly targeted at the core audience, complete with plenty of service for the long-serving fanbase. Bungie has spent two years learning what works and what doesn’t, and developed a pretty good idea of what fans want and what they don’t. If last year’s The Taken King was about reworking and recalibrating, this latest Destiny expansion is an exercise in crowd-pleasing consolidation. Available on Xbox One and PS4 (version tested)
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