Destiny 2 Beta: 7 Ups & 2 Downs

1. It's Still Destiny

From the opening title card to the ship-based loading screen, annoying voiceover chap berating you to "Keep going, Guardian!" and the glossary of nouns nobody but the most hardcore fans ever remember, yup, this is still Destiny alright.

Hand-wave this way if you like, but as we covered in our first impressions video, for players who were put off by the original DLC-less Destiny and haven't played since, aside from story missions there's very little that's meaningfully changed.

Altering meter burn cooldowns, adding powers and changing class balance is one thing, but Destiny's appeal is still routed in shooting lots of things with lots of guns, or grabbing some friends to run a raid. There's still a bizarrely empty sense of drive to proceedings though, and the game doesn't even tell you of your array of abilities outside of hunting through the pause menu to find them.

For example, I spent the first few matches online only looking at the icon for my Titan's wall ability, not knowing how to trigger it. It's these little things that still stand in the way of Bungie making a shooter that has the welcome mat rolled out like Halo used to, but when the fans that are here are some of the most rabid around, there's a chance they don't even need to care.