![]() That said, Bungie didn't necessarily make it easy on us. It meant even lapsed Guardians - and I count myself very much in that camp, as my fireteam and I found Beyond Light's end-game a little stale towards the end - could jump in the moment the campaign went live without grinding to get themselves more powerful beforehand. Bungie has toyed with such mechanics before, sure, but this is the first time it's done so so generously. The day The Witch Queen was released, all Guardians, regardless of whether or not they'd purchased the new campaign, had their power level boosted to 1350, putting every single player - new or old, current or lapsed - on an equal footing. The idea of our enemies having the same is at once both outrageous and utterly believable and set the scene for what is, undoubtedly, Destiny's most thrilling expansion yet. We had the fuel that fired our special powers and enabled us to do the impossible and return from the dead. We'd taken it for granted, hadn't we? Destiny's enemies may have numbers and brute strength on their side, but we had the Light. When I killed it and a ghost spawned in its wake, I shouted at my TV. The first time a Hive commander pulled a Super - that is, triggered special powers that had been, up until now, only in the purview of humankind - I was agog. It's why we can respawn when the creatures we have slain cannot. Humanity - saved from extinction by a mysterious sentient sphere called The Traveller - was gifted the Light, a mechanism that allowed them to return to life after death, albeit without their memories, courtesy of their curious Ghost companions. It's a given in games, isn't it? You fight, you die, you respawn, but unlike most other games, Destiny has an explanation for that. The things we fight - the huge, hulking Hive bosses - somehow only appear to us as "illusions". We're not supposed to feel sorry for the murderous creatures that sit in the crosshairs of our scope, and yet the more of the story we unravel, the harder it is to shake the sense they've been terribly deceived. We've spent days and weeks of our lives running through their subterranean dungeons and cathedrals, but rarely have we seen them craft such exquisitely ornate environs under the expanse of an open sky, even if that sky is a putrid green. Guardians have spent almost eight years now in the company of the Hive, Destiny's ancient alien species that kills its enemies to feed their carcasses - and powers - to the worms that lay within them. Just like the original wonderland, first impressions are deceiving, and not everything is what you may first think it to be. Watch on YouTube Here's a little tour around Savathûn's Throne World.īut the wonderland moniker goes a little further than mere appearances in Destiny 2's latest expansion, The Witch Queen. I half expected to find a quivering playing card or tardy white rabbit each time I rounded one of those perfectly sheared hedgerows. Not a benevolent monarch, of course, but the type that shrieks "Off with his head!", and even before I noticed Bungie itself had called this place a "twisted wonderland", the Queen of Hearts' tyrannical reign had already loomed large in my mind. Palatial and extravagant - maybe even mildly repugnant, perhaps? - you start to realise that only someone purporting to be a Queen could live in a place like this. The statutes - benign at first glance - are more menacing the longer you look. It's beautiful here - a touch cold, maybe, but beautiful nonetheless - until your eyes drift up, and you notice that its gothic facades are topped with long, thin, deadly spikes, as friendly as the barbs our city councillors install on rooftops and in shop doorways to keep birds and homeless people at bay. Availability: Out now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Series X/S, and Stadia.Its neat privet hedges bookend meandering walkways that don't seem in a rush to get anywhere, and much of the ground - bleached, polished stone - is obscured by a thick carpet of russet leaves and blood-red petals. Savathûn's Throne World is an indulgent, decadent place.
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