Rebellion is better than fate 2

I had exceptionally low expectations for Destiny: Rising. NetEase's non-canonical Destiny mobile spin-off raises more red flags than a professional bullfighter. As TheGamer's most relentless mobile game critic, I was ready to write Rising off the moment it started using AI voices. Luckily, I stuck with it because it turns out that Destiny: Rising does a lot of things that Destiny 2 should have started doing years ago.

That doesn't mean it's perfect. Destiny: Rising is still a mobile game with all the usual trappings of a mobile game. It's over-monetized, limited in time, and overtly manipulative in a way that's hard to ignore. But if you can get past a mobile phone – and I'm not saying you should – here's a solid loot shooter that improves on Destiny 2's formula in many ways.

Preparation

Like Destiny 2, Destiny: Rising is a challenging game. Progression isn't as simple as leveling up and gaining new skills. There's a wide range of actions that reward different currencies, each used to power up different aspects of your characters, which can be overwhelming. A dozen hours later, I still don't know the difference between Gauntlets Ops and Singularity: Chaos, but I don't need to.

Instead of expecting you to learn the ins and outs of a bunch of secret and interconnected systems like Destiny 2, Rising always guides you to go exactly where you need to go. Let's say you want to upgrade your weapon, but you don't have the necessary materials. Clicking on a weapon will show you a list of vendors and actions where you can get the items you need, and clicking on any of them will take you straight to the action. When it comes to navigating Rising's menus and progression systems, you have very little trouble because whenever you get stuck, you can press an on-screen button that will take you exactly where you need to go.

Matchmaking And Falling Asleep

Everything in Destiny: Rising has matchmaking. Let me say that again because longtime Destiny 2 players won't believe me. Every single action in the playlist, from the competitive PvP mode of Calamity Ops to the final six-player raid of Gauntlet: Onslaught, has built-in matchmaking. While you're not guaranteed to find a match on every playlist, especially during the closed alpha where the number of players is limited, it's possible to queue for any activity you want without having to go outside the game to find people with which you can play.

If queue times are long, the game automatically creates a Fireteam Finder list for you, and then lets you post it on as many social channels as you want to help you find players. Most classes will fill your fireteam with bots if there are no other players queuing with you. A few activities are designed for coordinated, highly skilled teams, but most of the time you won't find yourself locked out of any Rising content because you can't find other people to play with.

Variety of activities

Maybe I've been playing Destiny 2 for too long, but I find the Rising activity in the playlist to be a breath of fresh air. It features the classic Strikes, Public Events, and Seasonal Events, but many of its game modes are unlike anything we've seen in Destiny before, or otherwise reimagine familiar content in exciting new ways.

One of my favorite game modes is Shifting Gates, an extraction-style PvPvE that feels like the evolution of Gambit we've been waiting for. Four teams of three go head-to-head in a race to defeat the most enemies and chip away at them, but complicates the gambit formula by allowing teams to travel between each other's realms to ambush, disrupt, and steal their farm. It's a clever mix of MOBA and extraction that I can't get enough of.

I'm also fascinated by Rising's approach to raiding, which breaks down each encounter into a separate playlist with individual rewards and difficulty scaling. It's a good way to make complex endgame content mobile-friendly and prevent the frustration of dedicating hours to a team that ends up falling apart when things don't go right.

Singularity, Rising's rogue-like single-player game, is also a great game mode.

More manageable daily work

Time gates are controversial, especially if you can pay real money to bypass them, but since you can't spend money in Rising right now, I find that time gates give me enough to do each day to feel satisfied with my progress rather than being overwhelmed by how much remains to be done.

Each day you get two daily missions and three rewards, and each week you get bonus rewards for completing each action in the playlist a certain number of times. To maximize your rewards, you simply need to complete a couple of playlist activities per day. You can grind as much as you want for reduced returns, and there's a lot of extra material and experience to be gained by clearing Alpha's only patrol area – the Jianshi Metro – but knocking out dailies is so manageable that I can just do it and stop without feeling bad. on this occasion. If I really want to keep playing, I have a lot more to do.

Sparrow races

I've never been as fanatically devoted to the idea of ​​sparrow racing as some Destiny fans, and I totally understand why Bungie wouldn't want to commit the resources to bring Destiny's SRL to Destiny 2. But I'm impressed that NetEase included racing in Rising because he conveys a deep understanding of Destiny fans and what they want. If Rising can continue to fill in the gaps that Destiny 2 is missing, it will have a good chance of succeeding with those who prefer mobile games and shorter sessions, or Destiny 2 players looking to expand the grind to other platforms.