Rising Is Better Than Destiny 2

I had exceptionally low expectations for Destiny: Rising. The non-canon mobile Destiny spin-off from NetEase is throwing up more red flags than a professional bullfighter. As TheGamer’s most unforgiving mobile game critic, I was prepared to write Rising off the moment it started using AI voices. Luckily, I stuck with it, because it turns out Destiny: Rising does a lot of things Destiny 2 should have started doing years ago.

That’s not to say it’s perfect. Destiny: Rising is still a mobile game with all the usual mobile game trappings. It’s grossly over-monetized, frustratingly time-gated, and overtly manipulative in ways that are difficult to ignore. But if you can look past the mobile-of-it-all – and I’m not saying you should – there’s a solid looter shooter here that improves on the Destiny 2 formula in a number of big ways.

Onboarding

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

Rather than expect you to learn the ins-and-outs of a bunch of arcane and interconnected systems like Destiny 2, Rising always directs you to go exactly where you need to. Say you want to upgrade a weapon but you don’t have the required materials. Tapping on the weapon will show you a list of vendors and activities where you can get the items you need, and tapping on any of them will bring you straight into the activity. There’s very little friction when it comes to navigating Rising’s menus and progression systems because any time you get stuck, you can click a button on screen that takes you exactly where you need to go.

Matchmaking And Backfilling

Everything in Destiny: Rising has matchmaking. Let me say that again because long-time Destiny 2 players aren’t going to believe me. Every single playlist activity, from the competitive PvP mode Calamity Ops to the endgame six-player raid Gauntlet: Onslaught, has built-in matchmaking. Though you’re not guaranteed to find a match in every playlist, especially during the closed Alpha where there are limited players, the option is there to queue for any activity you want without having to go outside the game to look for people to play with.

When queue times are long, the game automatically builds a Fireteam Finder listing for you and then allows you to post it on as many social channels as you want to help you find players. Most activities will fill your fireteam with bots if no other players are available to queue with you. A couple of the activities are meant for coordinated, high-skill teams, but for the most part you aren’t going to find yourself locked out of any of Rising’s content because you can’t find other people to play with.

Activity Variety

Maybe I’ve just been playing Destiny 2 too long, but I’m finding Rising’s playlist activities to be a breath of fresh air. It’s got the classic Strikes, public events, and seasonal-style activities, 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 Gambit evolution we’ve been waiting for. It pits four teams of three against each other in a race to defeat the most enemies and deposit their motes, but complicates the Gambit formula by allowing teams to travel back and forth 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 raids, which breaks up each encounter into its own playlist activity with separate rewards and difficulty scaling. It’s a nice way to make complex endgame content digestible for mobile and prevent the frustration of commiting hours to a team that eventually falls apart when things go wrong.

Singularity, Rising’s roguelike single-player activity, is also a standout game mode.

A More Manageable Daily Grind

Time gates are controversial, especially when you can pay real money to bypass them, but since you can’t spend money in Rising right now, I find that it’s time gates are giving me just enough to do every day so that I feel satisfied by my progression rather than overwhelmed by how much more there is to do.

Every day you get two daily missions and three bounties, and every week you get bonus rewards for completing each playlist activity a certain number of times. To maximize your rewards you just need to do a couple of playlist activities a day. You can grind as much as you want for diminishing returns, and there’s a lot of extra materials and experience to earn by clearing out the Alpha’s singular patrol zone – Jianshi Metro – but knocking out the dailies is so manageable that I can just do that and stop without feeling bad about it. If I really want to keep playing, there’s plenty more to do.

Sparrow Racing

I have never been as fanatically dedicated to the idea of Sparrow racing as some Destiny fans, and I totally get why Bungie wouldn’t want to dedicate the resources to bring Destiny’s SRL to Destiny 2. But I’m impressed that NetEase has included racing in Rising because it communicates a deep understanding of Destiny fans and what they want. If Rising can continue to fill the gaps that Destiny 2 is missing, it will be well-positioned to succeed with those who prefer mobile gaming and shorter sessions, or Destiny 2 players that want to extend the grind onto other platforms.