‘Renegades’ Is Good ‘Star Wars’ and Pretty Okay ‘Destiny 2’

Renegades, the latest expansion to Bungie’s sci-fi shooter Destiny 2, has a lot riding on it. It’s the follow-up to a poorly received attempt to recalibrate the game in the wake of a climactic end cap on storytelling beats Destiny had been building towards since its very inception, and to boot, it’s something of a risk for the game: an entire content update themed around a crossover with another IP in Star Wars.

Destiny is no Fortnite, but it’s no stranger to brand crossovers. For the past few years, gamers have been able to kit out their Guardians in armor sets inspired by the likes of Mass Effect, Dungeons & Dragons, Assassin’s Creed, and yes, even Star Wars before Renegades took things to second base. The expansion represents a fascinating compromise: instead of flinging Destiny into Star Wars or vice versa, it’s Destiny with a veil of Star Wars, aesthetic parallels, thematic connections, and an original story within the saga of Destiny but one that openly pokes at you and goes, “Hey, just like in Star Wars, right?â€

For the most part, it’s this side of Renegades that actually works. Working with perennial Destiny fave Drifter and a ragtag crew, the story finds the guardian going off-grid to battle a potent new threat to humanity: the return of a strange cult, now led by a masked mystery named Dredgen Bael (voiced by Dan Da Dan and Marvel Rivals‘ Aleks Le, turning in a stellar performance), as it works with a militaristic offshoot of the Cabal, the Barant Imperium, hellbent on using a dangerous superweapon capable of permanently killing Guardians, wrenching their powers from out of their bodies.

It is, of course, incredibly Star Wars. That weapon, Nightfall Station, is the Death Star, a planet killer that does the job of eradicating people but not the worlds themselves. The Imperium is, well, the Empire, foot soldiers clad in gleaming white armor. Bael, an angry young man with a history with the Drifter and a chip on his shoulder as a supposedly fallen Guardian, is Kylo Ren, right down to the anguished screaming, the laser sword, and the mask gesturing towards the inheritance of a dark legacy. This is how Renegades does Star Wars, narratively speaking, paralleling stories and concepts we know and love but still keeping them rooted in the worldbuilding of Destiny. There’s no Luke Skywalker here, just Aunor Mahal (Dawn M. Bennett), the dogmatic agent of an order of space magic users who bristles about guardian usage of dark-affiliated powers as opposed to the light, running around with her own energy sword.

Squint, and for 6 or so hours, Renegades‘ story campaign becomes a pretty classic riff on a Star Wars shooter. Destiny locales like Mars, Europa, and Venus become, with a few aesthetic tweaks, nods to Tatooine, Hoth, and Endor. Barant forces are supported by new bipedal walkers that look close enough to an AT-ST. The very best missions of the narrative are essentially direct love letters to the infiltrations of both Death Stars: the opener being all about disabling a tractor beam and escaping an ever-enclosing trash compactor aboard the Imperium flagship after it captures your crew’s ship, Tantive IV style, the final stretch being a madcap dash to blow up the insides of the Imperium’s superweapon.

The guns you shoot are now actually blasters, heat-charge-based weaponry marking a first for Destiny‘s usually ammo-driven mechanical action, each inspired by different iconic Star Wars guns, from Cassian’s Bryar pistol to Mando’s amban phase pulse rifle, but still fitting into the gun archetypes that drive Destiny‘s loot-shooter grind—and yes, you get a lightsaber too, the first Destiny sword that can be thrown like a boomerang and deflect enemy fire back at them that makes all the right thrumming noises to make your brain tickle, too. Hell, even the music takes on a much grander, space-operatic bent, evoking Star Wars while not just doing some John Williams and calling it a day. The vibe of what “feels†or “looks†Star Wars can be challenging to capture, even for stories actually set in the galaxy far, far away, and the fact that Renegades not only achieves that, but does so playing in its own sandbox on its own terms—and does so while gracefully marrying parts of itself that were already inspired and influenced by Star Wars into this grand love letter—is kind of remarkable.

The love is more than skin deep, too. While Renegades‘ broad story is, well, broad—find the enemy, run away from the enemy, figure out how to blow up the enemy’s stuff before they can use it—its best Star Wars rhyming is driven by character and theme, rather than just spectacle. Bael and Mahal are absolutely the best examples of this in Renegades, completely compelling characters in their own rights beyond adjacency to Star Wars archetypes that, thankfully, seem like they’re going to stick around for a little while longer in the narrative.

The latter sees her arc across Renegades as she spends more time with you and your crew and reckons with the doctrines and failures of her group, the Praxic Order, as she personally adapts to a world that has grown beyond those dogmatic ideas and accepted a better balance of understanding in the cosmic forces that bind Guardians and the wider world, an interesting foil to Destiny‘s own wider exploration of dark forces as more than just a so-called “evil.†Imagine if literally anyone in the Jedi Order had a reasonable amount of flexibility for the organization, and you get Aunor, which is a refreshingly fun twist for a Jedi-esque character to take.

In the former, meanwhile, Bael is a remarkably delicious riff on Kylo Ren, balancing the paternal drama (this time instead with a father figure in the Drifter) and anger at the world that made the fallen Ben Solo so compelling with a wonderfully human core that puts a really clever twist on the relationship between the broader remnants of humanity in Destiny with their powerful saviors—and potential overseers—in the Guardians. Without getting into too much detail about where his arc climaxes, Bael is setting the stage for one of Destiny‘s most fascinating villains in a while, and a distinct mirror to the more cosmic-horror-tinged threats its universe usually plays in, and fully sells the potential of taking a Star Wars template and applying it to what Destiny already has and needs, narratively speaking.

But that’s all the Star Wars stuff. Where Renegades is weakest is largely issues that are currently inherent to the form: Destiny itself. The Edge of Fate, the aforementioned poorly received expansion, went a long way to introduce system updates and mechanical tweaks to Destiny 2 that Bungie has now spent the best part of the year trying to roll back on in an attempt to regain player trust. But while Renegades on the whole marks a positive step in that direction in terms of its gameplay, if you’re a Star Wars fan eager to see what the fuss is about, then the game is arguably at one of its worst points possible for onboarding either brand-new or returning players.

If you’ve been away from Destiny 2 for any kind of extended period of time, your first experience with Renegades is not going to be those great Star Wars vibes, but confusion and frustration as you attempt to navigate its gearing and progressional systems, either for the first time or because they’ve been radically overhauled in your time away—and more often than not with the help of external forces, rather than Destiny itself doing a good job of communicating the changes to its form. Likewise, Renegades‘ campaign, while excelling in tightly curated missions that can play with that Star Wars feeling, has a massive dip in its middle where you’re forced to drip-feed nuggets of narrative through a repeated tutorialized use of Renegades‘ new game mode, the “Lawless Frontier,†ahead of its designed use to be a primary activity pillar in the game once you’re done with the campaign (while it is fun, it’s by and large designed to be repeatable, narrative-light content, so it’s not entirely suited as a vector for the interesting Star Wars-y ideas Renegades wants to play with).

At the end of the day, it’s a double-edged sword—laser or otherwise—that Renegades is a profoundly Destiny spin on what a Star Wars experience can be. At its very best, it’s an example of what a unique and engaging collaboration can look like in our increasingly Fortnite-ified pop cultural landscape. At its most frustrating, it’s kind of just Destiny as it has been for a while, even as it takes some early steps towards fixing that experience too. If you’re a Destiny diehard, it’s a reminder of what the game can do when it’s firing on all cylinders, even with a few stumbles along the way. But if you’re a gamer looking for your Star Wars fix, as strong as the Force is here in Renegades, it might be worth getting that fix a bit closer to home in the galaxy far, far away before seeing what’s on offer here.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.