It’s essentially a passive way of getting rewards over time, and isn’t meant to be completed right away. Not that any of it is particularly engaging though, killing enemies, doing patrol missions, strikes and the raid. This record book is the same as the year two record book, but with much more to do. The short campaign is punctuated with a couple of quests and the Iron Record book. There was no real progression, as you went from discovering SIVA to blowing up the SIVA bunker without any real explanation, and it all felt half-baked. In total, the campaign was a little under two hours and five missions long. It was three large minotaurs back then, and in Rise of Iron it’s three corrupted Iron Lords. Not to mention that the campaign ends very abruptly with an echo of the Destiny’s original last story bosses, three of the same large enemy type. Outside of the first cutscene depicting the Iron Lords fighting SIVA and the premise of the Fallen using SIVA, nothing else is explained or elaborated on. The storytelling is reminiscent of Destiny’s initial release, in that it feels rushed and poorly explained. Shiro-4’s delivery and voice-acting feels very flat and unemotive, which is especially noticeable next to Saladin’s passionate and empowering lines. Instead we have Lord Saladin and Shiro-4, a vanguard scout, narrating the story missions and strikes.

There isn’t any new voice acting from any existing characters besides your ghost. The focus here fell more on the current threat of the Fallen using SIVA to enhance themselves and threaten to overrun the Last City.

Rise of Iron tells a bit of the story of how the Iron Lords fell to SIVA, unstable nanomachines that can be used to create just about anything. Before this expansion the only info we’d received on the Iron Lords was through item descriptions and bits of dialogue from Lord Saladin in the monthly Iron Banner events. Rise of Iron’s story focuses on two things: the Iron Lords and The Fallen, an existing race of enemies in the game. As the last full expansion for Destiny before Destiny 2, and a follow-up to The Taken King, Rise of Iron had big shoes to fill. This expansion itself is actually another way of tiding us over until the arrival of Destiny 2, which was originally to arrive this year, but now finds its home in 2017. Rise of Iron is the beginning of the final chapter for Destiny, and strangely enough it has many of the same problems that Destiny had when it first arrived.

Rise of iron release date