If someone had secretly installed Destiny’s first expansion, The Dark Below, onto my hard drive without telling me, it would’ve taken me a while to notice. To call it an “expansion” is generous, roughly equivalent to calling a moped a motorcycle. The dearth of completely new content for the price is only half of the problem here though; the other half is how recycled and tacked on nearly every element feels.

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Let’s get this right out of the way: the new raid, Crota’s End, is the best, and perhaps only reason to purchase The Dark Below. Just as the Vault of Glass raid did for the core Destiny experience, Crota’s End introduces objective-based gameplay that’s more interesting and varied than anything else you’ll find in this add-on. It’s an infuriating peek at the excellent game Destiny could be – provided that you have five friends with level 28 characters you can round up via text message or phone (seeing as there still isn’t any raid matchmaking).

That inconvenience alone is frustrating enough, but it’s compounded by how little there is to do in The Dark Below aside from the new raid. I blazed through the three story missions and the one new strike in under two hours, and in that time, I saw barely anything substantial that I hadn’t seen in Destiny before. A strong sensation of déjà vu crept in as I tore through Earth and moon areas I’ve visited and revisited countless times since Destiny’s initial launch. The strike mission felt particularly samey, lacking the extra challenge and sense of urgency that make the original group of strikes my go-to grinding activity.

Also disappointing is how The Dark Below fails to flesh out Destiny’s anemic story content. There was an opportunity here to take a more active approach to storytelling, but developer Bungie passes on it, opting to stick with expository dumps before and after missions to inform us why we should care about the things we’re about to shoot. It didn’t work for the core game, and it doesn’t work here either. In the time it’s taken me to write this much, I’ve already forgotten what I did or why I did it. Sure, it’s a new voice feeding us the story, but that doesn’t make what’s being said any more interesting. Loading

That voice belongs to Eris, a new NPC standing around in the tower, handing out new bounties to pursue. Well, kind of new. Essentially, these are the same “kill X number of Y” tasks you’ve been doing, though they sometimes have minor twists, like a requirement to use a specific damage or weapon type. The main reason to do these is to increase your faction standing with Eris in order to purchase new cosmetic items and…that’s about it. She’ll toss you a new weapon every now and again, but for the most part, she offers little more than meaningless stuff to grind for, and Destiny already had plenty of that.

In fact, there’s even more of that meaninglessness in The Dark Below, thanks to the fact that the new raid gear you earn from Crota’s End requires an entirely new resource to upgrade – a resource you can only earn by running the raid over and over and over. So yeah, you can use that fancy new gear you earned wherever you want, you aren’t going to progress with it. This narrows the experience even further for high-level players. Loading

Of course, none of this changes that Destiny is still fundamentally sound in the mechanics department. The act of combat isn’t any less enjoyable in The Dark Below, but it’s no more enjoyable either. Yeah, some Hive Knights will drop the same sword we played with for one mission in the original (which is a blast while it lasts), and you get a hoverbike that can do backflips in mid-air, but neither addition is supported by gameplay that makes them feel necessary or even useful.