Destiny 2 Renegades Review – Space Western Banger in a Game That Won’t Get Out of Its Own Way

Destiny 2: Renegades is the kind of expansion that makes you remember why you loved this stupid, beautiful game in the first place… and then immediately reminds you why you keep threatening to uninstall it.

This Destiny 2 Renegades review lives in that tension. The Lawless Frontier rules. The Star Wars crossover absolutely hits. The gunplay is still the best in the genre. And somehow, under all that, Destiny 2 still feels like a live-service Jenga tower that wobbles every time Bungie touches anything.

We’re not here to score marketing points. We’re here as the people who have bought every expansion, swore we were out, and still showed up day one for a laser sword.

Destiny 2 Renegades Review

The Good: When Destiny Remembers It’s Supposed to Be Fun

Before diving in, If you want to see where our heads were at before launch, check out our Destiny 2 Renegades preview, where we broke down our early hopes for the Lawless Frontier and the Star Wars crossover.

The Lawless Frontier actually slaps

Renegades’ new sandbox, the Lawless Frontier, is the most fun we’ve had just existing in a Destiny 2 space in a long time. It feels like someone at Bungie finally said, “What if we fully committed to the space-western thing and stopped pretending we’re not doing Star Wars?”

Dusty hubs, neon-lit hideouts, busted tech, and little pockets of weird lore tucked in corners—it all works. Running patrols here doesn’t feel like obligation; it feels like hanging out in a TV show you actually like.

You’ve got:

• Cantina-style social spaces that don’t feel like reskinned Tower corners
• Encounters that kick off quickly instead of waiting ages for a public event
• That specific “gunslinger in a dying galaxy” mood Destiny has flirted with for years but never this hard

It’s not perfect, but it’s coherent, and that alone feels like progress.

The campaign is tight, punchy, and mostly gets out of its own way

Renegades’ campaign is the opposite of those bloated Destiny arcs where you spend four missions chasing a side character who ends up irrelevant by the finale. This one knows what it is: a focused outlaw story with a clear villain, clear stakes, and setpieces that escalate without turning into raid-lite homework.

What works:

• Missions are just long enough; you’re not stuck in a three-phase slog every step of the way.
• The outlaw crew dynamic gives the story some actual personality instead of pure Vanguard bureaucracy.
• Boss fights lean into mechanics, but they rarely cross into “wipe until you memorize the spreadsheet” territory.

It’s not Witch Queen-level writing, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s a pulp space western wrapped around the best FPS combat in the business, and when it’s firing, it’s a blast.

The Star Wars crossover is shameless… in a good way

Let’s be honest: a big reason anyone showed up for Destiny 2: Renegades is the Star Wars crossover.

The weapons, the finishers, the not-legally-called-lightsabers—all of that hits way harder in motion than it did in the trailers. The first time you parry a projectile with your “totally original energy blade” or hear a sound effect that dances right up to the edge of copyright? That’s the good stuff. That’s why we endure this game.

The collab doesn’t feel tacked on. It’s woven into the missions, the aesthetics, the Frontier itself. When you’re in the moment, it absolutely sells the fantasy that you’re a space outlaw in a galaxy that could actually exist in some other nerd’s expanded universe.

The Bad: Destiny 2 Still Hates Your Time and Your Wallet

It feels like a medium expansion at a “we swear this is a big deal” price

Here’s the blunt version: Renegades feels good to play, but it doesn’t feel as big as it thinks it is.

You get:

• A strong but relatively short campaign
• One excellent new zone
• A dungeon that’s cool but not genre-defining
• New toys that spice up builds but don’t rewrite the meta

That’s all fine. The problem is the price point and the way the expansion is framed like an era-defining turning point. If you’ve been around the Destiny block, Renegades feels more like a deluxe season plus than a full-tier expansion. It’s not about “hours of content”; it’s about that nagging feeling that you just paid premium pricing for something that’s “pretty good” instead of essential.

We had fun. We also had that little voice in the back of our heads going, “If this same package dropped for half the cost, people would be losing their minds in a good way.”

Eververse is still the loudest person in the room

Yes, the collab cosmetics look incredible. No, we don’t love where most of them live.

We’re at the point where loading into a new expansion feels like this:

1. Watch a genuinely cool story beat.
2. Play a mission that reminds you why Bungie’s art and audio teams deserve a raise.
3. Open the menu and immediately get smacked in the face by a storefront full of the sickest looks in the expansion.

We’re not pretending Destiny doesn’t need to make money. But when the vibe is “the best Star Wars cosplay is behind a paywall,” it kills some of the magic. It reinforces that sense that Eververse is the main character and the rest of the game is the bonus feature.

If you’ve been gone a while, the game treats you like you never mattered

As a veteran or lapsed player, Renegades has that cruel little curve:

• The first mission whispers, “Welcome back, Guardian.”
• The menus whisper, “You should’ve kept up, idiot.”

Coming back to Destiny 2 for Renegades means smashing face-first into layers of currencies, reworked progression, and tooltips that feel like patch notes instead of explanations. You can absolutely climb that wall, but the game doesn’t meet you halfway. It shrugs and lets YouTube handle onboarding.

For new players, it’s even worse. Renegades doesn’t feel like a starting point; it feels like stumbling into season five of a show where half the early seasons are missing and everyone expects you to understand the memes.

The Emotional Damage: Where the Community Actually Is

If you go by vibes, the Destiny 2: Renegades conversation feels broken into three emotional camps.

1. The “I’m still having fun” crew

• They’re in every night, running Frontier loops and praising the vibes.
• They know it’s flawed, but they’ve accepted Destiny as “the messy game I main,” and on those terms, Renegades is a win.

2. The “I’m here but I’m mad” diehards

• They love the campaign and the new sandbox, then go right back to seething about pricing, FOMO, and how complicated everything is.
• Their mental review reads like, “8/10 gameplay, 3/10 business model, 5/10 overall, I guess.”

3. The “I’m done, I just came to talk trash” ex-Guardians

• They’re not buying Renegades, but they’re absolutely showing up in every thread.
• For them, this expansion is one more data point in a long arc of mismanagement. It could cure world hunger and they’d still be like, “Too late.”

The uncomfortable truth? All three groups are right in their own way. Renegades is good enough to remind you why you loved Destiny 2. It’s also compromised enough to remind you why you stopped trusting it.

So… Should You Buy Destiny 2: Renegades?

If you’re actively playing Destiny 2 and still enjoy logging in:

• Yes, Renegades is worth it.
• The Lawless Frontier, the campaign, and the Star Wars-adjacent fantasy will give you real, honest fun.

If you’re lapsed but nostalgic:

• Renegades is worth a look, but go in knowing you’ll need to relearn some systems and accept that the value proposition is “good but not generous.”
• If you still have old burn marks from past expansions, this won’t fully heal them.

If you’re brand new:

• This is not your starting line.
• Destiny 2 in its Renegades era feels like an incredible house built on a foundation of patch notes, and you deserve a better onboarding than that.

Press X Verdict

If we had to lock this Destiny 2 Renegades review into one pull quote:

Renegades is a stylish, fun, space-western expansion trapped inside a live-service machine that still doesn’t respect your time or your intelligence.

We laughed. We popped off. We shook our heads. We’re glad we played it. We’re not convinced Bungie has actually fixed anything long-term.

TL;DR [For The Skippers]

• Lawless Frontier is a win – strong space-western mood, great art, fun to just exist in.
• Campaign is tight and entertaining – focused story, good missions, big moments without raid-tier homework.
• Star Wars crossover goes hard – weapons and abilities feel fantastic in practice and sell the fantasy.
• Value feels mid for the price – content is good, but the package doesn’t feel as “big” as the marketing.
• Eververse is still overbearing – too many of the coolest looks and collab pieces are in the store, not earned.
• Returning and new players get punished – systems are dense, explanations are weak, onboarding is still a mess.
• Bottom line: if you already play, Destiny 2: Renegades is easy to recommend. If you’re out or on the fence, it’s a really fun reminder of why you left.

AJ Hanson

AJ Hanson has been part of games media since 2011, writing, streaming, and ranting about the industry long before it was his job. He runs the Galaxy’s Edge Discord, the go-to community for fans of Disney’s Star Wars parks, and works as Marketing Director for the Virtual Cantina Network, helping produce shows, interviews, and fan events. A lifelong Star Wars fan and unapologetic nerd, AJ’s focus has always been on building spaces where people can connect, argue, and celebrate the things they love without all the corporate gloss.