Many of our readers will know that it’d be an understatement to say I was incredibly disappointed with the Destiny 2 release, and both of year one’s DLC, Curse of Osiris and Warmind. The game, as reported by most news outlets, was a massive step backwards for the franchise, which was unfortunate. The release of Curse of Osiris for PC users just one month after the base game’s release and asking players to pay for that content when they just purchased the game (forcing players to ask the question, “why wasn’t this content simply included in the base game?”) will never cease to amaze me and never cease to draw my ire.
Gambit is a ton of fun. You and your team of 4 combatants enter an arena designed for you by “The Drifter,” where you have to kill either Vex, Cabal, or Hive, collect motes that drop when you kill them (they disappear if you don’t collect them quick enough), and then bank those motes at a central location. After you bank your motes, you summon a “primeval” (AKA a boss), and then must kill that primeval.
The trick is, the enemy team of 4 combatants is trying to do exactly the same thing on a separate instance of the map quicker than you. There are some roadblocks along the way as well. If you bank 5, 10, or 15 motes, you can summon a “blocker” on the opposing team’s map. This causes their mote bank to shut down, and they must defeat a Taken enemy (small, medium, or large, based on the number of motes you bank) before they can bank their motes again. This slows down their progress in summoning their primeval. Another roadblock is that you can invade the opposing team’s map as you bank motes and murder them to slow them down even more. If you invade their map while they are trying to kill their primeval and you kill them instead, you’ll heal their primeval, slowing them down even more.
What makes Gambit so much fun is that in its purest form, it’s a race against time. You have to kill enemies, get motes, bank motes, invade the opposing team at strategic times, delay their progress on their primeval, focus on killing your primeval, strategize on when to summon blockers, and ultimately DPS your primeval down as fast as possible before the other team does it first.
It has led to some intense, nail-biting finishes, one so close that when the mission complete screen popped up, I had no idea who won the match because both primevals’ health bars were at 0. (We ended up winning…..of course ;) ).
Gambit is way more fun when you can play with at least one other person that you know, as communication and strategy really are paramount to success, and having four people run towards the same motes only for one person to collect them definitely gets old fast.
Gambit is just one of many changes and new additions to the game Bungie has made with the release of Forsaken. I’ve found myself forgiving them for the release of the game, but not forgetting about those mistakes.