What You Need to Know About the Sparrow Racing League (SLR) in Destiny: The Taken King

Okay. For those of you who haven't tried SRL (Sparrow Racing League) or, haven't dive in deep to see all the feature of this new game mode in Destiny, then let me tell you a few things I've discovered about this new racing game mode.

First is that there are two tracks available: One on Mars and one on Venus. Each track is full of enemies that shoot at you, which don’t provide much more than the occasional annoyance. You pass through gates to get a speed boost and try to avoid flying off the track. Each match has six players, and the event rewards with special sparrow gear. Like all things in Destiny, you get the best results from just playing it a whole lot.

Many are so fun with this new Racing features but to make things clear, Destiny is not a racing game all of a sudden. The sparrows handle like dirt — a little reminiscent of the hovercraft in Diddy Kong Racing, a vehicle made only for masochists. You’ll find yourself caught up and flipping around at the worst times, saved only by the fact that your opponents have to deal with the same frustrating vehicle. But there’s something terribly addictive about even that handicap: once you start to get a feel for it, you can really maneuver those things around — there’s something truly satisfying about nailing three or five gates in a row. You’ll usually slam into a wall shortly after, however.

A few tips that are considered helpul are: Firstly, get yourself a sparrow that can hard brake with R2 — one drops from the first SRL quest. Secondly, gates are important, but they’re not the whole ballgame. Hitting a turn tight without losing momentum can be better than getting a gate, and much better than having said gate send you flying off course. And stay out of the air: the air is not your friend. Sparrows handle even worse in the air than on the ground, so you’ll want to keep things as flat as possible to keep an eye on what’s going on. and if you haven’t finished Jolly Holiday, equip the Last Word: you’ll earn progress towards that quest in SRL.

That’s about it: it’s a fairly straightforward little mode, useful more as a distraction, but a wholly welcome expansion of the Destiny universe nonetheless. I like this event-focused concept of the game going forward. It keeps things from getting boring, and allows you to scratch all sorts of itches with a single game. Plus, there’s a 320 helmet in there somewhere.

Update: Three of Coins works in SRL

So after the update I decided to throw on a 3 of coins since I knew I'd forget next time I needed and I know we're all gonna need them with the new exotics. After that I looked around the tower and went straight into a race, as my first race finished, I found an exotic chest engram and my 3oC buff was gone.

It has been confirmed by Lars Bakken via twitter that 3oC does work in Sparrow Racing League.