Destiny is a beautiful but hollow experience
with most of the pieces you' d expect from a
great multiplayer shooter . It just can' t find a
way to fit them all together .
Destiny is a terrific-looking first-person shooter with
a solid foundation in its shooting mechanics. You
might expect sound mechanics from a developer like
Bungie, which has been making popular first-person
shooters for years. But you might also expect things
like an engaging story and a real variety in
encounters from the developers responsible for Halo.
That's where Destiny comes up profoundly short.
When you throw it all together, you're left with a
game where the missions are designed to be
repeatable, but all the missions are so repetitive that
it's hard to get excited to see the same handful of
environments again and again and again as you
attempt to grind out faction reputation or hunt
around for high-end weapons. It's a beautiful game,
but a hollow experience.
The setting in Destiny is that humanity is already in
dire straits. Darkness has spread throughout the
galaxy and numerous factions, like the bug-like Hive
and the murderous robots known as the Vex, are
planning to put humanity out the picture for good.
You enter the picture as a guardian of humanity, one
of many, and you're sent out from the last city to
attack back against the encroaching forces. This
starts on Earth, then moves to the Moon before
heading on to Venus and, finally, Mars . The story
missions themselves are the bulk of Destiny. But
"story" is maybe giving the missions a little too
much credit. You'll get a little dialogue before you
start a mission that says what you're doing, and
maybe a few lines along the way. But Destiny is
incredibly thin on world-building, story, and in-game
lore, even going so far as hiding little bits of lore on
unlockable "cards" that you can only see on the
game's official website. There are somewhere
around four cutscenes in the entire game, and most
of the mid-mission updates are so full of space
opera mumbo-jumbo and factions or other groups
that you haven't heard of before, giving you no
context for any of it. It's almost like they expect to
flesh out the world in a series of books someday or
something. Regardless of future plans, I found it hard
to care about any of the lore in Destiny because
there was very little of it and it all felt loosely
connected, at best. Did I really accomplish anything
when I finished the last story mission? It sure
doesn't feel that way to me. If you were a fan of
Bungie's narrative work in the past, you'll probably be
disappointed with this aspect of Destiny.
The story missions also suffer due to incredibly
repetitive design. With one or two exceptions, every
mission has you running to an area (often
backtracking through areas you played through in a
previous mission), finding an old or alien computer of
some kind, and dispatching your friendly robotic
ghost buddy to scan or analyze the thing so you can
move on. Plenty of missions end with you finding a
thing, having your hover ghost stare at it while you
fight off waves of enemies, and then listening to a
few sentences of largely meaningless dialogue. The
menu is built in a way that seems to imply that you'd
want to play through these areas multiple times and
on multiple difficulty settings, but since most of the
missions fail to distinguish themselves from one-
another, I found myself feeling completely done with
Destiny immediately after completing the final story
piece.
Those story missions can be played by up to three
players, and it's my strong recommendation that you
don't play Destiny alone. Going in, guns blazing, as a
team is far more enjoyable than going it alone,
especially once you get to the back half of a
mission, which typically places you in a restricted
zone where, if all players die, the game resets back
to a checkpoint. You can revive downed players or, in
these zones, players can respawn themselves after
30 seconds. Having someone lend you a hand and
keeping things moving is way more exciting than
dying alone and having to reset back to try again.
Unfortunately, you are forced to bring friends and
acquaintances into story missions--there's no form
of matchmaking to line you up with other players
automatically. This seems like a needlessly
restrictive move.
By comparison, the game's competitive multiplayer
allows for matchmaking, as do the cooperative
"strike" missions. The competitive side of Destiny
pits players against each other in a series of
standard shooter multiplayer modes and typically
flattens the level differences between players in an
attempt to keep things fair. It's nice that you can
level up your character in the game's multiplayer
arenas, and you'll also earn a bunch of other,
alternate currency and reputation that can be used
to buy high-end gear. But I found the competitive
side of the game to feel like even more of a grind
than its cooperative side. It's lacking the
inventiveness and playful nature of Halo's crazier
multiplayer modes.
Strikes are longer player-versus-AI missions that
allow up to three players to fight through a set area
and face off against large bosses. The bosses in the
game's strikes are larger than anything you'll see in
the story, but most of the time the strategy boils
down to spreading out around the large boss and
shooting. As the different characters pull the
attention of the boss, it'll slowly turn to fire, letting
the other two players open up unabated. Since
ammo ends up becoming a consideration, all the
boss fights are also filled with regular enemies, who
will drop ammo and, very occasionally, gear.
The loot situation in Destiny is weird. On one hand,
you can equip armor to a handful of slots and
acquire different weapons for your three weapon
slots. On the other, the statistical differences
between different pieces of loot don't make a
meaningful difference to the way the game plays.
You might find a fully automatic rifle that has a
higher damage number than your old one, but aside
from some occasional differences in muzzle climb,
magazine size, and other small variances, it's the
same as the auto rifle you're replacing. Compared
with other loot games, which might have lightning
firing out of you at all times or cows that sometimes
descend from the heavens to do battle alongside
you, Destiny's loot system feels half-baked.
With its treasure-hunting reduced to a mere quest for
higher numbers, the desire to go in and replay areas
and strikes to find better loot is severely diminished.
Even though some weapons get secondary abilities
that might make reloading times faster with certain
classes of weapons or some armor might let you
throw grenades farther, nothing made such a major
difference that I ever felt attached to a piece of
gear. With that, the whole leveling system starts to
fall apart. You equip better gear to remain
competitive, but enemies that are at your level will
always feel like they can really soak up some bullets.
The boss fights, most of which are against
lumbering, slow enemies that deal a ton of damage,
exacerbate this issue even further. It gets boring.
It's a real shame, too, because for as lackluster as
the actual action and progression can be, Destiny's
world looks fantastic. The art team on this thing
must have had a field day designing cool-looking
helmets, capes, and other bits of armor. The areas
you're shooting through might be repetitive in nature,
but each one has a real look of its own that makes it
stand out, from the craggy surface of the Moon to
the burnt-out colony on Venus to the wide-open
sands of Mars. The game has terrific lighting, with
great shadows that cast off of your team and the
enemies. I found myself able to use the shadows
tactically in a couple of spots, as enemy locations
would sometimes be given away by their own
shadow. And, of course, no one can do a sky box
quite like Bungie. It's an impressive-looking game
that, at least, is a joy to explore the first time
through, if only to see each of the game's different
areas and look at all the detail.
But, yeah, its fantastic graphics often serve to make
the game's mechanical underpinnings that much
more disappointing. There are cool little flashes of
brilliance in Destiny, but a lot of it feels like a game
designed by people who weren't sure what sort of
game they were designing. Is it a loot shooter? Sort
of, but the loot isn't very good. Is it an MMO? No,
but you'll occasionally encounter other players out in
the field. A story-driven shooter like the Halo
franchise? Sure, if you don't mind digging through
the developer's website to find those little bits of
lore. Clans? Again, they exist on the website but
don't surface in-game in a meaningful way. The
pieces are there, but too many of them feel
malformed or half-realized to make Destiny
recommendable. If you're interested in this sort of
game, you may wish to wait and see what Bungie
does in the months ahead before spending fastfingers 5 reviews 3/5 any money.
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