by Chase Streetman
Destiny is Bungie’s first IP launch since Halo: CE’s release in 2001. Bungie's work on the Halo series created a household name and launched consoles shooters into the public spotlight. It brought about innovations and an exciting new universe by using well-known themes to cut through much of the world development.
Destiny comes nowhere close to doing this.
The story of takes place 700 years in the future, following a golden age of technological growth and the arrival of the mysterious Traveler; the sphere that sits above the last city of Earth.
The premise is interesting, but the story lacks depth. The only way to know more about the lore of this fictional universe is by going on the Destiny companion app and reading walls of text that give details that are absent from the game. It doesn’t feel like Bungie particularly cared about telling this story, but simply used it as a jerry-rigged vessel for the gameplay.
The story reads as a mish-mash of various sci-fi fantasy tropes. It borrows so many ideas from so many other places that it loses any sense of identity that it may have had. Influence from games like Advent Rising and Mass Effect are apparent. The call to action is a mysterious and evil threat from beyond the stars. The player character is gifted with magical powers because he or she has been chosen by a mysterious alien entity. Additionally, the Hive bears a striking resemblance in gameplay to the Reapers from Mass Effect and the Fallen to the Protheans from Halo 4. The story is never actively bad, it just doesn’t do anything special to really raise the experience from neutral to good.
One of Destiny’s redeeming values is its shooting mechanics. All of the guns feel powerful, the character hitboxes are tight and accurate, and the variety of enemy critical points makes for an interesting addition. This includes enemies with shields who must be stunned first, plus more creative ones like enemies who become significantly more dangerous if shot in the head.
Unfortunately the enemies don’t act too differently from another. Each type just slowly and continuously advances towards you while firing anytime you come out of cover. The only exceptions are the Hive Thrall, who charge right at you, and the various sniper-type, which take pot-shots at you from a distance. The general arrangement of enemies also tends to make rushing into the group a terrible option, which leads to a constrained combat system.
Scattered across each planet are several boss fights. These are some of the few genuinely awful aspects of Destiny, and they draw attention to some features that are strangely absent from the game.
The boss fights are tedious and frustrating. Each boss is simply a larger versions of previous enemies with an absurd amount of health, relentless attacks, and endless waves of minions.
Usually lasting 15 minutes, if you get bored and break your attention for a few moments you’ll get blasted and killed. The result is a respawn at the beginning of the fight without any of the ammo you just spent in vain.
Destiny makes many efforts to mimic elements from MMOs. A class-based character system, instanced gameplay, PvP arena, and its mission/reward cycle are obvious indicators of MMO influence, but there aren’t as strong of community-building tools available like those in games like World of Warcraft and Star Wars: Galaxies.
There is no way to trade items between characters. None of the skills in any of the trees are of direct benefit to teammates.
The PvP aspect faces a multitude of balancing problems. Guns and armor have a good balance to them, but the class abilities can be too chaotic. The result is frantic and occasionally rewarding deathmatches, and dull and unreliable objective-based matches.
The objective-based matches are too often won by the use of class super-charged abilities. Certain classes, like Blade Dancer, Striker and Void Walker, have huge advantages in objective-based matches because of their superb radial damage abilities. Beyond that, there’s little strategy to matchmaking.
The core principle of Destiny is to reward players for completing mundane chores.
Trying to get better equipment and weapons? You better get used to strike missions.
Want to try out the second version of your class that you unlocked 8 hours into the game? You better be ready to completely restart the levelling system without so much as a grenade.
Think that new gun looks pretty fun? Have fun choosing between your less levelled-up weapon and 30 minutes of levelling up the new gun.
The world of Destiny is truly beautiful, with each vista looking out onto a world’s scenic landscape. Unfortunately, many of these are just backdrops and can’t actually be explored.
The sound design is brilliant as well, adding to the feeling of a well-populated world that goes on with or without the player. Wandering the wastes of Old Russia or the jungles of Venus, you’ll hear gunshots and explosions far off in the distance as other guardians go about their business. Going through the Hive tunnels on the moon pierces your ears with screeches and growls that echo through the dark.
This all amounts to fun mechanics set in a series of unimpressive situations. Despite being the first AAA shooter since March, Destiny doesn’t have anything interesting to offer the FPS or the RPG genres.
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Image: DestinyTheGame.com, Gamespot, Softpedia, VG247
