Destiny has been in the works for quite some time and the $500 million spent on the game by Activision, publishers of the Call of Duty franchise, and Bungie, the developers of the renowned Halo series, set many gamers expectations sky high. But does Destiny live up to the hype? Let’s find out.
When you boot up Destiny, the first thing you hear is the incredible music by Marty O’Donnell and Paul McCartney, it is haunting, exciting and bold, hopefully offering a taste of everything else the game has to offer. All throughout the game, the music holds strong, always majestic but is not as memorable as the Halo music.
Before the introductory cutscene, you can build your own character to take through Destiny, there are three races to chose from and you can play a male or female in each with plenty of customisation options, but there is a distinct lack of facial hair for the male human and awoken races, the latter of which is a blue, purple or grey skinned race with ghostly pale hair. The last race are the robotic Exo, my personal favourite, they have a wide array of paint colours and even a metal Mohawk. All of the races are very detailed and because of the lack of any sliders the developers have made everything look great, rather than having a few basic features players can adjust.
The first cutscene sets the scene of Destiny, explaining, loosely, about the Traveller, a large alien sphere that gave humanity the technology to inhabit different planets, sending them into their golden age of space exploration. The Darkness, apart from being a decent game in its own right, is a dark force that followed the Traveller and now threatens the remains of humanity. That, sadly, is the most story you will get for hours as the game does a pathetic job of telling a story through the unimaginative missions, which is quite shocking coming from the company that started the Halo franchise.
The story never meets its potential and is truly a wasted opportunity filled with dull writing and big name celebs in small, insignificant parts. Your guardian’s Ghost, voiced by Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage, is the only character that really accompanies you throughout your fruitless journey, but sometimes you wish you could go it alone as he just sounds bored and uninterested when delivering his lacklustre performance, with his biggest use being pointing out the obvious.
The story isn’t the only letdown of Destiny, the mission structure is so uninspired and repetitive that you could mistake it for a first attempt from a new company making a subpar MMO. Every mission, regardless of level or location, involves the same repetitive structure, gun through enemies from point A to B, let your Ghost open a door or activate a machine while you defend the area, then continue from point B to C and occasionally defeat a boss, which are almost always all bark and very little bite.
The combat however, is incredible, and will most likely be the reason you see the game through to the end and carry on after you defeat the poor excuse of a final boss. The gunplay is fluid and responsive, each classes varied ‘supers’ are powerful and the whole experience is one of the most satisfying in recent memory. The weapons are dropped by enemies in a Borderlands or Diablo like fashion, but sadly the loot system is broken. All enemies have the same chance to drop any item in the game, so you could defeat a boss five times in a row and get nothing, but defeat a group of low level, cannon fodder enemies and get an ‘exotic’ weapon or piece of armour.
The multiplayer aspects of Destiny are hit and miss for me, the combat in general is great like in the rest of the game, but the game modes are set out in a way I have not seen before, but it doesn’t work. You have your basic capture the flag, team death match and free for all open from level five onwards, but all other game types are blocked until a certain time, for example, you may have a King of the Hill mode only open for two days until it is swapped out for another game mode. People may argue that this encourages players to try new modes but it is in reality restricting to players who already know what they want.
Even inside multiplayer the loot system is very flawed, at the end of every match some players get access to new weapons and armour, but there seems to be no real reason for players to get the loot, the guy who took your team to victory after a crushing defeat last round may get nothing but the other guy who is always at the bottom of the leader boards, who sits in a corner the whole match, may get one of the rarest items in the game.
Due to the game being always online there is no actual pause button in any game mode, even when you are tackling missions solo, there are actions mapped to the D Pad that can alert players to your current situation though, pressing down send you into a third person camera mode and your guardian sits down, basically an ‘I’m AFK/ AFC’ at the moment’ to other players. There is also a dance button, and trust me, you will see players using it A LOT. When you press right, your character springs into a race and gender specific dance, and it can bring up some pretty interesting situations, like a fully pink titan doing the robot after defeating that seemingly impossible boss.
Overall, with a poor story, a deeply flawed loot system and an apparent lack of content from the get go, Destiny may disappoint most of the fans who have just got off the hype train, but with a combat system that is one of the most satisfying in recent memory, constant future updates thanks to its MMO structure and seamless Co-Op whilst exploring planets, Destiny is still worth a shot if you have faith in Bungie to expand the game over time, but is for the meantime a farmers dream and a story focussed players nightmare.
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