Destiny Review – Just Not Meant To Be

It feels like eons ago that we heard Bungie was breaking up with Microsoft, and now that Microsoft has custody over their lovechild Halo, Bungie’s in need of a brand new triple-A IP to wow their desperately hungry audience.

After a long wait, many believed a new dawn could be coming for Bungie – and indeed for all gamers – for surely the first non-Halo game to come from them, with years of development time, would have been a transformative and life-affirming experience, truly, our Destiny.

Well; it’s not. Destiny is a game which is grand, beautiful, painstakingly crafted, but also sporting one of the most unfulfilling story campaigns we’ve seen in a shooter.

To begin, Destiny is a shooter-MMO hybrid which promises the world – or several worlds, as you explore the futuristic landscapes of planets located in our Solar System. Unfortunately, those areas are sparsely populated and don’t really fulfill that promise of exploring an actual world; Destiny’s MMO-like attributes, at least during exploration, fall somewhat flat. Whereas I expected to be racing past fellow Guardians and clearing out areas full of enemies with random people communicating through in-games emotes alone, instead I found myself often alone and isolated, wondering if I would ever manage to run into someone whom I could team up with to destroy some of Destiny’s more notorious opponents.

 

Experiencing Destiny without already arranging to meet with a friend in the game world can certainly feel lonely, but inviting pals to join your quests definitely makes the game feel more fun and much less tedious. By yourself, however? It’s a game where you will find yourself retracing your steps far too often, and merely defending random points from waves of enemy attacks whilst your AI Ghost companion (voiced by Peter Dinklage) examines, hacks, recovers or scans some sort of vital point. A vast majority of missions is concluded with you either defending a point until it is no longer fun or shooting at a giant damage sponge boss; as you can imagine, quests become highly repetive in a short time.

Bosses are something that strike a nostalgic chord with me. Modern day shooters seem to lack bosses entirely, believing that slowly whittling away at an enemy’s health is actually far too unrealistic for the hyper-realistic expectations set by shooters such as Battlefield and Call of Duty. There are bosses in Destiny, but they’re all too mundane; they look fantastic, towering over your player and looking positively intimidating. Shame that all you do is move into cover to avoid their bullets and shoot their weak point. If you manage to find a location on the map where you can continue to shoot them and they are unable to shoot you then you’ve basically won – as long as you remain aware of enemy mobs that will constantly spawn, dragging out the already lengthy and tedious boss fight; there’s very little of the coordination that some gamers may recall from taking down a boss in a MMORPG.

 

So the gameplay in Destiny consists of aim at weak point, shoot, take cover, repeat. Indefinitely. In fact, there is little to no variation in the entirety of Destiny, gameplay-wise. Sure you may find a vehicle to ride with weapons mounted on the front, but even then vehicles aren’t quite living up to the standards set in the Halo series. Disappointing, to say the least.

But having said all that, Destiny still manages to be some sort of fun. Shooting is still fun, although the feeling is exactly the game if you played any Halo game; I’ve also enjoyed exploring the world and discovering all I could, even if it was very little.

The term MMO has been thrown around a lot in the run-up to Destiny’s launch, but it never feels more like an MMO than when you reach the end-game. Once you reach the level 20 cap, the only way to increase your level is by acquiring gear that contains Light. Light can level you up further, and is contained in the rarest and most valuable gear. How much you’ll enjoy gear grinding though is entirely up to your playstyle. On the one hand, acquiring a rare piece of gear gives you a feeling of pure elation, and on the other hand, the grinding required to gather this gear is insane, and just might drive you to madness.

But everything you find in Destiny works, mechanically. Guns feel good to shoot, your characters movements feel accurate and stable; as a multiplayer shooter, it’s pretty fantastic and I have wasted hours in the Crucible (the PvP mode). Luckily, gear grinding and levelling up can all be performed in the Crucible whilst fighting other Guardians if you so wish, and a mix of PVP and Story missions are certainly the best way to embrace Destiny. Moreover, the game looks beautiful - it may not be the most technically advanced game out there, but if there’s anyone who shouldn’t feel guilty about Destiny at Bungie, it’s their art department - they did an amazing job.

 

Despite all of my gripes, I played Destiny for hours upon hours and surely any game that can grip me that much for that amount of time is worth something. I can’t say I hate Destiny, it’s just a game that is a victim of it’s own hype. Bungie promised so much, but delivered what I genuinely believe is a decent but intensely flawed experience.

Of course, Bungie and Activision have a huge selection of DLC of expansions planned for Destiny, so it’s fair to say  that there’s potential for huge changes coming in the next few months, or even years; still, I doubt that any addition will be able to transform the game to a point where it’s worthy of the promise.