User Review : Destiny

All killer no filler.

Like the glint of gleaming star in the visor of a marauding cosmonaut, Destiny brings with it a light that burns bright and shines proud. But this is a star with a deceptively short half-life, and one that loses its lustre with a languid inevitability. For this is the makeup of Destiny, a game full of promise and potential, but a game flawed down to its very essence.

Many of Destiny’s woes stem from its tri-genre foundations. This is a game that has been relentlessly touted as a ‘shared world shooter’ and as a hybrid that seeks to advance and innovate the rigidity of traditional game genres. Destiny makes some interesting in-roads in this respect, but these are pathways stifled by all manner of blemishes to each of Destiny’s three main components.

The first-person shooter basis of Destiny is undoubtedly its strongest facet.

Shooting is tight and responsive no matter what tool you’ve chosen for the battle to come, with all manner of rocket launchers and machine guns performing with realistic kicks and sways that are challenging to control yet satisfying to master. Weapons in the game are pleasingly varied too, with each offering a new and exciting way of tackling the droves of enemies ahead, be it in the PvE arenas of a cooperative Strike or in a multiplayer death-match within the Crucible. Time spent with each weapon opens up its potential even further, with a tree of unlocks allowing you to fine tune your armament to perfectly suit your play-style. Gunplay, and for that matter combat in general, is an incredibly fun aspect of the game that feels perfectly attuned to Destiny’s free-moving style. You can strafe to and from cover using a knee slide, take to the air and unleash a torrent of rockets before slamming back to the ground with a devastating melee charge all in a single move, with the successful execution of such a fluid attack enough to make you feel every part the true Guardian.

Destiny first falls down in its application of the games RPG features, however.

Certain things are executed perfectly well. Each of the games three character classes brings with it two unlock trees that come complete with several diverse skills to hone as you progress through the game. And whilst each character class is not overly different from one another, there’s definitely enough diversity there to warrant a play-through with all three of them, even if it’s just to sample the six defining super abilities that characterize each subclass. Destiny’s first foible here comes in the form of its rather shallow levelling process. In no time at all, you will have found yourself hitting the soft level cap of 20, with only the game’s best loot seeing you upped to the hard level cap of 30. But unlike loot-heavy games such as Diablo 3 or Borderlands that ingrain this process to the whole journey rather than segment it, Destiny’s post level 20 loot-infused experience leaves a lot to be desired.

Loot in the game is predictably dropped from defeated enemies, and depending on your luck, will manifest itself as either a white, green, blue, purple or orange drop, with orange weapons and gear being amongst the best items in the game. Interestingly, some orange items can be acquired through bounties rather than random drops, with the very best of the best requiring a number of completed challenges to finally put the prized exotic armament in your possession. For the most part though, you’ll have to rely on the prospect of loot dropping from enemy carcasses, and this is where you’re likely to be left frustrated. After a fair length of time following my triumphant rise to level 20, I was delighted to receive my first legendary item drop from a freshly killed enemy, only for this drop to manifest itself as an item exclusive to a class I wasn’t presently using. The next time I was lucky enough to obtain a legendary drop, it decoded into an item a whole tier lower than the one it had originally dropped as. Couple this with bosses that never drop anything, an excruciatingly long wait between item drops and the lack of a trading system, and you’ll soon find yourself inundated with a mass of things either criminally under-levelled or only usable by another character class. And this is from a post-game endeavour that’s meant to improve your character.

The short and relatively carefree journey to level 20, coupled with the sudden painstaking grind to 30 then places a lot of emphasis on replaying activities you have already completed, which is a far less appetizing prospect once you’ve become accustom to Destiny’s rudimentary level design. Deploy your Ghost, defend against waves of increasingly tough enemies, survive and repeat. This is the formula for mission design in Destiny, and it evidently becomes awful tiresome, awful quickly. It’s then made even more monotonous when you combine it with a story that’s no more engrossing than the text on a scrolling LCD belt-buckle and filled with dialogue delivered with the panache of somebody flittering in and out of a NiQuil induced coma.

It’s disheartening that in a world that has obviously been created with such a painstaking attention to detail, that the plot of Destiny has come across as such an afterthought. You are a Guardian, one of many in fact, and you are tasked with pushing back the agents of Darkness that threaten the very existence of out species. Your journey will take you to the fallen remnants of a decaying Earth, the infected core of the Moon, the arid sand dunes of Mars and even the volcanic planes of Venus. Visually, you’re left with your mouth agape as you regale in the destruction of these worlds at the hands of the Darkness and try to piece together the history behind the desolation. But the more you dig, the more you’ll come up with nothing but fistfuls of dirt. There is no treasure to be found here, no substance and no lore. There is only the evil ahead and its inevitable demise at your hand.

More criminal than the lack of discernible characters or the abhorrent reasoning behind our excursions is the simple lack of explanation behind anything. Who exactly is The Darkness? Why is The Traveller dormant? Did our actions regenerate it? If so, why is it still dormant? Are we The Darkness? All of these questions and hundreds more are left unanswered, not by a cliff hanger ending that seeks to whet our appetite ahead of the story’s continuation in Destiny 2, but simply due to the unimaginative, droll spittle that makes up Destiny’s plot.

It was hard to really pinpoint the exact moment when the Destiny story was forever lost to me, but at some point between the umpteenth deploying of my Ghost and fight against the subsequent slew of rampaging enemies, the wide-eyed amazement that accompanied the commencement of my journey turned into a haze of predictability, my sense of wonderment effortlessly subdued. Destiny’s attempt of a story is less of a sci-fi epic akin to that of Halo, and more like an adage to Space Balls scrawled on a napkin.

One of Destiny’s biggest successes is the sheer number of activities that you can partake in. As of writing this review, Raids are not yet available, but aim to provide a stern test to those who have mastered every other aspect of the game. Strikes put teams of three together for extended forays against hulking bosses, whilst next to increasingly difficult runs through the main story missions is a solid PvP mode. Barring PvP though, Destiny prides itself on its MMO focus that seeks to bring Guardians from across the spectrum together to complete shared goals. This doesn’t ever pan out accordingly, however.

If you’re lucky enough to be wandering the planes at just the right time, you may be able to catch a Public Event, which tasks Guardians with eliminating a single, large foe or even completing a number of different objectives. Aside from congregating in The Tower, this is where you’ll be able to see people just like you; people striving for the best gear possible and people outfitting their Guardians in one of many dashing colour combinations. But as soon as you complete your objective, your temporary allies fade away into wisps of white mist, never to be seen again. It’s then that you’re left alone, dancing a sombre dance amidst the broken husk of a defeated Devil Walker, wondering how long it’ll be before any allies rear their heads in your world again. It wasn’t as if you could’ve talked to any of them if you had the chance anyway. For Destiny, the game that prides itself on social interaction and cooperation, lacks any sort of proximity chat. Good luck telling the Warlock to your right that he’s about to be rocked by a Servitor through interpretive dance.

If there’s one aspect of Destiny that doesn’t need any improvement though, it’s most definitely in the visual department. Aesthetically, Destiny is immaculate. Its worlds, although rather lifeless at times, are colourfully vibrant and steeped in rich history open to interpretation. In the foreground, rocky vistas, artificial structures and decaying remnants of the Golden Age are all superbly realised, whilst in the background, natural monuments like volcanic mounds and lush greenry bring an extra touch of the exotic to each environment. And in terms of the UI, Destiny may just be one of the most perfectly designed games I’ve ever played. Every aspect of your character is accessible with minimal clicks through a sleek and user-friendly set of menus, whilst the soft colours of the HUD, all of which are coded to their specific purpose, mean that you never have to duck out of the action to digest all of the information beneath your gaze.

Lastly, Destiny brings with it a PvP element that perfectly translates the movement based combat of PvE battles into the arenas of the Crucible. Using weapons that you’ve grown dependant on during Strikes and story missions, you can take the fight to fellow Guardians in a number of different game modes that range from simple death-matches to more objective based pursuits. Maps are taken from areas inspired by those you have already explored, but they aren’t just simple copy and paste jobs. Each multiplayer environment has been crafted specifically for PvP, meaning that although you may recognize the location, it has been designed with a more fast-paced, relentless blend of combat in mind.

The multiplayer environments themselves range from the small and compact to the broad and expansive. On some of the bigger maps, vehicles such as the nimble Pike or the death-dealing Interceptor can turn the tide of a battle rather quickly, whilst a multi-layered approach to each map means that there are always numerous ways to advance on any enemy controlled territory. PvP in Destiny works so well because it isn’t burdened by all of the excess that the main game is. You enter, you fight to win and you leave, with the prospect of loot drops, Crucible Marks and Vanguard Marks following the conclusion of matches being a great incentive to spend an extended amount of time taking down fellow Guardians. And if you enjoyed cutting down swathes of enemies with your super ability in PvE, then in the fires of Crucible multiplayer, you’ll quickly develop a love for it all over again.

Perhaps the biggest compliment I can give Destiny is that, despite its many, many flaws, I’m still enjoying myself. The nonsensical story couldn’t put a dampener on my love of cutting through a hoard of enemies with my Bladedancer ability. The weak MMO features couldn’t stop me from enjoying myself whilst exploring every nook of every planet in search of Dead Ghosts, and not even the frustrating loot experience could stifle my love of PvP. This is a game that does so much wrong, but also a lot right.

Destiny is a solid game that feels so well built that you almost expect it to excel in every department, yet the conflict between its FPS, MMO and RPG elements was what ultimately led to its downfall. An enjoyable shooter when boiled down to its simplest lines, Destiny is a game that aimed for the stars, yet only succeeded in reaching the clouds.