Fantastic Destiny review

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Fantastic Destiny review
Sci fi shooters are nothing new to the video game landscape, particularly for the team at Bungie. Having worked tirelessly on one of the most famed first-person shooter collection before striking out to create something original for the first time in a decade, Bungie is no stranger to the open expanses of space, foreign landscapes, and heavily armored combatants with the capacity of taking on throngs of enemies with little assistance. With Destiny, Bungie attempted to eschew the trappings of the first-person shooters of old, and instead hoped to fuse its battle-tested shooter skills with addictive quest- and raid-based nature of the MMO. There was plenty of potential in the blend, but Destiny doesn't quite fulfill all of it.

Many years in the future, our solar system is home to a battle of good and evil. A massive being known as the Traveler arrives, together with the antagonistic Darkness trailing behind him. Battle ensues, and the Darkness is pushed away, but at a great cost to the Traveler. Now, after years of hovering dormant on Earth, the Traveler calls to you to help battle the forces of the Darkness once more. You are a Guardian, and you are the last hope. It's a tale as old as time, and at instants, it certainly feels like Bungie is quite acceptable with relying on memetic consciousness to do all the heavy narrative lifting. Destiny's plot is all about as concise and elaborate as the Cliff's Notes to a movie trailer. Your hero's journey would be more engaging had the entire lore of the universe not been locked away outside the core game itself. Bungie clearly went to great lengths in crafting the backstory of this alternate future, and also the inhabitants therein, but to even begin to comprehend the disposition of man and beast in Destiny, you need to go to an outside source.

Is it woefully unfair to expect every last bit of exposition and story to be delivered completely in this first entry in the Destiny collection? Perhaps. We do already know there will be more games to come, and that's not even discussing the planned expansions due to arrive over the span of the next year for the game as it stands today. Bungie has certainly crafted a vision of the future that is fascinating at first glance, what with peculiar new races and Titans and Warlocks populating the planetary system. But even heaps of hours later, Destiny hardly dips beneath the surface on what any of it all means, and why it's all there. The great disappointment is that there's so many wonderful new things to be curious about, and there are hardly any explanations as to why they are so wondrous.

It's fortunate then that the combat of Destiny is quite enjoyable. If Bungie has proven one thing time and again, it's that it knows just what it's doing when it comes to shooting things with notable weaponry. While the originality in armaments isn't necessarily inspired, Destiny's weapon system provides ample ballistic mayhem for fans of more serious shooters. Most of all, the feel of the weaponry is spot on. Assault rifles have a very true pull to their burst of fire, while handguns give a good kick between exact shots. Heavy machine guns have an incontrovertible weight to them, along with the shotguns pack a wallop that both you and also the individual on the business end can feel forthwith. The upgrade and progression system for weapons is intuitive, and offers a tiny bit of customization to tailor your loadout specific to your tastes. The varying degrees of simple statistics like correctness and range, which gives each gun merely a bit more flexibility and the fictional manufacturers a bit of character in design make up for the lack of variety in base models.


The guns themselves are a sizable section of combat in Destiny, but you'll rely on your own character's class just as much. All three possible classes (Hunter Warlock and Titan) each offer distinct advantages and disadvantages over one another in the PvE sections of Destiny, though the Warlock still feels vastly underpowered comparatively in the PvP area. We'll get to that in a moment though. Destiny's classes don't really offer much in the way of teamwork compatibility in a familiar sense whereas traditional MMOs feature a number of classes meant to balance one another in raids and quests. All three comprise a heart powerset to start, with the choice of researching an alternate series of abilities once you reach level 15. For the most part, only the super special character abilities really offer any sort of differentiation, but there are over a dozen different approaches to make your Guardian your own, from the type of hop you have to focusing on stats like defense or agility. Still, the variation between the three isn't all that drastic, and you can feel confident in your first pick without worrying about whether or not you picked the right class to love Destiny.

In the Crucible, Destiny's PvP arena, it's unfortunate that classes do matter, and despite the continued balance support, Hunters and Titans dominate play. That's not to say you can't have a good run with Warlock, or that you're automatically going to win because you're a Hunter or Titan. It's just a matter of those two categories having special abilities that are better tailored for the type of aggressive combat you'll partake in when combating against real human opposition. Additionally, there's still a bit of a difficulty with higher-leveled characters having a bit of an edge due to loadouts and abilities that have been unlocked. Again, it's not that you've no chance, it's just that characters that have leveled up a bit and wield Legendary or Exotic items have a bit of a leg up on the competition. This is in spite of Bungie's evening of the playing field in conventional PvP. While the armor and assault damage might be evened out, the abilities are not, and at times it can be frustrating to get matched up with extremely high level players.

All those previously mentioned elements could have been found in any first-person shooter, but what actually sets Destiny apart is the attempted meshing of more MMO sensibilities. Some mechanics translated quite well, like assault damage and critical hits, as well as certain weapons offering more damage if correctly tuned for a particular enemy kind. Additionally, crafting systems and the loot are both fully functional and work fairly well. Right up until you reach level 20, everything is extremely accessible, even if it's not explained very well at all, although it's true you'll have to grind a bit at points for materials at higher degrees. Just as Destiny's plot suffers from being under-clarified, so do many of the systems at the core of improving your character. There's a lot of experimentation and figuring things out on your own in Destiny, which is not necessarily a dreadful thing, but it wouldn't have hurt to have tutorials or a few hints available in regards to any of the customization or crafting parts.