As Destiny starts, your senses of hearing and sight are very quickly pleased. The game looks beautiful, the soundtrack is fantastic, and the guns sound beefy while being very fun to shoot. Then you get to hear Peter Dinklage’s voice from the little robot dude, and you start thinking “ohh yes, it’s gonna be awesome.” However, at the same time, you feel something right away with this game, that something just doesn’t feel quite right. At the start of the game, you can’t really put your finger on it, but something just feels lackluster, like you’re not playing Destiny but rather a lesser game, not the one which the gaming world made Destiny out to be.
Destiny nails the gunplay, it’s fantastic. Bungie has showed us that they still can make a tremendous first-person shooter. The mechanics are great, aiming isn’t a chore and the melee is brutal and can, at times, be more fun than the actual gunplay. I quickly learned though, over the course of the next four or five hours, that what I have just experienced at the beginning of the game, is really all this game has to offer. The guns are great, but as I played, I began to notice that the first few I used felt the exact same as that new rare auto-rifle I just picked up. There’s no variety here. I even tried every character class and, apart from some certain abilities, the majority of the abilities and skills I’m unlocking are extremely similar to my other characters.
The story is bland, generic, and forgettable. I knew I was a Guardian, and that this Traveler ignited some sort of Golden Age. Then, I was told how this “Darkness” was hunting the traveler and started a war against humanity. That’s about it. I was introduced to races such as the Awoken, Fallen, Vex, and Hive but I really didn’t know what significance they served. Than after really trying to get hooked on the story for the first few hours, I simply gave up because it was just an empty and hollow story void of details and anything interesting.
This is where Destiny fails, and does it quite badly. Ninety percent of the story missions consist of the exact same formula. Your Ghost needs to hack something, so you deploy him and proceed to defend that position for a while, just as you’re killing the last enemy he’s done. You proceed to the next area and do the same thing. Once you’ve done all of the hack and defend bits of the mission you’re either met with another defend portion on a bigger scale or you fight a bullet sponge boss which has no special characteristics or traits. You proceed to do this over the 17 hour story, again and again, and then once you get to the end, you’re met with a much easier boss who left me feeling disappointed and thinking “really?” to myself. I did get a reward for beating the story, and there isn’t any variety here either. Everyone I was playing with was given the exact same weapon as a reward, nothing class specific, not a random engram, just a fancy new gun which was the same as my friends.
The story for this game really sets the tone for what you are in store for, Bungie say that once you reach level 20 the game REALLY begins, however I didn’t experience this. Once you reach the soft-level cap of 20, you need to acquire gear which has a “light” trait. The more gear with more light you have, the higher you’re level. For a while, it does drive you to go through their strike missions, heroic story, and more bounties. After a couple days of this though, as the formula for these missions is the same as the story missions, it starts to really get boring and it starts to feel more like an annoying grind than anything else. In a few days’ time, I mastered every boss on every strike mission, because there isn’t any variety in the missions. If you want to know how Destiny plays, read the following sentence. Hack and defend this, okay now do that again, now kill this bullet sponge boss, now kill this super strong bullet sponge boss.
The real variety here is in the competitive multiplayer known as the “Crucible”. Here you know what to expect from Bungie, and they deliver. Excellent maps, satisfying multiplayer mechanics, and fun game modes. It’s not perfect, but no competitive multiplayer is. I spent a lot of time in the Crucible, and it is a ton of fun for a while, but competitive multiplayer was not this game’s main draw, and it saddened me quite a lot that it was what I had the most fun with.
Don’t get me wrong, Destiny is not a bad game, it’s a good game, not a great game. That’s really the problem, the majority of the gaming community was expecting something great, not something good. The shooter mechanics Bungie has created for this game are phenomenal. The core game is there, but that’s all it is, a core-game. It feels unfinished and bland. I can’t help but compare this to a delicious looking steak, but then, as you start eating it, you realize it’s just not very good, and once you’ve finished it leaves you wishing that it was just that much better. After a few weeks, or days, you’ll be putting this down and waiting for another game, and during that wait you’ll think about how Destiny looked and played great but lacked any sort of substance. Oh well, at least it will satisfy that next-gen hunger for a while.