Destiny Reviews
Destiny looks and plays wonderfully, but too many of the other promises it makes get left unfulfilled.
But in the white heat of the Strike playlists - or in Heroic mission runs with a friend, or in the unheralded arrival of a public event whilst tooling around in Patrol - Destiny blazes a clear trail through the middle of the desolate no man's land that, for years now, has segregated the bombastic emptiness of shooter campaigns from the frenetic slaughter of multiplayer. And it does so with a poise and depth that its few peers - games like the charming but scrappy Borderlands and Far Cry - cannot match; a poise and depth that will keep people playing it for years.
It's not short of spectacle but in terms of innovation and variety this is nowhere near as forward-thinking as Bungie would like to pretend.
Vast, beautiful, and endlessly satisfying, Destiny is like a gradually-opening puzzle box of ever-more involving FPS depth. What's already there can be explored for tens of hours. What's to come is an incredibly exciting prospect.
Even with several missed opportunities, Destiny is enormously fun, and only gets more engaging as you play
Destiny's essentials are there, and they're great--but the game surrounding them is cold and shallow.
As just another game, Destiny is a confusing combination of often at-odds elements — it presents itself as ambitious, almost boastful, while seeming strangely safe and reserved. It wants to eat its cake as a shooter, and have the longevity of an MMO — but it lacks the combat sophistication of the former, and the deep well of content native to the latter.
Destiny is a beautiful but hollow experience with most of the pieces you'd expect from a great multiplayer shooter. It just can't find a way to fit them all together.
Fun on a basic level, extraordinary at its farthest reaches, but marred with some frustrating, hopefully patch-able flaws.
Destiny feels like it wasn't ready, but it was shipped anyway. It tantalizes with glimpses of brilliance, but then confounds with clunky design decisions and baffling oversights. Hopefully future updates will fix these, and Destiny will realize its full potential.
Give Destiny a try if you like the idea of cooperation blended evenly with competition. The truth remains in its satisfyingly responsive mechanics, relatively forgiving checkpoint systems, competitive multiplayer, and the opportunity to blast away a million and one guys if that's what your story really needs to framed around. If not, there's always a beautiful sunset behind the Traveler in the tower.
Destiny hasn't gotten off to the best start but I do see potential down the line. If more social features are added, loot is improved, and new content keeps coming, it will be worth the entry fee. We'll be covering Destiny along the way, but for now I'd be wary of picking it up at full price.
Destiny is far from a perfect game, with flaws quite clearly apparent in the storytelling and the repetitive formula, but it's also a game that can quite easily keep you coming back for more time and again, especially if you play with friends. It's a shame that some of the ideas in the Vault of Glass Raid couldn't trickle down into the earlier stages, for more variety and intellectual challenge, but it does at least point to an exciting future for the game.
Destiny has not achieved greatness, yet. It is however, extremely fun to play.
Destiny may have seemed like a total letdown a week after launch. but I think what it does bring to the table is enough to have attracted a large, passionate playerbase, and the game is going to have legs well into the future. We're living in an age where for better or worse, many games eventually evolve into what we hoped they'd be at launch. If current trends hold, that's going to be Destiny too, but two months from its debut, it hasn't had a half-bad sprint out of the starting gate either.
Destiny, Bungie's ambitious space opera, has vision in spades and is mechanically sound--but it falls short of its lofty goals.
Destiny offers a lot of promise, but ultimately fails to deliver on everything it attempts. Still, thanks to Bungie's fantastic FPS design you will have fun playing the game. How much time you are willing to put into it will largely depend on how easily you get past the repetitive missions and maps.
But it's not that game right now. Destiny is a confident, solid, sometimes stunningly beautiful shooter with RPG mechanics that add longevity and depth, and the beginnings of what could be an incredible online universe. But it feels like the tip of the glacier, and I'm not sure it's a good thing to be more excited about what a game might one day be, than what it actually is.
Flawed, yes. Fun? Certainly. A total failure? Not really.
Activision and Bungie want Destiny to be the next mega-franchise in gaming. But a great universe needs interesting characters and compelling narratives. More important, the heroes need a true calling. I didn't find one while playing this game.