What is it?

Destiny is a 1st Person, Open World, Multiplayer, Sci-Fi, Shooter, Action-Adventure.

What’s good?

It’s gorgeous, the controls are fantastic and the relentless waves of enemies and twitch paced firefights offer a sublime balance of fun and carnage that’s lacking in so many games today.

What’s bad?

The end game is a boring grind, the loot system is a mess, PvP is small in scale.

Released: 2014	Bungie	Activision
Completed: 2014-09-26	Completion: 59%	Highest Trophy: Silver

Destiny – Full Review

Foreword

This review spawned from my desire to write a review for Destiny 2. While in that process I realized I spent so much time venting about issues I had since the original Destiny. Eventually I thought it would be unfair to burden my review of Destiny 2 with complaints levied at its predecessor. As such I chose to write this review first and in doing so I realized most of my displeasure with Destiny was based on my expectations born from my World of Warcraft experiences. So I in turn wrote a detailed review on World of Warcraft as a precursor to this which you can read HERE if you so desire.

The Trouble with Expectations

When Destiny was first announced, I thought what a spectacular idea! What massive potential! Whitesnake’s “Here I go again” is blasting in my ears as I think man I’m going to lose another decade and it’s going to be great! Like really think about it for a moment. A Massively Multiplayer Online game(MMO) on console, which is a First Person Shooter (FPS) in space, spread across multiple planets, with instanced dungeons and raids. Not only that but it’s being built by Bungie who is renowned for their mastery of the FPS genre. And just to sprinkle a little more sugar on top, the whole project is being backed by Activision/Blizzard who most certainly know a thing or two about MMO games. What’s not to love? So when Destiny finally arrived I was all set. I had a week off from work and I was going to slay it!

I must have been about a quarter of the way through the game when the perma-grin on my face started fading. Up until that point I distinctly recall being really excited about how great Destiny was going to be. You know when it opened up and the game really started. By half way through the game a new strained and puzzled look had etched itself onto my face. This was when the inevitable realization hit me. This was the game. There was no better game lurking around the next corner. I was in it and all its glory or lack of, right here, right now. Man what a disappointment. All of that hype, all of that promise. I’d been to Destiny and I didn’t even get a T-Shirt.

Flawed but Ridiculously Fun

Now to be fair the game flew by. The shooting mechanics and the controls are pristine. I would have to say based purely from a technical gameplay perspective it is the tightest FPS game on the console market, well at least out of the games I’ve played. Check out my BIG GAMES LIST to see them all. I only mention it to show that with over 135 games played on the Playstation 4, for me to say that Destiny has the best controls has some weight behind it. Aside from controls the gameplay was intense and invigorating. Man when you get into some of those big firefights it awakens forgotten memories of great old titles like Doom 2 on Nightmare difficulty or Super Smash TV. The relentless waves of enemies and twitch paced firefights offer a sublime balance of fun and carnage that’s lacking in so many games today.

I honestly don’t recall many FPS games as fun to play as Destiny. Now to be clear at this point I’m only talking about the campaign or single player portion of the game. I mean I love to death the Battlefield series and I have logged hundreds if not thousands of hours into it over the years. But if I am completely honest about it I would have to say that even in Bad Company 2 my all-time favorite, the single player component was a one and done sort of thing. Aside from maybe doing an extra playthrough for trophies, I never touched the single player portion of the game again. The multiplayer on the other hand, that’s where I spent all my time. Nothing like jerry-rigging up a tank with some c4 and watching some hapless fool jump in thinking he’s going to roll out and dominate.

Destiny Basics

Now with Destiny, the single player is a really fun mash up of an FPS, a shoot-em up and a loot based dungeon crawler. There are loads of enemies and you have a near limitless ammo supply as they are constantly dropping ammo packs. You have three weapon slots that can hold a small variety of weapon types. For primary weapons you can select from auto rifles, pulse rifles, scout rifles or hand cannons. For a secondary weapon you can select from shotguns, sniper rifles or fusion rifles (like a laser or rail gun). And finally for Heavy weapons you can pick from machine guns or rocket launchers. The weapon switching is a breeze. A simple press of the triangle button swaps between primary and secondary and holding triangle will pull out your heavy weapon. It’s easy, fast and ultimately effective.

Destiny has other RPG elements as well. First off you can design your own character. You decide your own gender and pick your race and class from three options each. As far as I can tell aside from appearances there is no difference between the races. Each class can use the exact same weapons but the armor is unique. Where class differences are noticed is in the special skills and talent builds. Like in World of Warcraft (WoW) you can specialize in a specific talent tree for your class. I played a Titan who represents the tanking class. For me I could choose to have an offensive or defensive based Titan. I chose defensive due to my long tenure tanking in WoW. My special abilities included a personal invulnerability shield after melee killing someone and a larger invulnerability bubble all my allies could take shelter in.

Players and enemies have basic shields that need to be taken out before being damaged. Both the shield and health will begin to recharge after not being hit for a certain amount of time. It doesn’t take very long which means after a quick tactical retreat you can be back in the fight quickly. Everything about Destiny seems to be designed around quickness. Unlike most other games delivered at a slower pace you rarely find yourself doing the shoot from cover shtick. That is of course until you start dealing with boss fights. In those moments everything I just said goes out the window as they are slow and plodding bullet sponge encounters where you rarely find yourself out of cover. But the for the rest of the time you spend most of it out in the open, standing toe to toe with the enemy, fighting ridiculous odds.

Destiny also gives you a couple of other tools to work with; a rocket boosted jump and a variety of different grenades. The boosted jump is great and it really opens up the levels as you can boost up to platforms and get better angles to shoot from during encounters. You can also vault over enemies and take up tactical positions at the rear. It’s also just fun to boost around. The grenades recharge over time and are tied to your class and talents so you can tweak them to suit your playstyle. They can be anything from impact grenades, trip wire explosives or even pulse grenades. Pulse grenades emit multiple AOE damage pulses for a short duration allowing you to essentially block off a flanking position.

Co-op, Where Destiny Shines

Co-op games seem rare nowadays. Maybe they always were and I just never paid attention. Ever since I stopped playing WoW I’ve missed the team based gameplay in a non PvP environment. PvP games where I team up with friends and go out blasting people in the face are a dime a dozen. Games where we work together to finish a story or take down big bosses or clear out massive dungeons, that’s not so common. Even less so in FPS games. So in this area Destiny is exemplary. I can join a friend and do missions, strikes, patrols, even raids if I had the stomach for them. With the fantastic gameplay and MMO stylings around the edges Destiny is amazing. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands would probably fit the co-op mold too but it wasn’t released in 2014.

Destiny is such a strange confluence of gaming paradigms mixed into one succinct package. The single player is never really just single player as the game is basically an MMO. You always see random players out and about questing and killing, sometimes you even join them in taking down public world boss type enemies. It’s really cool that way, and the integration of instancing is seamless. I never use a headset because frankly it’s just uncomfortable when I’m lying down on my couch. So I never really communicate much with teammates. But for the content I played, it never really mattered. If I just followed basic WoW principles things seemed to work out. Get out of the fire, kill the adds and when that’s covered focus fire on the boss. The fact I was tank specced never mattered at all. No aggro or threat meant no tanking.

Now the raid system is another story. I hear they are great but I’ll never know especially with Destiny 2 out now. Somehow Activision/Blizzard shipped the original game with no way for people to organize raids in game. To raid you had to find alternate ways to get a group together. Seeing that most of my friends don’t play Destiny the only way for me would have been to go into chat rooms or message boards and try to join a group. That was far too much work for far too little pay off. All they needed was a simple “looking for raid” interface. Shit Blizzard had one in WoW for years. This essentially killed Destiny end game for me, that and the fact I didn’t care for the PvP. This was just one of the many areas where instead of reinventing the wheel they should have borrowed from WoW.

PvP, Where Destiny Stumbles

As I noted above I am a big Battlefield fan. I have played the franchise since 1943 was released on PC and played every version since. Aside from Battlefield: Hardline which is garbage, I have enjoyed them all. I am also a huge WoW fan and played that game for over a decade as well. When Destiny was announced I thought great I can’t wait to see a WoW style battleground like Alterac Valley as an FPS in Destiny. How epic would that be? Sadly we’ll never know. The PvP in Destiny, in my opinion, was awful. Sure mechanically the game still worked great but why was it limited to 6v6 or less most of the time? Why were the game modes so boring. Never mind massive battlegrounds like in WoW why not have big battles like in Battlefield. Instead we just got Call of Duty in space. But smaller.

Call of Duty(COD) had long worn out its welcome by 2014 when Destiny came along and that same year Advanced Warfare was released. That game is so bad that to this day I won’t even bother picking up their next game Infinite Warfare. Although to be fair I have pre-ordered Call of Duty: WWII. The old COD games were so good that nostalgias got a hold of me. When Infinity Ward split from Electronic arts and the Medal of Honor team they completely redefined the military FPS genre with the first COD game. That game was a masterpiece. All these years later I’m holding out hope that the team who got it so right back then can do it all over again. Maybe I’m a sucker or a dreamer but I love gaming so much I just want them all to succeed.

The only time I remember vaguely enjoying Destiny PvP was in a game mode called combined arms where there were a bunch of tanks and other vehicles to use. It was the closest to a Battlefield match Destiny got but again it was limited to 6v6 which was pretty lame. The super abilities and gear imbalances also hurt the game. As did the ridiculous amount of lag and stuttering I’d get. I would say maybe it was just my connection but having played so many other online games without issue I tend to think that’s not the case. All in all Destiny PvP, while better than that of the latest COD games, didn’t offer anything special to make me want to invest any time into it.

Story, Where Destiny Falls

Earlier I talked about how much fun the gameplay is, and it really is, but that can’t be the only thing a game offers can it? I am big on story and world building. Being a quasi MMO game I expected so much more from Destiny. I was thinking epic storylines, a world steeped in rich storied history, a branching or divergent storyline, a sense of grandeur. Anything but what was delivered. The story lacked any real substance at all. The character voice work was abhorrent. The quests were linear and repetitive. The multiple planets on offer were abysmal in scope. At the end of the day I still don’t even really understand the whole story but from what I gather I don’t think Bungie did either.

I was so sad when I realized Tyrion Lannister couldn’t always be captivating. Peter Dinklage is perhaps one the greatest things about HBO’s Game of Thrones. He has stolen nearly as many scenes as Arya Stark and has proven time and time again to be massively entertaining, heartfelt, and wise beyond his years. So color me surprised when his voice work as your ever present ghost fell so flat. In fact it very likely hurt the game. Yes it was that bad. Like he was reading a menu not lines for an epic space saga. Well a supposed epic space saga. It wasn’t really epic and there wasn’t much of a saga either. How you can craft a story spanning the galaxy and have it feel so small and empty is beyond me. At times it even feels like they don’t realize how ridiculous it all sounds. Maybe Dinklage did.

Loot, Where Destiny Self Destructs

As noted above Destiny is part dungeon crawler loot game. As such all of the weapon types have dozens if not hundreds of variants. This is also true for armour slots. So maybe the most basic and important aspect of Destiny aside from shooting things is gearing up. You know, finding that phat loot. When I used to play WoW I levelled a half dozen or more characters to max level and started gearing them up for end game content. I levelled so quickly in most cases that I’d be swapping gear out so frequently there was no point in farming for low level stuff. I just used whatever was best in slot for the moment and moved on. That’s exactly how I approached Destiny. I’d find some new and better loot, equip it and move along never really paying attention to it.

That all changed when I hit the level cap. Now I started caring about loot. Slowly but surely I maxed out my character with legendary and exotic loot, I ran Nightfall Strikes, grinded patrols, PVP’d in the crucible, and ran every mission dozens of times tuned to higher gear scores. The shooting is still mostly fun because the mechanics are so tight but man is the grind terrible. I’m not running this stuff because it’s fun. No I’m grinding this shit because I have to. The highest level content is blocked by gearscore meaning you need the highest level gear to access it. Again this is nothing really new as a WoW player who has grinded for gear scores for every new expansion, raid, or pvp season released.

But this is something different. Something so much more irritating and so much less enjoyable. You see in Destiny Bungie decided to change up the tried and true loot mechanics games like WoW have been using for over a decade. And good on them for trying to be different. But seriously Bungie did you ever once listen to any of your game testers? Or did they just not have the balls to tell you? Maybe you preferred the “expert” opinions of focus groups? You know people who might play thirty minutes of a game from a specified point. People who never get to see the whole game and how it all fits together. More importantly people who will never experience the relentless grinding of the end game.

I just can’t imagine not even a single game tester said umm yeah this cryptarch idea is garbage. Cryptograms are garbage. In fact your whole loot system is garbage. There are literally hundreds of games and decades of gaming experience to use as reference points to back up those claims. How no one pulled the plug and went a completely different route is something I still can’t understand. You see the loot system in classic games is pretty simple. Each enemy has a specified loot table. I know that if I kill enemy A, I have a chance at getting weapon A1. It’s simple yet effective.

Should Have Been Could Have Been

I know for example that in WoW the only way I could ever get my hands on the Pauldrons of Might would be to kill Sulfuron in Molten Core. It’s the one and only place to get the coolest looking shoulder armour in the game. Did I mention they aren’t guaranteed to drop? I might have to kill him a dozen times before they drop and even then maybe somebody else wants them and we have to do a random dice roll to see who walks away with them. It’s annoying sure but it gives you incentive to keep running specific dungeons to get the best gear. This means other players have a good chance of being able to find a group to get into these dungeons.

Most WoW players have a dream set of gear they want and it could take months to build some of them. It was always a grind don’t get me wrong but it was a focused grind. I knew exactly which dungeons and what bosses I needed to kill. Best of all, once you finally got that last piece of gear to drop you would be so happy you’d never have to step foot in that dungeon again. Until of course one of your friends needed gear and you were helping them out. That’s the traditional tried and true looting system for loot games like Destiny.

Unfortunately Bungie didn’t do that. Instead they made it that every single enemy in the game had a chance to drop an engram. Big shiny gemstone looking things. You’d collect these engrams and take them to an NPC in town called a Cryptarch. He’d then turn them into a random piece of gear. The gear would loosely be based on your current level and the color of the engram. Gear in Destiny is color coded like most gear grinding games from green being common, blue being rare, purple being legendary and orange being exotic. But here’s the trouble with what Bungie did. All enemies regardless of level had the same chance to drop the same engrams. So killing level 1 enemies gave you the same chance of getting max level gear as killing max level enemies. Only thing is killing level 1 enemies is way faster.

Seriously people were cave farming intro levels where level 1 enemies respawned quickly because of this stupid loot system. To make matters worse, just as the initial engram drop is a random chance, so is the colour of that engram. More annoyingly so is the item the cryptarch gives you in return for the engram. It’s a random chance to be any color at or below the color of the engram. So essentially you could get an exotic engram which for arguments sake has a 1 in 10,000 chance to drop. The crypt arch might then decode it and give you a piece of shit green item. And to add insult to injury the item might not even be usable by your class. The system was so ridiculous I still can’t get over it. If only they had stuck to the tried and true loot systems.

Final Thoughts

Maybe it’s unfair that I had such high hopes for Destiny that it was bound to fail. When it was announced Bungie talked about their 10 year plan for the game. Well here we are three years later and Destiny is dead with the release of Destiny 2. I never stuck around long enough to play all of the expansion content but I shouldn’t have had to. The game that shipped just wasn’t what it could have or should have been. It felt rushed and devoid of content. Each playable area on the planets was so small for a game like this. I just recently played Mass Effect Andromeda which isn’t as bad as everyone said by the way. But although Destiny’s gameplay is so much better, Andromeda had far better storytelling, far better characters and far better planetscapes. And Andromeda was only a mediocre game.

I wish the Destiny planets were much more like the Andromeda planets. That would have been great. Or even scrap the multiple planets and just have it on one really massive and interesting planet. You know think of Norhrend in the Wrath of the Lich King, or shit San Andreas in Grand Theft Auto 5. Give it some epic size and scale. Maybe Bioware will get it right with Anthem later next year but who knows. It will be tough to compete with the crisp gameplay in Destiny. Aside from all my gripes the bottom line is Destiny is a good game. It’s certainly better than the average title. It just doesn’t measure up to the greats and it certainly doesn’t measure up to its own hype. There’s so much it gets right. It’s just a shame the things it get’s so wrong are a pretty big deal.

How does it rate...		Other games in that category...
1st Person	A	Fallout 4, Farcry 4, Metro 2033, Dying Light
Open World	B-	Borderlands 2, Ghost Recon: Wildlands, GTA 5
Sci-Fi	B+	Tom Clancy’s: The Division, Watch Dogs 2, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Mass Effect: Andromeda
Shooter	A+	Battlefield 1, Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, Doom (2016), Destiny 2
Action / Adventure	A-	Destiny 2, Dishonored 2, Fallout 4, Far Cry 4

These ratings are based on games I have played at the time of this posting. Additions and Alterations made to game ratings and rankings after this date will not be reflected in the written review. For a fully updated list of games and game rankings please visit Rebel Gaming Canada’s BIG GAMES LIST.

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