Game:

Destiny (2014)

Category:

Review

Duration: 6:19

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9

Bungie’s Destiny is probably the biggest game we’ve seen so far this year, and I’ve just finished playing it on the Xbox One. I’ve finished the main story, that is – being that Destiny is technically an MMO, there’s a whole heap of content that’s set to be added. It’s important to mention this now, because if you’re watching this review in 6 months, Destiny could be a very, very different game. Probably a much better one. Hopefully a much better one.

Before being an MMO, Destiny is an FPS. A really efficient FPS – there’s a solid variety of weapons with distinct differences between one another, from damage to fire rate and reload rate. You can have 3 at any one time – your primary is a particularly standard one, where I favoured an assault rifle. Your special weapon is really just a secondary, which is usually snipers or shotguns and your heavy weapon is a… uh, heavy weapon. Ammo drops for your primary before anything else, meaning you’re forced to favour it over the others in a way that really subtly encourages tactics and preservation. You know you won’t get heavy ammo all that often, so you’ll store it.

Grenades, on the other hand, recharge. Then there’s your special attack, which is different for each of the game’s 3 classes, and recharges over time and as you kill enemies. The melee, which is assigned to the shoulder buttons of a controller, is one of the most satisfying things ever. Probably THE most satisfying melee in any game I’ve played – something about the timing, the range, the sound and the visuals are just so perfected that it’s a delight, every time. So, for a fairly simple first-person shooter system, the combat itself gives you various things to think about as well as making you focus timing and recharging against some of the particularly nasty bosses.

And thank god for that, since Destiny requires a whole lot of shooting. Nearly every mission requires going somewhere for some nothingness reason, making your robot friend ‘Ghost’ – who is very averagely voiced by Peter Dinklage – scan a thing, while you fight off a super predictable horde. Like, it got to the point that where whenever Ghost would be all ‘oh yo Warlock, bro I need to scan this console’ I would immediately scout the room for somewhere appropriate to cover while the game threw the same repetitive thing at me for no real reason. So yeah, while the combat plays in a way that’s hard to flaw, all of the actual gameplay is horribly predictable and the story… The story is nothing. It’s a void. It’s just a very insignificant feature of a game that does a much better job of coaxing you forward with a level system.

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