'Destiny' Review: Jack of All Trades
Erik Fattrosso ’17 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer
There’s no denying that Destiny is a lot of fun. The familiar FPS mechanics are some of the best ever seen. They’re fine-tuned to an incredible degree and mowing down countless numbers of aliens and machines feels great. Visually, it’s one of the better looking games on current-gen hardware. The different planets all look and feel different from one another and it’s easy to immerse yourself into the various locales. That being said, Destiny’s problems start with the fact that there’s never a satisfying reason for you to go to any of them. The game starts, introduces the fact that you’re a guardian (basically the protectors of the realm, lord of the seven kingdoms, king of the Andals and the First men…sorry for that), and sets you off. You’re AI companion Space Tyrion (It’s a floating orb voiced by Peter Dinklage, called a Ghost in-game) tells you to go somewhere and stop something bad from happening and that’s basically all the plot you get for most of the game’s missions. It’s not until the last third of the game that a real narrative starts to form, but by that point you won’t care and the lack of explanations early on lead to confusion near the end. For a game so similar to Halo (you could easily mistake Destiny and Halo 4), it’s a real wonder why it lacks even a fraction of the story.
Rather than have a solid level cap, the game instead gives you a “soft” level cap of 20. At this point, standard experience ceases to level your character. From then on out, you increase your level past 20 by “finding” items with a new stat called Light. The more light you have you higher your level can go, presumably to an infinite number. Now, there are a few problems here. The first is the confusion factor. The game does a really poor job of explaining this mechanic, so until you do some googling you’re not going to understand what’s going on. Secondly, you can’t really find items with decent Light stats; you have to buy them from one of the numerous vendors in The Tower, the games hub-world.
There really isn’t anything new that Destiny brings to the table. For all its hype, it ends up being a culmination of different games that never reaches the heights of any of them. There’s RPG elements like in Borderlands, but they feel underdeveloped. There’s a very Halo-like setting and gameplay style, but the story hardly exists. There’s loot finding like in Diablo, except you’re almost never going to find any helpful loot (Think Diablo 3 at launch). There’s a level of social interactivity similar to an MMO, but it’s not quite social enough to match one. Destiny does a lot of things well, but it doesn’t do anything particularly great except for the actual gameplay mechanics. It comes off feeling like a bit of an empty shell. There are a lot of cool ideas on the outside that are never fully explored and leave you with a hollow feeling that’ll persist as long as you play.
For all of its shortcomings, Destiny is still a genuinely fun game. You can have a great time with it, so long as you can suppress the nagging feelings that’ll arise during the experience. They don’t damper your fun so much as they pull the game down from great to average. Today, Destiny walks away with a 7/10.