Destiny

UPC: 047875846913

Platform: PlayStation 4

Publisher: Activision, Inc.

Developer: Bungie Software

Category: Shooter

Style(s): First-Person Shooter

Synopsis: The first non-Halo title developed by Bungie Software in more than a decade, Destiny incorporates MMO elements into FPS action set 700 years in the future, long after a massive, mysterious orb known as The Traveler entered the solar system, drastically altered the climates of Mars, Venus, and the Moon, and set off a new Golden Age of human exploration and colonization. But The Traveler's ancient enemy soon followed, laying waste to nearly all of civilization and leaving the benevolent orb hovering in low orbit over Earth, protecting only the land beneath from attack.


Society rebounded in the protective shadow of The Traveler, creating one last great city, and fighting a number of wars to keep that city intact. These battles gave rise to the Guardians, warriors capable of harnessing some of The Traveler's power. Players take on the role of a Guardian, protecting the last city from attack and exploring long-lost civilizations on Earth and its closest neighbors. Gamers can create and customize their Guardian, choosing from the cyborg Exo, ethereal Awoken, and Human species, and then selecting from the Hunter, Warlock, and Titan classes. Species type affects only physical appearance, but each class has specific skill trees, abilities, weapons, and subclasses.


Destiny is optimized for multiplayer action, but solo gamers can still take part in the majority of the integrated campaign. Accompanied by their AI robot Ghost, players set out to discover the remains of great Golden Age civilizations, exploring the dangerous frontiers of Earth, traveling through subterranean labyrinths on the Moon, cutting through the lush jungles of Venus, and visiting massive Martian skyscrapers now buried under the sand. As gamers explore the solar system they will collect resources to upgrade their weapons and gear, and confront a variety of powerful enemies, including the zombie-like Hive, the time-traveling Vex cyborgs, the hulking, heavily armed Cabal, and the six-limbed, humanoid Fallen.


Multiplayer fans have a variety of options in Destiny, including arena-based PvP action in Crucible mode, and the co-op Strike mode, in which three gamers team up for short, structured adventures. Destiny also includes the Tower, where the perspective switches to third-person, and players can change their equipment, join factions, and form alliances with other gamers. Public Events offer the global community random challenges, while those seeking an end-game experience can take part in six-player Raids, which are designed to be extremely difficult and time-consuming. ~ Christopher Brown, All Game Guide

Package Contents: Downloadable Content Code

Controls: Joystick/Gamepad

The developers at Bungie, best known for creating the blockbuster Halo sci-fi shooter series for Microsoft, understandably wanted more freedom to craft their own intellectual property. So, after completing five Halo games over the span of nine years, they left Microsoft to fulfill their Destiny, the game, if not their future. Yet instead of taking a gamble and branching out into something different, they've made a rather safe bet: another sci-fi shooter with many of the same mechanics, weapons, and design elements of Halo. Described in interviews as a game that sets a "new benchmark" for shooters, Destiny is more remarkable for its dearth of features compared to its pistol-packing peers.

Destiny's online-only requirement suggests it's an MMO, but there isn't nearly enough content to support this design decision. The four worlds available in Destiny (moon, Earth, Venus, and Mars) are essentially maps of a single region; large maps, mind you, but maps nonetheless. What you do on these maps is extremely repetitive. All campaign missions follow the same predictable pattern: travel to the objective marker, shoot down waves of enemies, deploy your drone (voiced by an apparently apathetic Peter Dinklage) to scan a computer or relic, and then defend your position by fending off even more waves of enemies as well as a boss.

The action can be fast-paced, intense, and at times exhilarating, but it eventually grows tiresome once you realize you'll be engaging in nearly identical encounters in similar areas throughout each world. Enemies follow predictable patterns -- often playing peek-a-boo behind cover or charging straight at you -- and a failsafe tactic to recharge your shields is to simply run around like a headless chicken. And while there are action RPG elements, allowing you to outfit your class with different helmets, body armor, boots, gauntlets, and guns, the loot in Destiny is sparse and sterile, with most of the "bonuses" offering slight cooldown reductions.

Yet the most frustrating part of Destiny is the amount of filler to make the game seem larger than it is. The hub city is beautiful to look at and is billed as a gathering place for the community, but you can't actually communicate or interact with players. Traveling to the different planets requires you to first launch into orbit from your jump ship, but you don't pilot the vessel; you just watch it hover in space while the game loads the next map, and it isn't a short wait. You have to repeat this annoying sequence whenever you change venue.

Once you've completed the main missions, the "real" game supposedly begins. Sadly, there isn't much of a difference. Each world offers patrol missions, strikes (the fantasy MMO equivalent of dungeons), and repeatable bounties, all of which offer bonus experience to level up your character and faction points to unlock new equipment from vendors. Of course, since enemies are always in the exact same locations, each trip through the four worlds feels exactly like the last; there's no sense of wonder or surprise, and the objectives aren't creative in the slightest.

Patrol missions have you shooting down enemies to automatically receive bits of cloth or fragments, or travelling to a specific location to scan the environment. Bounties are rewards for making x-amount of headshots or completing x-amount of patrol missions in a particular world. Strikes require three-person teams to mow down large groups of enemies, but even these are structured like the campaign missions. The key difference is you'll periodically encounter bosses with ridiculously large health pools to compensate for their lack of interesting mechanics.

Perhaps the most surprising misstep of Destiny is its choice of competitive multiplayer modes, which given the success of Halo, should have been the main draw. Instead of wide-open battles featuring scores of players, races with speed bikes, or something new, you are limited to six players per side in a dull lineup of capture the flag (control), team deathmatch (clash and skirmish), and deathmatch (rumble) variants. The action is also brutally unfair to new players thanks to some questionable matchmaking and unbalanced weapons.

Fortunately, there is hope. This is a giant project in which Activision claims to have invested $500 million. It is a game clearly built for ongoing content, and that content could help Destiny live up to its high expectations. As it stands, Destiny is a gorgeous looking game but an empty one, devoid of any personality apart from its art style. Thirty minutes of Borderlands 2 or Far Cry 3 offer more creativity and memorable moments than 20 hours of Destiny, making you wonder if the bulk of the money spent by Activision was on fuel for the hype train. ~ Scott Alan Marriott, All Game Guide

the game requires Joystick/Gamepad.