Destiny Review

I was pretty bored of the Destiny beta, I thought the full game will offer more content, will be more diverse, and I waited. Bad idea. The full version of Destiny is exactly like the beta they released on the PS4 and Xbox One.

Which means, I simply do not have the will to play Bungie’s sci-fi romp anymore. The game is just to monotonous and you keep doing the same thing over and over again.

Whenever ‘Ghost’–a tiny floating device that guides you through the main game–examines a console or some weird alien thing, I think to myself, “Oh boy, here we go. Waves of enemies incoming!”

This happens all the time. It is way too predictable. The mission design is horrendous.

But it’s not a bad thing if you just like shooting stuff, and don’t care about anything else. Then it becomes a pretty great game.

Bungie have designed a tremendous varied world that is spectacular to look at. There are a bunch of planets like Earth, Venus and Mars that you can visit and do missions there. I don’t even remember what the story was about since I was just shooting a bunch of stuff and admiring the scenery.

Basically the planet thing is a huge gimmick. I expected so much more. They could’ve done so much more with this; created a really believable sci-fi world with an interesting story like Mass Effect. You know why people like the Mass Effect series, right?

You get to create your own Guardian in Destiny and are given a bunch of character customization options. There are three classes to choose from: Warlock, Titan and Hunter. Each with their own abilities and you can level up your guardian by playing the game.

Level 20 is the soft cap but you can level up to 30 using the light stat. You can reach level 20 pretty quickly if you spend 8-10 hours doing the main missions, or the Crucible which is a competitive PvP mode.

This game is basically like an MMO, so the entire point is to collect great gear and take on hard enemies. Grinding is inevitable. There are missions called Strikes that you can participate along with your friends or randoms. There’s no matchmaking for other missions which is weird because the entire point is to play with other humans. That’s what makes this game fun.

Playing solo is extremely boring and you probably won’t finish the main missions if you do that.

The gunplay is tremendous and that’s what Bungie does it best to be honest. It’s not balanced as Halo but it is still very good. It gives a taste of what Halo gameplay is like to PlayStation owners who may have never played a Halo game before.

The AI seems adequate and there are a ton of enemies. Again, I didn’t really pay attention when they introduced the different types of enemies and was simply shooting anything that moves. The enemy design is great, though. The thing I don’t like is that some enemies like the Devil Walker take 10 mins to go down. I mean, what is that? It makes no sense.

There is a hub type area  called the Tower and the people I’ve encountered there were mostly from my country. You can do various things here but it’s an extremely boring place with terrible one-dimensional NPCs. Buy weapons, take on bounties, check for mail, and go talk to your class NPC for some goodies after you finish a mission; that’s all there’s to do here.

The main let down is the story. It’s awful. If you spend so much resources to make a beautiful world, why not spend equal time to create a good story? After all, that’s the thing that motivates people to complete the story missions. In Destiny, all you do is go from one area to another and shoot enemies, with some terrible narration from Ghost–voiced by Tyr… I mean, Peter Dinklage.

The netcode is fantastic and PSN never went down once. I never faced any serious connection issues while playing and that’s a fantastic thing when it comes to games like these.

While the main missions get old fast, the Crucible is a lot of fun. There are your usual competitive modes and around 10-11 maps. The weapons tend to do similar damage so you don’t have to worry about level 20 players smoking you pretty fast, but they do have advanced abilities that a lower level player won’t have.

I took a while to get used to all the maps but once I started killing people, I just kept playing on and on. Honestly for me, Destiny is all about competitive multiplayer because the main story is just not engaging enough. This is a little disappointing since I wasn’t planning to buy the game because I feared it would be just like the beta.

People interested in a sci-fi shooting game with an interesting story might not find a lot of satisfaction in playing Destiny, but if all you care about is shooting and some intense competitive multiplayer, then I could recommend this game.

This game was reviewed on the PS4. Reviewer bought the game on PSN.