This was a game that I was slowly becoming hyped for as time passed despite the fact that I am not the biggest fans of Bungie and their Halo series. Granted, Halo, to most, was fun and entertaining, and while I did enjoy the series I was not overly thrilled like most were; it was a good set of games, but not spectacular. While I do not own a current gen system and have been without my PS3 for little over a year now, I did watch dozens of game play videos on Destiny, have watched the campaign from beginning to end, and feel confident that I can accurately review the game based on what I have seen.
Short version: This game is a resounding 7 out of 10.
Long version:
(Note: I am not a professional, and this is my first attempt at writing a review for a game, so if my review appears confusing or lacking then I do apologize.)
First off, the game play, while seemingly enjoyable, does appear to be frightfully repetitive. Now, granted, much of that can be said about any video game, especially those within the first person shooter genre, and this is coming from someone who has mindlessly sunk dozens of hours in Borderlands 1 and 2, a game that basically had a handful of mission types that had the player kill "X" amount of creatures or collect "X" amount of loot with slight variants on those main archetypes, but it was still very much enjoyable. Destiny, however, feels more mechanical, thus spawning a feeling of generic repetition. This is only enhanced by the fact that each mission has you committing to the same tasks over and over again, which is to shoot your way in, have your Ghost hack a terminal, and defending against hordes of enemies while said terminal is being hacked. I have much more to say on your partner, the Ghost, but I will delve into that topic later. Next, I'd like to talk about the games dialogue.
Borderlands had quirky dialogue and over-the-top behavior to drive their missions. I very much enjoyed the character's character, to put it bluntly. Destiny, on the other hand, possesses a more serious tone, which is fine. I don't mind serious games, not one bit. What I do mind is bland, uninspired, monotone voice acting. No one in Destiny speaks with any life or charm, just bland and dull tones so mindbogglingly dissatisfying that it ends up reeking of extreme melancholy. Halo's original voice acting wasn't perfect either, but it somehow felt as if it possessed more weight to it. Master Chief's interaction with each character felt hardy and satisfying. A mixture of gestures and tones made one feel as if what was being said had impact. Destiny falls short due to this lacking of emotion. Even with cut-scenes depicting visible conflict or strife, the game still manages to feel stark because no one actually seems to care that something exciting, eventful, or dangerous is occurring. It's almost as if everyone is going out of their way to be as boring as possible. A perfect example, to which I will do my best not to spoil any of the plot, what little there is, involves the queen of the Awoken. Why they have a queen is never made clear to me. I was left utterly in the dark about her very existence, just as there is nothing depicting the origin of the Awoken to begin with, though I'm sure there is some information on this woman somewhere, probably on the Bungie website, but that is besides the point. The Awoken queen is, by far, the penultimate of dullness. The voice actress for this character is beyond lifeless for what little dialogue she has, and it's not as if I don't understand the nature of the Awoken queen either. I understand that she is to be this beautiful, somber, yet ruthless women with power unimaginable. I understand that she is to be this figure of authority that is to never be questioned, that she is a woman who will rip the galaxy asunder should she feel insulted let alone if her people are in danger, and yet her emotion and body language are utterly nonexistent.
This is where I bring in who I label as the second most unenthusiastic character for the game, the Ghost. As we all know, Peter Dinklage voices the Ghost who remains as your companion for the entire game. While I enjoy Dinklage and his acting skills, this is one venue where I felt like he just wasn't giving it his all. I'm not sure if this is by choice of the game directors to have Dinklage to be as weirdly monotone as possible, but something happened in that studio that made him give his most lackluster performance yet. I'm sorry, I really do want to enjoy Ghost, but I can't. Dinklage's subpar performance and the writers lack of consistency leaves Ghost as one of the most emotionally spontaneous characters in the game. I swear, I cannot figure out Ghost's attitude one bit. I guess the writers were trying to show that Ghost and the Guardian were gaining some kind of familiarity with one another, that they were becoming friends as Master Chief was to Cortana, which is why I assumed that Ghost's personality was shifting from robotic to organic, but when there is no story showing this growth then the act becomes lost and muddled. Not only that, but the Ghost seems rather spasmodic in his intelligence and informational skills. It's weird how Ghost's computational acuity, knowledge, and fact finding skills leave him as the most intellectually inept being in all of existence. All in all, I chalk this one up to bad writing, which the game seems to hold in ample supply. A great deal of the writing does feel amateurish, and when their is an attempt to throw around any scientific terminology the game has, it sounds like nothing more than gobbledygook, but the story as a whole is just not there, which amplifies the rather bland dialogue and bad voice acting to a higher degree than normal, making me want to ignore most of what was being said in the game.
Next on my list is the enemy A.I. and general game difficulty. I'm not really sure what to say except that the enemies aren't so much as difficult as they are resilient. I've seen players pour dozens upon dozens of bullets into their targets and they simply won't go down, which would be fine if the enemies attempted to run for cover or form strategies to give one a sense of true difficulty, but most of them, if not all, don't. Most of your enemies stand out in the open and take your furious assault, allowing you to pick them off one by one. Sure, some of your adversaries will run for cover or lob the occasional grenade, but it doesn't occur enough for one to feel as if their enemies are providing them with a challenge, that is until you fight a boss or a semi-boss, and even that has its limits. As we all know, semi-bosses and bosses are suppose to be tough and bring a challenge, but Destiny doesn't make you feel as if you are going against a monstrous adversary in terms of intelligence. The bosses may be big, they may be daunting, and I will give credit to Bungie for making some unique and amazing creatures, but other than that they are nothing but giant bullet sponges, just like their minion counterparts who will constantly swarm you while fighting said boss. To me, throwing in constantly spawning enemies to distract you and giving them ample resistance does not make the fighting challenging, it just makes it tedious, at least in this case from the fact that each enemy suffers from standing-out-in-the-open-and-letting-you-unload-your-entire-clip-into-their-face syndrome.
Destiny has some very beautiful environmental design. The locations, which have a pretty decent size to them, are well crafted and give you the sense that you are in a dramatic, Sci-Fi universe, but at the same time these locations appear a tad empty and linear in spots. The game tries to give you a sense of grandness while restricting your to certain areas, and it is that seamless world attempt that disappoints many players about the level design. Because there are few borders and this focus on scenery, you gain the sense that you can, truly, go anywhere and everywhere, but you are quickly brought back down to earth, or through I should say, when you step of a cliff and clip through the ground as you fall to your death. I can understand the frustration when a player looks off towards a mountain peek and desperately wants to explore the secrets it may hold only to fall to their doom the second they travel pass the maps boundaries. I guess everyone, myself included, thought this would have more of an Oblivion or Skyrim level of exploration, and who wouldn't after the great deal of hyping that Bungie and Activision did for the game? Still, the locations are amazing, but it will leave you wanting more. I know I was, and I don't even own the game.
There is something else that is odd about Destiny. The MMO style that it tries to portray itself as is, in a word, ludicrous. The game has a way of making you feel connected and alone all at the same time. From what I have seen and have come to understand, voice chat is terrible, pairing with players who already aren't on your friend list is asinine and contrived, matchmaking in PVP is terrible, and the game can't seem to decide if it wants to focus more on multiplayer or single-player experiences. Again, I don't own the game, but much of that sounds horrible and is a turn off to me only because I am a person who, generally, enjoys playing a game on my own, and to suddenly have my experience limited because I can't tackle a mission with less than three people who I may or may not have on my friend list or is expected to partner with someone through a convoluted system that will take more time for me to understand than to try and go it alone does not spell fun for me. I get that this game is not suppose to be an MMO, but when you have a game that needs an online connection to be played, pairs you into servers, has a centralized hub where you and other players share in a community style aspect, and have public event zones where you can team up with random people to take down powerful bosses, one can't help but to think that this is an MMO. You know what they say. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck, and to me it looks like Bungie tried to play their duck off as a swan, but just because you put eyeliner on your duck and call it a swan does not make it a swan.
In the end, Destiny doesn't seem like a terrible game, it just didn't live up to the $500 million dollar hype that went into it, so far. People have portrayed this game as a generic, Sci-Fi shooter, and it kind of is, but that does not mean it isn't a solid game. The game play does look entertaining and the communal aspect can allow you to make some new friends or enemies. Multiplayer, while a little unbalanced, is good, but you need to make sure that you are properly leveled and have some excellent gear before jumping into the fray. If you have to have this game, then go out and buy it, and if you can wait for a price drop, then wait, but this game isn't bad.
I will say there is one major problem I have with Destiny, and it has nothing to do with the game itself. No, it's the journalistic websites like IGN and Gamespot I have a problem with. More specifically, I have a problem with how long they are taking to review the game. Both IGN and Gamespot have taken three days to playing this game, and they keep claiming they need time to fully assess Destiny like it's an MMO...but it's not. We've been told multiple times that this game isn't an MMO, so why are they treating it like one? Why have they taken their sweet time reviewing this game when, in truth, they could have experienced what they needed and reviewed it on day one? It's not like the game is really hindering them or anything. You know what? It's not that they haven't reviewed the game. It's that they haven't assigned a number score to it, and that number score means everything. From the live streams I've watched, the reviewer clearly doesn't wants to give Destiny a perfect 10 out of 10. I can hear in their voices that Destiny didn't live up to their hype, but they keep dodging the final grade like their careers depended on it, and I'm starting to think that, maybe, it does.That, or this is a ploy to wait for as many people to buy the game on the built up hype before releasing a score that can, ultimately, change the minds of thousands of people who could potentially purchase this game. I don't know. All I do know is that I want the reviewers to stop jumping around the subject matter and release their final score already. In all honesty, I will be surprised if this game gets a perfect 10 after hearing the audible dispositions and comments by various reviewers on IGN, Gamespot, etc.
And, again, this game isn't bad. A 7 out of 10 isn't a bad score despite popular belief, the game just didn't live up to what it could have been, and overtime, with additional content, it could, possibly, get to a perfect 10, but right now it's about a 7, at least in my eyes, and nothing more.
I'm also optimistic about the future regarding expansions: new areas, levels, skills, gear, classes, it's all possible.
