It’s not going to be easy to encapsulate the sheer unadulterated brilliance of Bungie’s sci-fi fantasy first person shooter, Destiny, but we’re going to give it a crack anyway to add our recommendation to the many out there already. It’s fast-paced, relentless and brutal fun that genuinely leaves you physically affected after each ferocious level you blitz your way through and with impressive graphics and a well crafted power-up system it just keeps getting better and better the more you play.
Released on PlayStation 3 and 4, as well as the Xbox 360 and mighty ONE on the 9th September 2014, Destiny has been one of the most talked about and eagerly anticipated games for a while, but now that it’s finally in our grasp it’s clear that all of the hype doesn’t live up to the time engulfing excellence of the real thing. It’s quick to deliver on all of its promises, throwing you straight into the action as soon as you fire it up for the first time, so for anyone that hasn’t yet been lucky enough to play the game, when you do, prepare yourself for an instant onslaught of FPS thrills.
The only downside is that it demands a lot from gamers if you want to keep up the pace with the ferocious firefights that take place in the online multi-player. It’s addictive and requires constant play to get the right kit and skills to take the fight to people, so if you’ve got anything resembling a life you might want to kiss it goodbye for a while to give you enough time to play the game properly.
Storyline
The storyline is in general a simple case of alien invasion, but the setup and construction of the Destiny universe is a subtle piece of brilliant storytelling that results in an awe inspiring, sprawling narrative. Set hundreds of years in the future following the rapid development of humanity, thanks to the appearance of the intergalactic super-power known as The Traveler, it becomes clear very quickly that things are not right with the world anymore.
Now, humanity’s “Golden Age” of space exploration and colonisation has collapsed thanks to the attack of a growing sinister presence known as The Darkness and their advance attack troops, The Fallen, and all that remains is a small city on Earth that’s being protected by The Traveller, who inhabits a giant white sphere floating high above the city. With the continued threat of The Fallen and the approaching Darkness, The Traveller’s age-old nemesis, it’s up to you to push back the tide of hostility.
The game begins with your character’s regeneration as one of the Earth’s guardians thanks to a Ghost, a small hovering high-tech unit with advanced artificial intelligence and powers. From that point on you’ll find yourself well and truly thrown in at the deep end as you shoot your way through hoards of The Fallen, and other hostile alien species, to begin eradicating their menace and journey once again to the stars.
The mysteries of the unseen enemy and your orb-loving protector start to come to light as you develop through the game, which also expands your reach to former colonies to make a dent in the attacking war machine. It makes for a slow release of tension and mounting intensity as you advance into the great unknown and the promise of more revelations in the storyline is as much a part of the drive to smash through the game as the scintillating gameplay.
Gameplay
It’s at this point that Destiny gets into it’s stride as Bungie has successfully landed a thoroughly absorbing first person shooter that will dominate your game playing time. While the story’s a big part of the addictive nature of the game as you want to unlock more clues to the truth behind the mysteries, the reality is that it’s the blistering action and level up system that straps you into the cockpit and keeps the thrusters down hard.
We’ve sort of had to go a while without a truly ground breaking first person shooter in terms of direct gameplay, but 2014 has delivered two already. First there was Titanfall, which focused its attention exclusively on the multi-player versus concept with always online gameplay, and now we’ve got Destiny, which delivers an always-online open-world first person shooter adventure with awesome versus multiplayer options.
The shoot-em-up element of the gameplay is genuinely sublime with a perfectly responsive heads-up display that makes movement, enemy spotting and aiming feel incredibly realistic. It transitions well to looking down the sights, giving a good level of zoom and allowing for quick sighting to take down the advancing fallen hoard with precision.
However, the big step-up on the basic mechanics of modern FPS games is that there’s a massive level-up system that not only sees you accrue new weapons and armour, but also new magical abilities, tapping into the power of The Traveller and harnessing it in the main gameplay. This can take the form of movement abilities, including glide, teleportation and double jump, but it also gives you a lot of battling might thanks to wicked melee moves and powerful magical attacks. You can also unleash more defensive abilities too, like establishing force fields to protect against a particularly devastating enemy attack or healing powers to bring yourself back from the brink.
All of this combined makes for a whole lot of fun and a level of complexity that becomes intuitive without being docile, giving you a range of options to unleash to make it through the levels. This makes the game much more tactically minded than other first person shooter games as you need to take in your current weapons and ability powers, your surroundings and the nature of the attacking enemy before working out a way to make it through.
It’s far from an easy game, so getting the tactics right can be the difference between finishing a level and getting stuck in respawn hell. This becomes all the more important when you enter no-respawn sections of the campaign gameplay (the screen goes dark and you start to brick it immediately), where death means that you start the section again from scratch, so it can take a lot of time and effort to make it through if you don’t get your strategy right with every turn.
However, the campaign storyline does tail off a little as you progress with a few odd characters taking the edge off things a little too much and confusing path direction in the levels leaving you a little frustrated.
The cool part of the game is that each player’s character will be unique to them, so you form a pretty strong bond with your guardian, which adds to the excitement when the action dials up to “thick and fast” levels of devastation. It all starts out with the creation of your guardian, choosing everything from its race (Human, Awoken or Exo) and skin colour to their hair, eyes, build and gender to create a character that’s entirely your own.
This is added to by the choice between the different classes of guardian that you can become, with three options to go for – Hunters, which are straight-up lone wolf attack soldiers; Warlocks, which have more focus on the magical element of the game; and Titans, which are heavy duty, futuristic soldiers. The decision becomes important to the type of game you want to play, for example, while each of the classes draws on a little of Traveller’s magical abilities, if you want to experience the full might of this force you’ll probably want to go for the Warlock class. On the other hand, if big guns are your thing then the Titan class will be the right decision, or if you want a nimble, fast paced fighter you should go for a Hunter. It’s a feature that also encourages longevity in the game, because when you’ve ploughed through the campaign as a Titan, you can always take it on again as a magic wielding Warlock to get a different type of experience.
Enemies are a big part of the intensity of the game. As you get bigger and stronger with level-ups, you find yourself facing increasingly difficult foe, so there’s no let-up on the overwhelming nature of the gameplay. Their numbers swell as the game progresses too, so while you might start out picking off a few from afar to begin with, you’ll soon find yourself in the thick of a massive attack that will need you to be able to quickly switch your tactics to take out the different types of enemy during the onslaught.
There’s a good level of variety in the different baddies that you can go up against, which keeps Destiny interesting right the way through. There are 4 main races that you’ll battle during the game – Fallen, Hive, Vex and Cabal – and within each is a hierarchy of classes with all manner of different skills, abilities and attacking styles. If that isn’t enough there are also bosses for each of the races, so if you there’s any part of you that thinks this is going to be a walk int he park, you should probably think again.
Multiplayer gameplay is woven into the very fabric of the game right the way through the co-op fireteam play during the main campaign to the heat of the Crucible, Destiny‘s portal to online multiplayer versus action. One thing you should know in advance of playing the game is that the Crucible isn’t playable instantly, as you don’t unlock it until you reach level 5, so if you’ve just started the game and you’re wondering how you play versus online multiplayer, just be patient, it’ll appear after 3 or 4 storyline sections. By this point you will have given yourself enough time to brush up on your skills and power-ups to a status that means you’re not instantly mullered as soon as you enter the fray.
When you do unlock the Crucible, you’ll start with just one game mode, called Control, which is the game’s team base domination equivalent, delivering 6 vs 6 multiplayer gaming to seize and hold a location from the opposing team. The rest of the multiplayer game modes unlock sequentially once you’ve made it through each at least once, which is a cool way to demo each of the modes to help you decide on which of them you’ll be playing the most in the future.
After Control comes Clash, which is a Team Deathmatch-style 6 v 6 blast-em-up of epic proportions. It’s followed by the unlocking of Rumble, which is the classic solo deathmatch free-for-all, and lastly Skirmish, which reduces the team deathmatch concept of Control to a 3 vs 3 base and adds in the ability to revive your teammates into the mix.
Graphics
The graphics are truly amazing, but Destiny isn’t necessarily the kind of game in which you’ll spend a lot of time being overawed by the sheer beauty of the rendering of characters and the scarred-world landscapes you fight in. The quality of the graphics have clearly been crafted to create an experience that feels like it could be real, which makes your first clash with a Cabal soldier all the more ferocious (check them out in the image above to see what you’ll be facing).
There’s inevitably going to be a significant difference in terms of the graphics between the previous generation versions of the game for the PS3 and Xbox 360, and the current gen editions on the Xbox ONE and the PlayStation 4. It’s definitely cool that both sides of the console divide are still supporting their previously released tech, there’s a part of us that wants things to move on.
If you’re planning on getting Destiny, the game will inevitably be closer to the real deal on the ONE and PS4, but equally we can’t help but feel like the dual development for previous and current gen consoles holds games back just a little. While that isn’t necessarily significantly noticeable here, there’s a slightest of inclinations to imagine what the game might have looked like if all of the dev had been focused on the latest tech available.
Destiny review: 4.4/5
