Destiny Review

You can get by with a little help from your friends.

 

Bungie’s highly anticipated FPS MMORPG extravaganza is by all accounts a multiplayer experience. There is of course a single player narrative to follow and no obligation whatsoever to even interact with players, however doing so would be depriving yourself of one of the game’s biggest features and Destiny’s greatest asset.

Entirely online, it is impossible to truly feel alone as you’ll come across fellow players all across space, excluding mission areas designed to be traffic-free. Even within the tower, civilisations last cultural hub/equipment supermarket/dance-off arena, you can’t help but notice the buzz of players going about their Guardian shenanigans.

For the socialites, all missions can be embarked with a Fireteam of up to 3 players, cranking up the difficulty and allowing players to revive one another in darkness zones. That being said, even if you don’t have a tightknit Fireteam with your own passwords and secret handshakes, multiplayer is an absolute must to fully experience what destiny has to offer.

If you play without your own band of buddies backing you up, it’s ok. The Guardians are all working together for the greater good but are by nature solo adventurers. Each are individuals with their own race, class and motives, so it’s only natural that when cooperating on strikes some players back up their fellow guardians and put the team first, whilst others chase their own individual goals. Participating in strikes independently will pit you and two other randomly selected guardians through a level of enemies, culminating in a challenging boss fight with respectable loot to claim upon completion.

PvP is introduced via the Crucible – an arena style “training area” – where players choose from 4 classic game types. Players are levelled to match each other regardless of experience, however there is still an aspect of unbalance. As players use their own equipment, higher level player will have significantly better weapons. The Crucible also favours fully automatic weapons due to the fast paced chaos and less on single fire, precision weapons such as scout and sniper rifles, so a guardian’s load out is a large contributor to victory. Where PvP balances out is through the distribution of heavy weapon ammo, which is scattered in randomly selected ammo crates, resulting in a frantic scramble to be the first one to reach the ammunition, as heavy weapons give players a distinct advantage.       

Where Destiny falls short however is with its campaign. Hidden behind the sultry tones of Bill Nighy and Peter Dinklage lies a fairly short, repetitive storyline revolving around Peter Dinklage going all Aiden Peerce over security systems while you fight off waves of varying enemies. Set in a grim future, The Darkness has taken a break from being Jackie Estacado’s snake tentacles and is battling against Earth’s last vanguard, setting out to destroy the Earth’s benevolent floating sphere – the Traveller – and everything good in the galaxy. There are currently four alien races to do battle with from planet to planet, including the multi-limbed, bug faced Fallen (Tyrannids), the subterranean Hive (Locust), the Hulking, militarised  Cabal (Krogan) and the robotic legions of the Geth, I mean Vex. Each race has their own motives and can be seen fighting one another on each world.

What the story lacks is any explanation. Throughout the game it is unclear as to which race is your true enemy and whether or not the final boss fight is the Darkness or just a particularly powerful baddie. Players don’t really need to pay attention to the story and can plough through the game focussing on their immediate goals, guided by their ghost to undoubtedly scan some computers and fight off a couple of waves of alien nasties. The upside to the campaign is that it unlocks some truly breath-taking open world planets for players to explore, ranging from ancient ruins and crumbling cities to vast swamps and sandy dunes. Destiny’s visuals are stunning and makes grinding through enemies a little less mind numbing.

Verdict   8/10

Ups:

• Crisp combat

• Mesmerising Locations

• Great multiplayer interaction and gameplay

Downs:

• Repetitive missions

• Farming for upgrades and XP is tedious

• Plot doesn’t do the game justice