Life On The Grid

With much doubt and uncertainty about Bungie’s move away from epic single player games and shifting towards always-online MMO-like games, I decided to give Destiny a try.  And sadly, I was massively underwhelmed.  Here’s why.  For a start, I played on the PS3, not owning a PS4 yet, and the graphical fidelity seems to be a large step down from what I’ve seen of the next-gen versions.  While this didn’t detract from the game-play, it was always a small niggle in the back of my mind that the next-gen versions seemed to get a lot more attention than previous gen.  The story, writing and characters are extremely generic invoking no caring for them whatsoever.  There is more to the lore and story than you get in the main story missions, but it seems to be well hidden away from you for some reason requiring you to dig to find it.

“Lands of lore”

These story missions seem to be there just to check the boxes for some kind of single player “campaign”.  Although, I’d use the word campaign very loosely as all the missions seem to be extremely similar and just variants on “go here, kill this guy” or “go here and hold off waves of goons”.  Peter Dinklage voicing your AI companion, Ghost often comes across as if he doesn’t know what he’s saying or that he at all cares.  It kind of looks like Halo.  The movement and shooting are almost identical to Halo although they do feel a little looser and not as tight or sharp as the spot-on Halo controls.  But buddy, this is not Halo.  You must be on-line and signed into XBox Live or PSN just to start the game.  Whether you intend to play alone or with others.  This seems to be because they have chosen to host the save games remotely, probably to reduce cheating.  Another common MMO tactic.

The almost mandatory on-line co-operative elements and levelling system forces you to grind to be able to keep up with the enemies in the main story missions if you are alone and can’t scrounge together a fire team.  So either have friends dedicated to play with or be prepared to spend a lot of time along replaying missions to get required levels.  Bungie neglected to include cross platform play, meaning PS3 and PS4 players cannot play together nor can XBox 360 and XBox One players, because they felt the next-gen consoles would have an “unfair advantage” due to their higher resolutions but this seems like a thin excuse to me.  I’m sure most would be willing to endure that small problem so that we weren’t stuck to playing with people on the same platform especially considering the last-gen consoles have a much smaller pool of players.

“Destiny Really Begins at Level 20”

They have said that the game doesn’t actually begin proper until you’ve beat all the story missions, reached the level cap of 20 and can participate in “Raids” which are longer, more difficult and open ended missions with larger teams and focused on loot gathering.  This just irritates me that they’ve designed it to be drip-fed over a long time.  Sure, people should be able to keep playing it long-term but the fact that you have to sink enormous amounts of time into it to get even close to a full experience or finish the main storyline pushes it closer and closer to a MMO game which are the bane of the newer generations of gaming.  As mentioned before, the shooting action is solid and it is a lot more enjoyable if you can get people to play with as the whole experience goes a lot smoother.  Sadly, not everyone will be able to do this.

Summary

High level requirements and lack of people to play with slowed my progress quite considerably and sapped my enthusiasm to finish even the main story line.  I got to the final set of levels and then lost all will to play as it just felt like a chore.  If you can get friends who are willing to join your fire-team regularly, then this will be worth a quick play-through and the occasional return to.  But if you are planning to play it solo, you will have a rough time and I couldn’t recommend it.  And because of this, I abandoned it before I even finished it.

Overall Score: 2/5