Destiny is a game developed by Bungie Inc., the makers of the highly successful Halo franchise which started with Halo Combat Evolved and moved on to have  many sequels including Halo Reach and Halo ODST. Destiny is an open world first person shooter (FPS) based in an apocalyptic future where humans have taken their last stand under a giant spherical alien object called the traveler. The traveler, however, has an enemy known only as the darkness, which ended their previous age of glory and beat them down to only one small city left on Earth. In the game, the player is one of the Guardians who are instilled with the “light of the traveler” and granted great abilities that they use to fight back the darkness and take back the universe that they once inhabited.

Now to the gameplay. It is an FPS style game like Halo, but the actual combat feels a lot more like Borderlands, a game developed by Gearbox Software. Your character has  no shield bar, only a recharging health bar. The health of all enemies can be seen on your heads up display (HUD) .

There are many different groups of enemies in Destiny. Some are four armed aliens called the Fallen, some are teleporting robots called The Vex, and some are militaristic space manatees called the Cabal. All of these enemies are very different in design but in combat, they are basically the same. While the enemies move differently and act differently, they all seem to carry the same kind of weapons. There is a sniper-like weapon, an explosive weapon, and a close-range machine gun type weapon. The way the game is built makes the each one feel stale and repetitive. Even the bosses of the strike missions (missions that are done with two teammates with a boss at the end and rewards) have no real interest, which should be the MOST interesting enemies in the whole game. The bosses are just larger versions of regular enemies that absorb more damage.

The few interesting enemies that are a part of the game are underused, such as  the Fallen Devil Walker. The Devil Walker is interesting because if you target and destroy the weak points (the legs) you reveal an even more vulnerable area which gives you the chance to do massive damage. These mechanics should apply to bosses as well, this makes the game not particularly challenging.

The game is not difficult because it requires very little skill to play. The bosses take a long time to kill which gives the player the illusion of difficulty and relief when the long battle is over. The enemies, however, have more health and their weapons do more damage. Essentially, the designers substituted this instead of making the enemies more difficult to fight because they are smarter and slightly stronger.

The whole game comes down to a painfully slow and boring grind by doing the same thing over and over again. The enemies spawn in the same places on every map each time, the collectible materials are only on their respective planet, and chest spawning areas are always the same. There’s a spot on earth known as the loot cave where players can sit and kill enemies repeatedly to collect loot because the spawn is predictable. As a result, this is something players exploit from the poor game design.

One of the most positively advertised part of the game and ultimately disappointing features was the open world and design of the universe in general. The universe itself isn’t bad, but the presentation is. . The game’s story can sometimes be the saving grace of a game and make it all worthwhile, but the developers of Destiny gave us a deep universe with basically no explanation to what anything is. Any info on the universe is presented to players through Grimoire Cards, which are small tidbits of information that cannot even be viewed in game. The player has to go to Bungie.net and put in their username and view the info there. A player should not have to leave the game to look up information. This takes away from the immersion.

The world that the player interacts is a series of large open areas connected by pathways that just make it take more time to get to each area. There may be tunnels and some other areas where missions take place, but the player is always directed toward these, taking away the feel of an open world. There are few interesting areas for the player to find and they are full of difficult enemies.  After taking time to fight through all of these enemies, the player is rewarded nothing more often than not.This is, again, another aspect of the game that could have been  cool that  ruins the excitement of exploring this world.

Additionally, the world is not that big either. The fact that it takes a long while to get everywhere makes it feel larger when, realistically, it is just a lot of open landscape. The whole open landscape is plagued by five second kill zones and unnecessary invisible walls that just make trying to explore anything frustrating.

A very good aspect of the “explorative” part of Destiny is the sparrow, it is a vehicle used by the guardians to maneuver large areas of the landscape quickly and it is just very fun to drive and very well designed. So that was worth mentioning.

Destiny is  focused around the idea of random encounters with players and building a virtual community in a world among all of the guardians in a central HUB called the Tower. This is a  cool idea and a cool place to meet players, especially since Bungie added a feature where your guardian has four action commands that can be used to wave, dance, point or sit with other players. However,  the Tower is a just a big empty place with some NPC’s that sell you gear.There is nothing that players can engage in as a community.  Shouldn’t there be more? Why not add a poker table where you can bet glimmer (currency in Destiny) on a game. Or maybe Sparrow races. You can’t even trade items with other players. The community feels pointless besides having shops there. Then there are the factions.

The Factions are a way to get better gear in Destiny through doing missions and leveling up under the name of the facion. There are three total factions in Destiny: Future War Cult, Dead Orbit and New Monarchy. (You can find out more about these factions by reading the Grimoire cards). t is also worth it to mention that it takes a long time to level up in a faction.

Destiny also has competitive multiplayer which is known as the crucible. The matchmaking was something that players looked forward to prior to the game’s release. In the end, players got a piece of unbalanced garbage that is just above the level of Call of Duty. All it takes to be successful in the Crucible is a shotgun or pulse rifle. When these weapons are used right, they are an instant kill. This makes the multiplayer unbalanced, especially if the player has built a character meant for matchmaking. Players should expect to die within a minute of their respawn.

The game does have some redeemable aspects like the graphics which are stunning. The cloth forms to the environment and hangs off of ledges when sitting, the water looks like water and has real reflections and the light and shadow of the game is amazing. Also, the class customization is nice because a player can change it whenever they want. This means the player does not have to make more than one  character to experience a different class. There is also a feature called the vault which is a storage system that can be used by all the characters that a single player has created.

Overall Destiny gets about a 6/10. The game is really just a big a grind which seemed impossible for an FPS. Somehow Bungie managed to pull it off. It makes it very boring, very repetitive and overall a very stale game from with what could have been fantastic. What ultimately makes everything so bad is the fact that the game was incredibly over hyped. People got too excited for a game that just did not deliver. Destiny is not as good as it seems and that is just really disappointing.