Monday, September 22, 2014

Destiny Review

As a FPS with a story it is nowhere near as good as Halo, it's not even on the same planet.  Bungie clearly used up all their good ideas the first time around and Destiny sort of feels like the dregs that were left over.  It's got the same religion meets technology meets end of the world vibe but without ever being remotely interesting or funny.  Even if you ignore how boring the story is and just treat it as a value for money exercise you're not going to be happy...most expensive game ever?  How come it took me about 10 hours to play it through from start to end, and that included a shit load of extra optional (very repetitive) missions?  I reached level 21 in that time, enough to make the final battle a walk in the park. I suppose if I would have been trying I could have finished the story in about 5-6 hours.

So that's the single player sorted, what about the multiplayer RPG elements?  I've done quite a few Strikes and played a few hours in the crucible, neither are great.  The competitive multiplayer is basic head down, charge around with a shotgun dying every few seconds fair.  This is the only way to win.  If you try and play tactically some cunt will teleport on top of you and shoot you in the face with their shotgun.  There is no fucking way that this game will get a cult online following, I'd be amazed if people are still playing this in 12 months.  You level up to level 18/19/20 to stand a chance then you charge around like a headless chicken hoping to get a couple of kills for every death, there are no tactics.  This is matched by the type of player as well, you will get fed up hearing"fucking owned".  Not that I'm bitching because I'm bad at it, I'm not and I've won my fair share of games.  It's just that it is not fun.  As for the RPG?  It's a bit like Borderlands but much worse.  One class is far too strong and that sorts out any hopes of a WoW experience.  In simpler terms it is to Mass Effect what Asteroids is to Elite. 

The best bit about the game is the novelty value in seeing other real people jumping around on your same mission map.  It is only a novelty though and it soon gets fucking annoying when somebody is hanging around mining XP on a part of the map where you are trying to follow the story.  For example my final story mission was made a lot easier because somebody decided they were just going to hang around killing these bad ass monsters every time they respawned meaning I could walk through unchallenged

In short, as a FPS it has a dull story, poor weapon variety and as much as they've borrowed all their old Halo ideas none of the new bits are as good.  In terms of a FPS/RPG it just doesn't compare to Borderlands 2 and the fun that can be had working co-op in that.  Looking at it as an overall space adventure gaming experience whoever decided to compare it to Mass Effect needs their head read.  Overall it's not as good as Halo, Borderlands or Mass Effect.  The good news is that it helped me make my mind up which console I was going to buy and even better, I only took out a 1 month subscription on the Play Station network.

OR as somebody else put it...