Power Hour Review: Destiny (XBox One)

The FPS is not my favorite genre of game and that’s for two reasons. First, I love narrative in my games. I want to know the characters in my game. So when a new FPS comes out I usually only rent them and play through the single player campaign since they are usually only a couple of hours long.

Bungie’s Destiny promised to be different. It wasn’t just going to be a re-skinned Halo. Folks were touting it as the new Mass Effect and we all know how much I loved Mass Effect. With that in mind I couldn’t resist Destiny. I didn’t play the beta and with their upgrade special I could get digital copies for the 360 and the XBox I just couldn’t turn it down. It had too much going for it to just be a rental.

First up, character creation. I am infamous for the hours that it can take me to tweak a character to be just as I want her to be. Destiny’s character customization choices were just limited enough (but  broad enough) that I was done creating my character in about a half hour (not counting more than a few minutes of that toward my power hour) and that I still felt like the character was mine. 

Being limited to 3 classes (Titan, Hunter, or Warlock) of character first was a little frustrating because I have grown more and more accustomed to the more free wheeling customizable classes that we first started seeing in games like Kingdoms of Amalur. I rarely want to be straight warrior or straight magic user, but rather like to be a good combination of both. The closest that I could get to this in this case was a Titan (which will reportedly allow me to control battles with strength and strategy) and has a pretty cool ground strike move that makes people fucking dissolve….yeah you heard me right, dissolve. After an hour of play I haven’t gotten that power yet, but I am really waiting on that one! You apparently also get to choose other options after you reach level 15 of the 20 possible character levels.

Next you get to choose one of 3 races (Human, Awoken, Exo) which appear to just human, undead, or cyborg type figures. One of the things that struck me during this part of the creation was that while you could do some fairly extensive cosmetic customization you learn very little about the individual races themselves. I ended up choosing Awoken, but all I know of my race is that they are somehow “marked” by the cosmos and that my ancestors took shelter in deep space and that this has changed my race forever. (I can say that Awoken won out mostly because of the mysterious nature and the fact that they seem to physically embody the cosmos and that you can see space moving beneath their skin.)Learning about racial background at this stage is something that I have always loved most about the games in the Morrowind series. This is the part where I get a glimpse into who my character is or should be because of their racial history.

With those two choices you are thrown into the game. You quickly learn that Mars, Venus, and Mercury have been colonized and humans are flourishing, but now being hunted by something called the Darkness. You find yourself on Earth being revived by your “Ghost” (voiced my Peter Dinklage) who tells you that  you are a Guardian who has been dead for a long time and that you are tasked with saving the world from The Fallen, aliens that sport Triceratops/lizard type frills and apparently have a real taste for death. The gunplay is pretty tight in this game and it’s fairly unforgiving. The enemies come hard and fast even at the very beginning. There is no assuming that you are a beginner here. And there is no dialing back or up on the difficulty level. You do get to respawn once you die, but it bumps you back to the last checkpoint and all of the Fallen that you had dispatched have also respawned. I should also note that in terms of the controls there were a number of times that I had to tap the switch weapon button repeatedly to get it to switch between weapons during battle. This kind of thing can get you real dead, real fast.

I would like to say that this all was frustrating enough to make me rage quit the game, but it really did just make me strategize more. I had to start thinking about better ways to go around pockets of enemies or even good vantage points that would protect me enough to allow me to pick them off one by one. One of the things that I don’t like is that HP doesn’t start to regenerate until you fall into the critical zone. That just made me die…a lot, because getting hit while it was refilling just automatically knocks it back down to near nothing.

Pretty quickly I got a ship and was able to make it back to the Guardian stronghold (thanks to Ghost) and was able to get some basic upgrades and buy some weapons and such from the local vendors before I set out on my next mission. All in all I have to say that Destiny is a pretty good shooter, but I am not really feeling the MMO part as of yet, though I suspect (hint, hint) that many of the missions will quickly become too difficult to complete alone. Ultimately what does seem to be missing is the narrative. The story that the game seems to promise has yet to reveal itself. I am hoping that this is something that gets rectified fairly quickly because I would really like to know what is going on in the universe around me.

If shooters aren’t your thing I would suggest renting this one and playing it for a few hours until you can decide if there is enough other stuff there to keep you interested in the game. And most importantly choose a platform that  you have friends on to play with. There is no cross-platform or cross-generational play (i.e. 360/ONE or PS/XBox). With that being said, I’m off to kill some Fallen!