Without further ado let's dive right into it!
The Good:
The gameplay of Destiny is a mix of MMO, and the loot and shoot gameplay pioneered by Borderlands. Destiny does a lot of this setup right, and much of it is left to be desired.
What it gets right is the core gameplay, which is very important to ensuring the game will have legs and be fun. Bungie is the king of rock solid FPS action and this game is no exception. The shooting mechanics feel fantastic, you really feel like you are delivering some impactful mayhem on your enemies with nearly every weapon. None of them feel like pea shooters so it's satisfying to kill something every time you do it...which is good because that's all you're going to do in the game.
Character building in this game is very thoughtful and interesting. On the surface it feels like you just select skills after leveling up, which you mostly do, but your gear levels up too based on your actions. You can add skills to your gear and that's where most of the customization will come into play for everyone. People will choose different builds to focus on, and may likely end up having more variety than say Borderlands where all you do is pick the two of three trees you want to focus on. So in this regard it does much better than Borderlands did.
Since this is a Day 1 review I haven't unlocked all my skills yet so I can't say whether the skills are above average yet or not. I will say that so far they at least feel more noticeable. Like unlocking double jump for instance you immediately notice something new about your character. Unlike in Borderlands where skills would consist of adding 1% critical hit damage. You knew you were stronger, but you couldn't really tell. If this sort of unlocking continues in Destiny, I will be pleased.
The social aspect of Destiny is done VERY well I feel. It seems very easy to jump in with another group and form teams. I joined two in my playing of the game and I didn't even try, they just randomly invited me. People you see roaming around all have the ability to quickly pause and click on your name to say hey, I need some assistance. Seems to work wonderfully, though I haven't tried to form a team yet myself, I didn't need to when people kept inviting me!
The enemy AI is pretty bad, but the enemy variety is good enough. There are enemies that chase you, some that hide, and they try to maneuver on you. Bosses are bullet sponges making battles long and nail biting. It's nail biting because if everyone dies, or if you're going solo and you die, you have to start at the last checkpoint. This is both good and bad design, but mostly good in my book. It's bad for people who keep losing and spend hours on one boss, but it's good for people who want a challenge and the game is preventing people from just coasting on by. It's making you work for it and think about your movements deeply rather than going headlong into a fight and dying. It gives you CONSEQUENCES which few games do anymore, and I respect that highly.
There are a variety of other things the game does right too, crafting, upgrading / equipping, customizing your character look, unlocking rewards, interacting with people though limited brings the laughs like kicking soccer balls around or having everyone sit after a mission completion is hilarious to do and watch happen.
Apart from gameplay, the music and sound effects are great, you really feel the kick of your guns. The graphics are phenomenal too. The environments, though lifeless and sterile, are very pretty to look at.
The Bad:
For all that Destiny gets right, it does need quite a few improvements on the gameplay front.
Firstly, for being a loot and shoot type of game the loot you get is pretty limited. You're not inundated with gear like you are in Diablo or Borderlands. One could argue this is a good thing as nearly everything you do get in this game improves your character whereas 99% of gear that drops in other loot games is totally worthless. But part of the fun is collecting that useless crap hoping for something good. Seeing stuff drop is always a "chance" that it'll be good loot and that constant carrot on a stick is what keeps you motivated to play more. That's why they design them that way. But not so for Destiny. Most of your loot is given to you after you complete a mission. They aren't even dropped on the ground for the most part, you're not actively picking it up, it's just given to you. Destiny gets one half of itself right, the MMO part, and doesn't really understand the loot part.
The next bump in the road is how repetitive this game is. From a personal standpoint I honestly don't mind, I am still having a blast actually playing this, but I can see most people getting bored really quickly. There is one mission type the entire game, go here, fend off waves of enemies, repeat. It's even worse that these missions are also set up the same way too. When you get to the destination that you have to encounter waves your little Navi thing called Ghost has to scan some shit while you "defend" him. I put defend in quotes because he has no life bar, but the motive is you're defending him. EVERY mission is this way it seems. It's pretty ridiculous how little variety there is in missions. Borderlands had about 4 or 5 different things it had you do and was fairly creative on how it delivered those setups, Destiny is very straightforward however, very deliberate and if you're not motivated enough to improve your character, or don't find the core gameplay as solid as I do, you'll lose interest quickly.
Another reason to lose interest quickly is just how painfully bad the story is. There are no excuses for how bad the plot is of this game. While I haven't beat it yet to see if it improves, the first 5 hours has been nothing but dribble. The entire plot so far has been just a bunch of vague...vagueness. Your character apparently was resurrected from the dead...though we're not sure how that's done or why. They go on and on about "light" and "dark" just about every other line includes these words in some form or another. The plot basically reads something like this: The light of the light will carry your light through the darkest dark parts of the darkness against the dark forces out to kill the light with their dark powers. May your light be brighter than their darkey dark....nightlights...Ok, I got a bit carried away there, but with no frame of reference to what the hell they are talking about, this is honestly how it came off to me.
They completely missed the very first step of storytelling which is to introduce the characters and let the audience know a bit about them and what problems they are dealing with. All we really know is there is there's some last city of the human race and they are apparently being protected by zombies called Guardians resurrected by flying monotone tiny robots. One guy even says they will not survive their next attack. Ok well, let's run the fuck away then right? No instead he sends you on a mundane task to gather information....kaaay.
The awful plot is compounded by terribly written side characters like one female hunter you meet who, again talks entirely too vague about whatever nonsense. But what I could make out is at one point she tells you of a super important place to go to and then your character smartly asks her if she can show him how to get there. She response with "that's not my path," and I couldn't have facepalmed harder. WTF does that mean? It's not your path? The human race is at stake and you want to pussy-foot around? If this was Mass Effect your character would get the evil choice to choke her to death until she told you where to go. Seriously though, she doesn't say why she won't tell you, there's no "prophecy" they reference, she's just being a total bitch, but that's not even her character! She's just some bland female character that's trying to help you. She's not like a two-faced highly nuanced well written character where you could be like, oh look she's trying to screw with him here, NO she's just so inconceivably poorly written that it boggles my mind. This is like shit I used to write as a kid, but at least I had the decency to write those characters as obvious villains so their vague banter gave you an inkling that they were just fucking with you.
I should quickly discuss how bad the AI is, but in a way I think it's funny and adds to the game, but many would prefer smarter enemies so it goes in the bad section. The AI is INCREDIBLY stupid. There are times you get ambushed by melee only enemies and you can literally jump up on a box and they can't hurt you anymore. Borderlands knew you would do this and so all of their enemies that don't shoot can leap an infinite amount directly at you like a homing missile. But here...you can outsmart them in this pitifully stupid way.
Another way I outsmarted them was standing behind a barred off area. Their bullets are ones that are big and explode, so they don't go through this area, so I stood there and shot through it just fine, and this was a boss fight end sequence mind you. How did they fuck that up?
Lastly, in most cases you can run away and enemies will not follow you past a certain point, they'll just stand there. So you can lure them one at a time to this "checkpoint" type area they are programmed apparently to stop at. This has to do with the reviving system and set spawning points and Bungie wanting to ensure that if you die that there won't be enemies hovering over where you spawn and kill you again immediately. It has this bad side effect though of being able to manipulate the AI like this and abusing the system in many cases to remove the difficulty from the game. Again though, I've always liked finding this kind of stuff in games and it makes me chuckle so I really don't care, but it's clearly poorly made there's no disputing that.
Apart from the repetition, plot, AI, and not understanding what a loot system should be the only remaining faults of the game are minor at best. Bad loading times, god awful voice acting (Ghost (Peter Dinklage) sounds bored the entire time) and that's really about it.
Final Thoughts:
Destiny is not a game for everyone. I can overlook it's faults as I understand what this game is trying to do and it mostly succeeds at that for me so I find it enjoyable to play. I want to be with this game for the long haul, get all the DLC, and eagerly await all the extra stuff they plan to do with this world. Because in the end this game is a platform for content, and hopefully some of that content will include different missions and unique gameplay. It has a very solid structure so it can only improve from here. Much like how small of a scope World of Warcraft was in its first year, so is Destiny, but that scope will expand as Activision is heavily investing in this game. That is good for fans of Destiny since we know for a fact they aren't giving up on the game. We know they put down $500 million for Bungie to continue to create content for the game and that's very exciting to me. So many of these games come out and die off with no promise of continuing, but here we have the exact opposite. We have the basis for a LOT of potential.
If you're like me and this gets you excited then by all means dive in. For gamers who prefer that 8 hour story with solid linear structure you might want to stay away. I personally am one of those gamers that prefers that 8 hour linear game 90% of the time, but lately I've also been looking for a game like this where I can turn my brain off. I never could get into something like World of Warcraft because the actual gameplay of it was so pitifully bad, but this is a solid FPS game and I'd much rather play this that requires a bit of skill and stamina than WoW that has zero skill to it. No monthly fees here either.
Is Destiny a good game? Well, it's an average game with a lot of potential that I believe will be realized with their investment, unlike most games that come out and they are final and can't be fixed. The story will probably always be bad though, but I believe Bungie will continue to give us reasons to play this game for a long time and I'm very happy about that because in the end, it is really fun to play.
*Haven't tried the PVP yet, but I will soon. I'm sure it's good though based on streams I've seen of it, though I doubt it's as good as Titanfall's PVP*
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