Destiny starts off with a bang: You're revived from suspended animation by a mechanical, cube-like Ghost assistant (voiced by Peter Dinklage) and flee into the ruins of an old Russian space center to avoid the hostile alien enemies known as the Fallen. Within moments, your Ghost finds you a serviceable rifle, and you're gunning down aliens left and right. You eventually find yourself a spaceship and take off towards The City, humanity's last-known haven. Once you talk to a few non-player characters and pick up some equipment and traveling gear, you're instructed to go back to Earth to retrieve a warp drive so that you can travel to the stars.
View all You can be one of three different character classes—Hunter, Titan, and Warlock—each of which has unique special abilities that benefit offense, defense, and agility stats. Destiny has light RPG elements that let you level up your character and equip it with abilities such as Arcane Wisdom (improves your toughness and speed), Energy Drain (gives a health boost when you kill an enemy), and Glide (lets you pepper enemies from the air),
Destiny's Highs and Lows
Though each mission has a different story-related narrative, they all share essentially the same gameplay. Destiny's campaign is a shooting gallery, with enemy levels and loot being the only real variation among missions. Gunplay is fun and satisfying, but this satisfaction is short lived, because missions are all-too similar. The game gets exciting when it introduces a new enemy, but these introductions are not common, and the enemy's novelty is very short lived, as cover-based shooting is the solution to all of Destiny's extraterrestrial problems. You can acquire vehicles, but they don't change the play mechanics very much.
Perhaps this is why developer Bungie opted for a multiplayer approach to the story campaign. Destiny has no offline mode: you must play online at all times, which means that other players can spawn within your instanced world and assist you or ignore you as they see fit. Enemies spawn at an absurdly high rate, and players engaged with the same enemy will both earn experience even if they're not partied together. As a result, kill-stealing is a not an issue unless you're hunting a specific type of enemy during a side mission.
Unfortunately, a server hiccup or connection drop will boot you off the map and back into the mission-select hub, with all progress but XP lost. With the game freshly released there are connection issues aplenty, which means lots of dropped missions. This is compounded by the absurd loading times. It can take a minute or more to select and load a mission.
Grab Your Guns
Beyond the story campaign, Destiny presents several multiplayer-specific modes that let players fight one another competitively or band together to take on challenges cooperatively. You need to get a few missions into the story campaign to unlock the multiplayer modes. This is to prevent players from gimping themselves by engaging in serious multiplayer sessions without key class abilities and special attacks.
Destiny's player vs. player (PvP) modes are what you expect from a multiplayer shooter. The many options include Free For All, Capture The Flag, and Team Death Match.
Attack and defense ratings appear normalized in PvP matches, so players are all on similar footing when fighting, regardless of their level gap. Player characters are well suited for fighting enemies in player vs. environment modes (PvE) because of their incredibly powerful special attacks. That said, the special attacks are severely imbalanced in PvP. Matches can quickly devolve into instant-killing special attack spam-fests.
Boss Battles
Co-op PvE is more fun, but it's still a shallow affair. The Strike missions see players tackle a powerful boss while also fighting hordes of lower-level enemies. This is essentially a more exaggerated form of the gameplay from the story campaign, and it highlights the game system's flaws. Boss fights are challenging because they bring mobs of enemies, but they don't engage players in any interesting or meaningful way. Bosses don't have many unique attacks, making the encounters straightforward and simplistic. The toughest decision a player needs to make during intense boss fights is deciding which rock to hide behind, and for how long.
End-game content consists of harder versions of missions you've already completed. Or players can go back and play the generic optional missions that become available between story missions. It's unimaginative padding.
Is This Shooter Your Destiny?
Destiny does nothing to innovate or move the FPS genre forward beyond adding flourishes to gameplay elements that already exist in other games. The science-fiction story has potential, but the conflict between light and darkness is laughably banal, and Destiny does a poor job of making your actions feel significant. The online multiplayer nature of the game does enrich the gameplay, but it also proves a hindrance when connection issues arise. Bungie tries to marry MMO and FPS elements with Destiny, without making combat particularly interesting for fans of either genre. The result is a beautiful and reasonably fun, but it's ultimately a simplistic and shallow experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment