Destiny launch review: Bungie's shared world shooter plays it safe

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Destiny's narrative posits a future where humanity, having enjoyed a Golden Age of technological advancement that saw us colonise other planets, has been brought to the verge of extinction by an event referred to as The Collapse.

 

Perhaps Bungie saw it as a cautionary tale: it's never wise to reach too far too soon. The scope of Activision's calculated $500m gamble might be ambitious, but almost everything else about this 'shared world shooter' - an amalgam of Halo, Borderlands, Guild Wars and Defiance - is deeply conservative.

 

Unless you've somehow managed to avoid the blitzkrieg of marketing, you'll already know it's an FPS set in a persistent online universe that you share with other players. Its campaign is a series of missions spread across several planets that you can play alone in its entirety, or co-operatively with two friends, forming a three-strong Fireteam. You'll find loot in the form of Glimmer, the game's currency, or weapons and armour dropped by enemies and found in chests, and you'll upgrade both those and your character as you progress.

 

It's familiar stuff, but it forms a compelling, hypnotic loop: after each mission, you're encouraged to return to the Tower, a central hub for players, where you'll collect rewards, decrypt schematics for new gear, or perhaps enter the Crucible for a few rounds of competitive multiplayer. Particularly during the early game, you'll rarely return from a mission without having levelled up your Guardian, unlocked a new ability, or upgraded your armour - or all three. Or maybe you're just coming back because you've finally accumulated enough Glimmer to buy that uncommon sniper rifle you'd been eyeing up at the gunsmith's stall.

It starts very promisingly, though for anyone who played the alpha and/or the beta, those first few hours of Destiny will feel a little too familiar to be as thrilling as they probably are for newcomers. As such, for many it won't be until their first moon landing that the first real tingle of excitement arrives - though it's likely to be accompanied by more than a few doubts.

MAYBE THE GAME'S NECESSARILY EPISODIC STRUCTURE PRECLUDES A GREAT NARRATIVE, BUT SURELY BUNGIE CAN DO BETTER THAN THIS?

The story has to take a good portion of the blame. Maybe the game's necessarily episodic structure precludes a great narrative, but surely Bungie can do better than this? As the game begins, you're warned of an encroaching darkness that threatens the survival of the Traveller, a large celestial body said to be the only thing standing between the remaining survivors and total annihilation. But there's no real sense of impending, just a vague overhanging threat that never seems to properly materialise. First you fight one extraterrestrial force, then another, and then a third is introduced: each apparently more evil than the last (and that's before we get onto other factions, like the militaristic Cabal). Essentially, you're just gunning down faceless bad guys with little meaningful motivation to do so.

It's at once basic and untidy, a simple story in theory that's mired in a tangle of lore and jargon, most of which is detailed in collectible cards that, astonishingly, can't be accessed from within the game. Instead, you're forced to visit Bungie.net to uncover the background of these cosmic conflicts - not that many players will be minded to bother.

And it's even harder to care when the voice actors seem equally - if understandably - bored or confused by the lines they're asked to deliver. As your floating AI ally, Ghost, Peter Dinklage struggles to muster any kind of enthusiasm for the woeful dialogue. There are fleeting, half-hearted attempts to turn him into a kind of comic sidekick, but otherwise Destiny's self-important script takes itself incredibly seriously. Not even the likes of Nathan Fillion and Bill Nighy can inject charisma into this personality-free guff. From a pure narrative standpoint, it's an alarmingly poor piece of world-building.

 

It hardly helps that the missions are almost comically repetitive. In each of them, you'll spend time clearing out areas of enemies, before reaching a 'darkness area', from which point you can't respawn - though these often contain checkpoints to restart from.At some stage you'll reach a room where you're invited to plug Ghost into a machine to decode or unlock something, prompting waves of enemies to appear. Sometimes you'll do it in a slightly different order, destroying a large wave of enemies and perhaps a boss, before deploying Ghost so he can deliver another barrage of tedious exposition. "Wow, this is amazing!" says Dinklage, the contempt in his voice clearly audible.

Outside the story, you're free to explore each planetary hub via Patrol missions, which invite you to locate beacons directing you to various additional objective.These are standard MMO-style sub-quests, asking you to kill enemies until you pick up ten of a certain item, to head to a specific location and deploy Ghost once more, or sometimes even to simply reach a certain point on the map and stand around for a bit.

 

In theory, it's a relaxing change of pace, a place to grind levels - not that you need to when the Crucible PVP modes are a much more efficient method - and to scavenge for helium filaments and spinmetal leaves to trade with vendors at the Tower. But there's little else to find beyond the odd loot cache or dead Ghost to revive, with the same pockets of respawning enemies in-between. Bungie has built a world that's great to look at, but here it feels oddly hollow. Little wonder that the infrequent public events act as such a powerful magnet for nearby players: these temporary bursts of activity and excitement bring a lethargic world to thrilling life, if only for a few minutes.

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Meanwhile, that strong sense of early progression soon subsides. Before long, the differences between new weapons and old ones are too subtle to see a tangible difference beyond larger numbers erupting from enemy heads, and a defence stat that steadily builds so you can absorb more damage before cowering behind cover. You're only concerned about getting a stronger gun because the enemies are tougher, not because it does anything significantly different from its predecessor.

 

There's little meaningful choice when it comes to your Guardian's skill tree, too - with few ways to truly differentiate your Guardian from others within the same class. You can opt for faster recovery or movement speed, or stronger armour, but genuinely new abilities are few and far between, and there's little sense you're truly shaping your character into someone unique. You will at least get to change your subclass once you hit Level 15 - having rolled as a Warlock, I relished the opportunity to hurl great balls of fire, but only the new Super ability was functionally distinct from my time as a Voidwalker.

 

These problems are impossible to ignore, and yet many of them all but melt away in the face of the game's moment-to-moment interactions. Flaws that would torpedo any other game feel insignificant when you're dealing with gunplay of this quality. Bungie knows how to build combat bowls that fizz with tactical possibilities, how to craft intense encounters that you somehow survive by the skin of your teeth.

More importantly, it knows how to build weapons that are fun to shoot. Pulse rifles are a particular joy, but I quickly fell in love with the sharpshooter - a magnum designed for methodical marksmanship.Thataffection is mostly down to the feedback; precision shots here are unbelievably gratifying.

 

Vex robots splatter gloopy white fluid like Bishop in Aliens, while a headshot on a bulky Cabal trooper sees their helmet pops off, prompting wisps of black smoke to pour from the top of their suits as they gasp and collapse to the floor. There's aural pleasure in the whooshing charge and release of a fusion rifle, physical satisfaction in the juddering recoil of machine gun. Even the melee attacks are fantastic. Many will favour the Hunter's knife, but there's undoubtedly something special about the Warlock's talk-to-the-hand shove, a close-range Force push in all but name.

 

It's a frequently beautiful game, too. Though the gravity is curiously identical, every new planet has its own unique look, from the brick-dust dunes of Mars to a ruined city on Venus that looks like a sickly, tropical version of The Last of Us. And outside the covers of Seventies sci-fi novels, you won't see skyboxes anywhere else that look as beautiful as these.

...YOU WON'T SEE SKYBOXES ANYWHERE ELSE THAT LOOK AS BEAUTIFUL AS THESE

You can see where the money went, then - and it's worth crediting both developer and publisher with an uncommonly smooth launch for a huge online game - because from the UI to the environment design there's a slickness and polish to the production that feels lavish, expensive. But did that budget perhaps prohibit Bungie from trying something different?

The PvP multiplayer demonstrates that the developer has lost none of its talent for map design, and if you're a Halo player looking for something along those lines you'll be well-pleased with the four competitive modes here. It's fast-paced, twitchy, entertaining, and the matchmaking is very good indeed. Yet there's almost nothing new here.

Destiny is perhaps best described as a game of wonderful moments rather than a wonderful game. Each player will have their own anecdotes to share; for me, two in particular stand out. One was an event during a Patrol session, where I teamed up with two strangers to stop the Hive - or was it the Fallen? - drilling into the Moon, succeeding with mere seconds to spare.

 

The other saw an unknown Hunter and I forced to finish a Strike mission with an extended fight against a bullet-sponge boss after the third member of our Fireteam inexplicably dropped out. After half an hour of panicked pot-shots from distance - and taking turns to cower and pray for the other's respawn timer to hurry up - the wave of relief and satisfaction as the boss finally fell prompted a celebratory dance-off.

 

These are the kind of shared experiences Bungie wants Destiny to be about (and wants its players to talk about) but they're carefully rationed throughout a game that too often provokes ennui instead of exhilaration. Is it wrong to expect something more?

 

That budget always going to put it under the kind of scrutiny that no game could realistically live up to - and besides, Activision's investment is a long-term deal - but it's hard to shake the sense that, as fine a shooter as Destiny can be, it's still something of a missed opportunity.

 

As Paul McCartney warbles over the grandiosely bland credits theme, there is hope for the future. In the coming months and years, Destiny could yet evolve into something essential. Right now, it's a frequently enjoyable, beautifully made shooter you can play with friends and strangers alike. But that's all it is.That budget always going to put it under the kind of scrutiny that no game could realistically live up to - and besides, Activision's investment is a long-term deal - but it's hard to shake the sense that, as fine a shooter as Destiny can be, it's still something of a missed opportunity.

 

 

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