DESTINED FOR GREATNESS: A REVIEW OF DESTINY
A party of Guardians moves on to their next objective. Photo courtesy of Bungie.
If you have played as many video games as I have, you may start to feel as if you have seen everything there is to see. So, imagine my surprise at the fact that my familiarity with many popular concepts in gaming has only served to make me absolutely love a game that shows me nothing that I have not seen in a game before.
Destiny, a first person combat video game from the creators of the Halo series, manages to combine these traits extremely well and has easily submitted itself as a serious game-of-the-year contender.
Like a DJ mixing disparate elements of various musical genres, Bungie, the developer of Destiny, has clipped pieces of well-used gaming conventions, polished them and pasted them together like a venerable love letter to the past decade of gaming.
From jetting through space in your own ship to dancing with a fellow gamer when you have nothing to do in between missions and almost everything in between, one should never have a lack of things to do and see in the sprawling universe of Destiny.
The first thing that will jump out to most gamers would be the amazing graphics. I routinely find myself staring in awe at the various landscapes, locales, and planets presented in the game.
The amount of equipment available to you in the game is seemingly infinite and it is always interesting to build a large collection of loot and outfit your virtual warrior with the hardest to find (and coolest looking) stuff.
Interacting and working with (or against) your fellow players in a massive multiplayer world is a tremendous experience that will give you as much as you put into it, it requires strategy, teamwork and communication.
The voice talent alone is worth the price of admission and features Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones) and Lance Reddick (Fringe, The Wire).
There are some small issues however; the game crashes a bit too often. Although it won’t lose your progress, it will break the flow of the game and can become quite frustrating.
The leveling system for the player character is a bit unbalanced, and while it still serves to be rewarding and deep, the spoils can be hit or miss when you reach the higher levels.
The game’s storyline mostly feels like a bolted on reason to string missions together. As entertaining as the game is however you would likely never notice, as you will be too busy exploring (and exploding) the world around you.
Destiny is a wondrous experience that will keep on giving to you as long as you keep on giving to it. It is easily recommendable and I would suggest picking up a copy to all gamers.
By: Benjamin Freier
The Patriot Press 