BLABLA... BLA BLABLA!
After finally releasing my small game
Supreme Chicken Showdown, I've recently been able to finish a lot of games I have played only sporadically over the last months... so there are quite a few reviews ahead. To mix it up I thought it would be good to start it off with a review of a really big AAA title:
Destiny.
Before I begin I would however also like to shortly address something that might again land in my inbox because of this review. Sometimes I am asked the approximated following via email: What is the purpose of a review of a game that is already out for a long time? Why do you do that?
Because first of all I am pretty busy and even more importantly I can't print my own money at home, and since nobody (at least not the big-time industry) is sending me free copies of their games, I have to wait a bit until the prices drop before I can buy them. - Luckily, taking a look at the industry prices that doesn't take that long anymore. But there's more: I also don't want to write a review of a game that I haven't played at least through half of it - in most cases I even want to finish it completely. I find this very important because I strongly believe that from playing just a very short time - especially when it comes to bigger titles - you can't and shouldn't really judge a game. I don't have any rush. If this was a race I have already lost. But it isn't! And quite frankly I think it's about time even more people realized that you don't have to play a game right away, let alone buy into the mostly disastrous preorder hypes! I neither have the time nor the money and I also don't want to be treated like any other form of modern, high-speed and in the end completely useless review platform on the net. I see my reviews anyway more like an opinionated and often exaggerated testimony, here to stay and still funny to read even in some years from now. So, sometimes you might get lucky and I can indeed review a brand new title super quickly, but I guess most of the times you would just have to wait until I am really sure what I am writing about. If I just finished a very old game on my Super Nintendo for example, I might even review that just because I feel like it. That's how I meow!
Thanks for your understanding and continuing support and without further delay, let's have some fun (?) and jump right into
Destiny:
A BIG FIREWORK FOR NOTHING
Oh boy, was this game anticipated! Everybody was talking about it, the media was going crazy and already at the public beta (like a year ago) servers were running hot and dozens of comparison videos (Xbox 360 vs Xbox One vs PS4 graphics, and so on) flooded youtube while becoming a big part of the general XB1 vs PS4 debate.
I have played the beta... the whole weekend and I already knew back then, that contrary to my expectations, this game wasn't for me. I tried most classes and I was done with it. The game didn't feel like there was anything left to do for me after the content that was provided in the beta... and after I finally got it and started playing (about three months ago) nothing had changed.
Yes, this game's visuals are astonishingly beautiful, the regions are vast and imaginative and especially the controls feel awesome and almost exactly like the - probably - best shooting controls, taken directly from
Halo. BUT that's it! In my opinion this game respectfully fails at everything else.
The only thing I naturally have to exclude from that statement is the basic nature of this game being a massive online shooter hybrid. But I don't like massive online games. Be they massive online RPGs or this kind of "modern" shooter adaption. I usually avoid everything that says "massive online". Still, I understand some people like this, so in all fairness for those I'd have to say
Destiny might be good in that regard. Personally, I almost had to puke the first time I was teleported to the city and I saw all those other people running around behaving like idiots, doing stupid dancing memes, jumping on my back, and so on... sorry, but this just destroys any game for me completely!
Next up: looting, items, drop rates, skills and customization. - Actually something that could have kept this game going,... but I never felt particularly rewarded or in any way motivated to progress my level or get new gear. Sorry, but I think the skills across all classes and sub-classes are not that special and I would have preferred to find a hundred times more different guns and weapon classes instead.
Also the gear; from what I have seen on very high-leveled players, I didn't like any of it! In a way they all looked liked some messed-up, futuristic vampires and that's not really my taste.
Welcome to Space-WOW? And the rest of it (the items you just find easily while playing through the game without dedicated farming) just all looked like the same piece of armor with only minor adjustments.
And what are you doing in
Destiny? Well, you simply accept a mission, you travel there for like 3 minutes (loading time) you run towards your marker, which btw. is so stupidly hidden all the time that you have to constantly press a button and stop the flow to make it pop up again for a few seconds, then you get confined in a final location, you fight off big waves of again more or less randomly spawning enemies and then you travel/load back to the city. - Phew... great stuff, right? Oh, and did I mention that just after you have defeated the final wave and/or the boss, there is always a countdown that stresses you to search the area for possible drops because it strictly ports you out of the location when the countdown reaches zero? - Seriously, what is going on there?
Before I mentioned that the regions are vast... yep, that is true, but sometimes they are simply too big and it really becomes annoying to travel through them. After playing the first missions there is just nothing... not the slightest incentive to play the next one. You always do the same: Fighting of waves of enemies, filled with endless travelling, loading times and other nuisances. - For example the constant stumbling around of other players on the battle fields. Imagine walking from A to B in this game. On the sheer endless way, you fight off one of many spawning nests for enemies, then you continue. You think you have cleaned that spot, you move safely through it and you already aim at the next enemy region in front of you. Suddenly another player enters the region at A and guess what: The first nest you just cleaned becomes again populated with enemies (of course also the "new" player needs to shoot at something, right?). Well, thanks to the new player you are now trapped in the middle of two enemy nests! Bravo! Don't you also love it when enemies just spawn out of thin air all around you? I think after this example you can now very vividly understand that if this game is one thing, it most certainly is a shooting range with an infinite supply of enemies. But sorry... that just gets boring. - Especially if there is no reward or some sort of thought-through challenge involved.
Alright, enough of that. I realize the last paragraph is all about issues up for personal interpretation and I really don't want to go more into detail about the public shooting events you can join. So here's the one thing completely unrelated to whether you like shooting or not and the one thing that ultimately destroyed
Destiny for me (as well as my friends):
PURPOSE, SENSE AND STORY
- Is there any of this in
Destiny? As much as I am open to imagination,... honestly... no, I don't think so! If it was one thing I expected from this game (something no beta would reveal), it was a deep and epic story; a story that drags you along similar to
Halo; great personalities, simple yet sticking dialogues, impressive locations accompanied with some epic music and everything superbly well staged! Maybe the locations are there but in
Destiny there is absolutely no staging and everything feels as empty as the surface of the moon. - Like I said, the missions are always the same, they feel boring and if there is something that explains you why you're again supposed to fight your way through infinite enemies over and over again, it is short and useless monologues during the loading/flying times. I am really sorry to say that but this is no staging, this is less than nothing! Where are all the in-game cut scenes? Where is the dialogue? Characters giving purpose to everything? A real introduction the current level and its goals? Characters that tell the story? Characters that become more?
It is obvious to compare this game to
Halo, so just take a look at this
link (a collection of all the cut scenes from the original
Halo), or
this (collection of
Halo 4 cut scenes)!! I am really sorry but why is there no such story telling in
Destiny? Is this not possible to synch with the massive online nature of the game? Sorry... but then please don't force it into that!
Destiny has only one good cut scene and that is the intro. I know there are a few more during the game but yeah... they are simply not worth mentioning. If I assume the story of
Destiny is actually great, there is only one conclusion: The story telling is ridiculously bad and that is the biggest negative point about the game!
Hmm,
Destiny is still said to become the next big thing, isn't it? When you take a look at some official servers stats and how often this game is still played every day, maybe it is. Maybe this was really just the beginning. We will see. For now, in my opinion, this game unfortunately remains an over-polished, short and boring shooter with a good handling but filled with countless massive online zombies instead of real story, characters and purpose. I am deeply sorry but to me this game was a disappointment and I really miss the money I spent on it.
Play more! Cry more!
