Destiny has taken some time for me to review because of the duality of my experience. On the one hand it has a disjointed story and a hollow single player experience. On the other hand I have spent well over 50 hours captivated by the incredible art design, music, atmosphere, and loot grinding, and I still want to play.
Your guardian starts as one of three classes with a designated subclass that can be changed to an additional unlocked subclass. The classes and subclasses shape your speed, defense, and special attack, but all ranged weapons will be available to all classes and work essentially the same. Leveling happens fairly quickly up to level 20, where experience levels give way to light levels, up to 30. The extended levels are determined by the amount of light affixed to each piece of equipped armor. Weapons in the game only seemed to have a meaningful difference up to about level 18. At this point rare weapons become frequent in drops and weapon abilities level out. The auto rifle becomes the obvious choice at this point because of its sustained fire while having the similar power and distance to the scout rifle. Loot drops themselves are relatively rare, and at the extended level, almost none of them will improve or diversify your equipment set. There seems to be an extremely shallow pool of equipment and you will see the same items dropped repeatedly.
Armor and weapons can be purchased from a generic set of vendors who provide sub-standard fare. You can also purchase legendary equipment, that you will need later in the game, but you must join a faction to use their vendor. Several are available, but the wares they offer are not significantly different. The factions offer no more backstory or depth, and the grind necessary to achieve faction levels to purchase items is excruciating. A large portion of equip slots are reserved for vanity items that have an exceedingly high cost. You will trade hours of your life for the ability to color your armor with no extra benefit. This seems like a spot where Bungie missed an opportunity to really diversify player skills or bonuses.
Gameplay will generally start with the campaign and can be easily accomplished by a single player. It starts on earth and progresses through three separate planets and the Moon. Each consists of a large map broken up into several zones. There are around five missions available on each map, and although they mostly occur in separate zones, you will backtrack often and repeatedly see the same areas. Although the art and music are amazing, after seeing the same scenery over and over again it does get tiring. The story itself is vague and short, it is possible to complete the single player portion at around 12 hours. Your ghost, voiced by Peter Dinklage, delivers story dialog that makes it sound as if he is also completely uninterested. Occasionally there is a small cut scene, but those too, offer nothing to further the plot or deepen the backstory. During this time you will be earning grimoire cards through game play but ultimately they end up being shallow as well, while also ripping you from your game emersion to log into your computer or phone and look them up. Then the story abruptly ends with no fanfare, conclusion, or explanation.
As you progress in the story missions several multiplayer modes become available: strike, crucible, raids, and special daily and night missions. Strike missions are the easiest to jump into and they allow for matchmaking, meaning you will not need to wait for your friends to get online. Strike missions are basically standard missions with more enemies, more loot drops, a boss, and a random chance of prize loot at the end. The number of strike missions is limited though and you will quickly find yourself playing the same missions over and over. In particular, the Winter’s Run mission appeared nearly 3 out of every four times a mission was selected at random.
The crucible consists of the standard PvP fare: death match, team death match, and control type games. The rewards for crucible matches are probably the best since you can finish them relatively fast and the random ending loot drop can be rare or legendary even if you are the worst player on the board. I found the matches to get dull after a shot time though because almost everyone you meet here will be carrying a shotgun and fusion rifle, using the same technique; close-in one shot kills while waiting for their special to charge so they can run into a room and one-hit multiple opponents.
Overall Destiny feels like an amazing incomplete framework that did not have the time to be filled in. The shooting and movement are tight and responsive. The AI is generally smart and responsive, using good cover when appropriate. The art design and sound are some of the best around. Leveling never truly makes you too dominate to be killed, which helps making runs on lower levels more interesting. But there are still too many misses; the poor story, uninterested dialog, and shallow loot pool. There is no opt-in for group chat or proximity chat making the entire experience very quiet. The biggest miss though is not having matchmaking on every mission type. I could not help but feel Bungie is subtly asking for players who do not organize fire teams to leave the game. Nearly one third of the game, including the raids which should be the showcase, seems to be locked away from a large portion of the audience; an audience that Bungie wants to hang around for ten more years.