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Destiny comes to us from Bungie, the development team that have brought us such titles as Marathon – and its sequel which were early first-person shooters, Myth, which is a fantasy-based combat strategy game that removed the resource gathering for tactical head on skirmishes, as well as Oni which was released on PC/Mac and PS2 prior to their most famous release, Halo, which rocketed them to fame on the original XBox. Everyone that is into gaming regardless of the platform they choose knows exactly who these guys are and their heritage.
Now Halo has been passed onto 343 Games and Bungie have headed off to do their own thing, their first game away from Microsoft is the much-hyped Destiny available on PS3, XBox360, XBox One and PS4. Today we are looking at the PS3 version of Bungie’s latest shooter, Destiny. We are currently being bombarded with live action TV adverts, website adverts and links to videos of this game everywhere so we all know it is available now!!
So without further ado as everyone will have seen the marketing, shall we begin?!
Right off the bat from the moment you start playing Destiny you will immediately see comparisons to other games in this genre. I hate comparing new titles to other games when doing a review but Destiny certainly pays homage to a few other games when it comes to first-person shooters.
For a start you do have similarities to Halo if you pick the Titan class as their armour looks very similar to Master Chief but with different colouration. It also has an old-school feel to it, limiting weapons to primary, secondary, heavy weapon and grenades. I must admit it actually reminds me a lot of id Software’s Rage in the way it plays, feels, looks and world setting.
The game itself is a MMOFPS (Massively multiplayer online first-person shooter game), a very light one at that as you can play through most missions without the aid of other players, so the social aspect of the game is limited to one central hub called The Tower where you can purchase extra weapons and armour, get bounties (more on these later) and see the usual crowds dancing and pointing at people like in most online games!
The levels themselves are split into worlds: you have the Earth, Moon, Mars & Venus and there is also The Reef which has yet to serve a purpose as such. I believe, at the time of writing this review, Bungie are getting ready to release the raids, and this will be the raid location which will be popular once you reach the end game.
Each location has various missions, kind of similar to the Borderlands franchise. However, you do not run around an open map getting said missions from an NPC or bounty board, you are strictly limited to selecting one from the map screen from the planet’s top view. Once you select a mission, your ship takes you to the location (another slight comparison to the Mass Effect series here!). You will be given a little information on why you are there as the level loads in, and once on the planet, your ghost (voiced by Peter Dinklage of Game of Thrones fame) will update you on where you need to head.
For each location and the various missions you will start in exactly the same place, your tracking-type device when you open your ghost will put a temporary marker off in the distance, giving you bearing on where you need to head. Once there, if you bring up your ghost it will briefly give you an onscreen navigation point again. You also have a radar at the top left of your screen with a white arrow round the edge for your heading so you don’t essentially need to pull up the ghost screen.
Once you have reached your destination you will enter either a rundown building, underground set of caves that will eventually house a temple, a sort of area that lost civilisations would have used, or a cave type system that has been created by the enemy. Once you reach the main mission point you will get consumed by darkness which essentially means that there is no respawn if you die past that point. And if you do die, you will be taken back to the start. However, I have found even in these situations you do get checkpoints at roughly the midway point in the mission. In there you will be tasked with in most cases scanning something, killing a specific enemy or reactivating something. While your ghost does this scanning, you usually get swarmed by wave after wave of enemies and ending once the last one has fallen instead of hold off for a set amount of time.
Go to page 2 for more thoughts on the game.
Retro at heart and lover of all things ’80s, especially the computers, the music and the awesome movies and TV shows! Crazy huge retro gaming collection spanning the ’80s and ’90s with hundreds of tapes, discs and carts for various machines on top of a 600+ strong Steam library that is ever-growing. No I am not a serial hoarder, just a dedicated retro gamer!