What a lauded project. This thing has had the advertising strength of a three separate locomotives pulling it along. At this point one could argue the PR cycle was approaching the speed of light. No game could ever live up to the amount of hype behind Destiny. Coming at this with those lofty expectations in mind you will only find your self brutally disappointed. But even without those expectations you would find something wanting about the whole thing.

For a game that was trotted about as something huge and expansive I can’t help but feel underwhelmed by what was delivered. The only thing grand about the scope of Destiny is the space between things. Yes, you travel to different celestial bodies across vast distances of space, which you can tell is vast because it takes so long to load, but the areas on these spheres feels constrained. Even when traveling outside, your progress feels like traversing hallways. Hallways that branch into more hallways or dump into arenas for shootouts. It feels myopic and sterile. Exploration is rarely rewarded, traversing off your current path usually only brings you to the cold dark interiors of an empty monster closet. There are chests sprinkled about the landscape but I have yet to open one with a significant reward. So exploring ends up feeling like an exercise in futility, that terminates in such insubstantial ways that it begins to feel like more of a punishment. It boggles my mind that they spent so much time making something look, at a surface level, vast but then lack the followthrough to make it actually feel, or be, vast. It eventually devolved into the point where I only bothered to follow my current quest objective and ignored any small caves or branching hallways.

It pained me to do so though. There is significant, and very well executed, craft here. It’s obvious that Bungie is a group of extremely talented people. Everything looks great, the lighting is spectacular, the art design of the landscapes is incredible. I rarely ever stop to take screenshots of environments but I have done so on many occasions here. When I’m not exploring I feel like I could be missing some other well crafted piece of design somewhere but looking at pretty things can only take you so far in a game this is all about shooting the bad guys.

That, at least, feels great. It is the single biggest saving grace of the entire game. Which is fitting considering the medium. The part you play is the best part of the game and that goes a long way. There are only a few weapon types but they all feel very distinct and certainly enhance specific play styles. I have a particular affection for the fusion rifles, the tension of charging those up for a well placed blast is delicious and well worth the effort of timing your shots correctly. This is a pretty obvious thing for Bungie to get right, they have been making shooters for a very long time. As such the action certainly carries me through the game. Once I stopped trying to investigate every nook and cranny of the maps, and just focused on getting to the next battle, I was enjoying myself a lot more.

The story is unfortunately cheesy, when it’s not sending your brain into selective bouts of amnesia, and just feels lifeless. There is a recurring theme in the naming structor of the enemies that pulls from fantasy. Things are called wizards, goblins, or ogres and it just feels silly in this hard sci-fi setting. With some of the enemies the names kind of make sense, the ogre is a huge bruiser, but most of the time it looks like they slapped the name on there for no reason other then they started doing it that way, and were too far gone to bother thinking why, and lack any traces of the fantasy creatures they are invoking. There was a promising structure here from the early looks we got years ago. The concept of the traveler was interesting to me at first but it has just turned into set dressing in the story so far.

Destiny feels like a series of baby steps. Like timid advancements on some very large concepts. Maybe Bungie bit off more then they could chew, their ideas too grandiose for this initial outing. The result is something that sounds amazing from a distance but isn’t as substantial up close. It casts a veneer of disappointment on something that may not deserve it. As it stands, Destiny is a master class in over promising and under delivering. Even though the end product, if it could be experienced in a vacuum, is well crafted and ultimately fun to play if not a little vapid.