Within hours, l could tell that Destiny wants desperately to be loved by many different types of players. It attempts to weave threads from many popular genres together into one interconnected tapestry, but your experience will depend entirely upon which of those threads you tug on hardest.

At the very least, it provides blistering firefights and brilliantly crafted worlds to have them in. In fact, the exceptional caliber of its moment-to-moment gameplay is what partially excuses the fact that it never quite realizes its grand design. For as fun as it is, Destiny just doesn't fully commit to all of its disparate parts, making it simultaneously many different things, and none of them at all.

Bungie has a history of excellent world-building, and Destiny is a powerful expression of that excellence. From the moment your AI companion wakes you from your long slumber in the shadow of the colossal wall around Old Russia, the world of Destiny feels grand. Picturesque, static backdrops are slyly blended with wide-open spaces and large vertical terrain features, creating an effective illusion of scale. The many stunning vistas go a long way towards making Destiny's world feel like one that's worth saving, despite the fact that you can’t fully explore everything you see.

Even if it isn't as wide-open as it initially appears, each of Destiny's Five main planets are more than big enough to get lost in. Even atop your speedy, instantly summonable Sparrow bike, which gleefully handles a lot like what I always imagined a Star Wars speeder bike might, getting from one end of a planet to the other takes a while. Factor in all the caves, temples, and other structures housed within, and there's a ton of ground to cover. Perhaps not as much as an open-world RPG or an MMO, but then, despite its similarities, Destiny isn't either of those things – and its overall topography has more character than most games of those types anyway.

Even on last-gen hardware, the craft on display throughout Destiny's alien landscapes is masterful in its detail. Every rock face, outpost, and ruin looks lovingly hand-crafted, aside from a few repeating nooks and crannies. Even if I didn't always stop to gawk at how roads look physically carved into the terrain, or how gas bubbles to the surface of the iridescent water pools on Venus, these details silently pulled me in and constantly reinforced the idea that that this is an actual place – a special place.

Consistently excellent music magnifies that sensation, deftly driving the action forward during big firefights, and conveying a sense of wonder and mystery in between them. Even the somewhat over-indulgent load screen animations between worlds are eye-catching. Bungie made lemonade out of lemons here. Going from one planet to the other takes way too long, but it’s wisely used as an opportunity to double down on the idea that all these places are connected.

Sadly, none of that keeps Destiny from becoming the latest example of the friction between open-world design, and tightly directed narrative. Cutscenes are kept to a bare minimum, limiting the story to vague exposition dumps before and after missions. It's not a new, or effective way to unintrusively tell a story though, regardless of how many Emmy Award-nominated actors you have reciting the lines. It says a lot about the quality of Destiny's combat that I gladly continued to move and shoot, despite it never really giving me an emotional incentive to do so.

The Art of War

Destiny retains the fluid, tactical feel of the Halo series, but with an increased sense of speed and mobility that make its firefights feel more dynamic than those of its direct FPS ancestor. That’s partly due to the ability to sprint and slide in addition to each class' mobility skills, which include gliding, double jumping, and even short-range teleportation. Combined with how powerful grenades and melee attacks feel, thanks again to class skills that modify them, this extra mobility allows you to engage foes in a wider variety of ways.

Destiny's intelligently designed combat areas provide excellent opportunities to leverage those options. It’s an impressive design feat when you consider how organically these areas blend with the open spaces that tie them together. I could, for instance, toss out a big vortex grenade to control space and force my enemies to back up behind cover, then sprint towards them, glide clear over their cover to greet them with a shotgun blast, and then catapult up to safety on a ledge above. Cover is smartly placed, and there’s enough horizontal and vertical space to allow for a variety of approaches, even in the most straightforward combat scenarios.

You'll face many different races over the course of your journey, and their armies are each diverse and interesting. The cunning, multi-armed Fallen make excellent use of cover, will actively flank your position, and even attempt to lure you into ambushes. Other foes, like the robotic Vex, can teleport directly into combat out of nowhere, and still others have jump packs, cloaking devices, or massive riot shields to aid their advances. The range of different problems they can give you to solve is downright impressive, which keeps the combat fresh, and exciting throughout.

That is, with the exception of some of the bosses, who are mostly just super-sized versions of existing enemies with a lot more hit points. The two or three bosses that don’t fit that description, like the imposing spider tank, require more from you - you’ll have to find weak spots and coordinate with teammates to to stay alive, which resulted in more than one exciting “we did it!” moment.

On the whole, the combat is so well executed that I never once tired of fighting in the multitude of hours I’ve played so far. That says a lot considering that fighting is, disappointingly, the only way you can meaningfully interact with the beautiful world around you.

A Class By Any Other Name…
Outside of combat, Destiny postures itself as far more than a simple FPS, but while its various RPG elements add some extra layers on top of its well-done combat, they don't feel fully explored or fleshed out. Part of that is because of what a poor job Destiny does of educating us about all of its moving parts, but it's also because it’s so hell-bent on being all things to all people that it unsurprisingly drops the ball in places.

Destiny's class and skill systems are the biggest victims of this. The Hunter, Warlock, and Titan all do the same things (stay alive and kill stuff), just in different ways. Everybody can use every weapon type with equal proficiency, and until you get to the very highest levels of endgame gear.

The RPG element that succeeds the most is the loot game. It doesn’t overwhelm with any sort of statistical complexity, but rather engages by presenting clear, meaningful choices. It gets off to a slow start though. Eventually though, weapons and armor start dropping with interesting mods, and entire upgrade trees that allow you to tailor their feel and performance in interesting ways.

From weapons that reload faster when their clip is completely empty, to ones that speed up your ability cooldowns when you score kills with them,