Destiny (2014): The Review

Overview

At its core, Destiny is a mechanically sharp, visually striking FPS wrapped inside an undercooked RPG shell. The endgame can absolutely sink its hooks into you once everything clicks, but in the end, Destiny struggles with one key issue: it wants to be too many different games at once, and never fully commits to any single one.

Score: 7.5 out of 10

The Positives ✅

Within the first few hours, it becomes painfully obvious that Destiny wants everyone to love it. It pulls inspiration from shooters, RPGs, MMOs, and open-world games, stitching them together into a single experience that changes depending on which thread you pull the hardest. At its best, that ambition pays off. The moment-to-moment gunplay is phenomenal, and the worlds you’re fighting in are genuinely stunning. Even when the bigger picture starts to wobble, the sheer quality of the combat does a lot of heavy lifting.

Bungie’s strength has always been world-building, and Destiny wears that pedigree proudly. Waking up beneath the towering wall of Old Russia instantly sells the scale of the universe, blending static vistas with vast, vertical spaces that feel enormous even when they’re not fully explorable. Each of the four planets is large enough to get properly lost in, and even blasting across them on your Sparrow, which handles exactly like the speeder bike your childhood imagination always wanted, takes real time. The environments are dense with caves, ruins, temples, and winding paths that give every location a strong sense of identity.

The craftsmanship is exceptional, even on last-gen hardware. Rock faces feel carved rather than stamped, roads look physically worn into the terrain, and little details, like gas bubbling through Venus’s glowing pools, quietly reinforce the illusion that this is a real place. The music elevates everything, seamlessly shifting between bombastic during firefights and hauntingly mysterious during exploration. Even the long loading screens between planets are turned into a stylistic flex, doubling down on the idea that this universe is vast, connected, and worth caring about.

Combat, though, is Destiny’s true triumph. It takes Halo’s tactical DNA and injects it with speed, mobility, and flexibility. Sprinting, sliding, gliding, double jumps, and teleportation combine with powerful grenades and melee abilities to give fights a thrilling sense of flow. The level design supports this beautifully, offering smartly placed cover and verticality that encourage creative approaches. Enemies are varied and aggressive, from flanking Fallen to teleporting Vex, and most encounters feel fresh thanks to how many different problems the game throws at you.

The Negatives ⚠️

Unfortunately, Destiny struggles mightily when it comes to telling a story. Cutscenes are rare, exposition is vague, and narrative motivation often feels like an afterthought. Even with talented voice actors delivering the lines, the plot rarely gives you a strong emotional reason to push forward. The irony is that the combat is so good that you’ll keep playing anyway, just not because you’re invested in what’s actually happening.

Outside of combat, Destiny starts to show cracks. Despite presenting itself as something more than a shooter, its RPG systems feel undercooked. Classes exist, but they don’t meaningfully change how you play. Hunters, Warlocks, and Titans all boil down to “shoot things and don’t die,” just with slightly different flavors. Weapons aren’t class-restricted, armor differences are mostly cosmetic until very late, and none of the classes feel indispensable in a group.

As a result, co-op often feels like casually shooting enemies alongside friends rather than coordinating as a specialized team. Strikes are fun, but there’s little sense of synergy or strategy beyond basic cooperation. Compared to games like Borderlands 2, Destiny’s class identity feels disappointingly shallow.

The loot system eventually shines, but it takes its sweet time getting there. Early drop rates are stingy, and gear lacks interesting stats until well into the campaign. Once legendary and exotic gear enters the picture, things improve dramatically, with mods and upgrade trees that meaningfully affect how weapons behave. The problem is that the game does a terrible job explaining how to actually access this endgame content. Factions, currencies, bounties, and progression systems are poorly communicated, leaving players to either stumble into them by accident or consult external guides.

Multiplayer fares no better. The Crucible benefits from Bungie’s excellent map design, but it lacks features that competitive players expect, like private matches or meaningful customization. Meanwhile, Destiny’s “shared-world shooter” label feels misleading when communication is so limited. No loot trading, no meaningful interaction with players outside your party, and no matchmaking for raids or Heroic Strikes creates unnecessary friction.

The Experience 🎮

On a personal level, I never got tired of Destiny’s combat, and that’s saying something, considering fighting is basically the only way you meaningfully interact with its world. Every firefight felt satisfying, every ability impactful, and every encounter gave me enough freedom to approach it my own way. That alone kept me playing far longer than the story ever did.

Playing mostly solo, I actually appreciated the strange sense of isolation. Exploring these massive spaces alone made the universe feel quieter and more mysterious, even if it clashed with the game’s always-online nature. But once I hit the endgame, that solitude became a problem. Raids like Vault of Glass are genuinely exciting and well-designed, but without matchmaking, participating in them meant hunting for groups online, a jarring shift for a game that otherwise bends over backwards to be accessible.

Destiny left me conflicted. I admired its ambition, loved its combat, and was constantly impressed by its world design, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that it never fully committed to any one identity. It wants to be an FPS, an RPG, an MMO, and a social game all at once, and in trying to satisfy everyone, it ends up holding itself back.

The question I kept coming back to was simple: Why does this game demand an internet connection while doing so much to keep players at arm’s length? Destiny is at its best when you’re pulling the trigger, not when it asks you to navigate its systems. And while that’s enough to keep it fun, it stops it just short of being truly great.