Plaid. Destiny 2. The Rainbow Cake Simulator

//Introducing Plaid - my attempt to review games! Feel free to comment and challenge my opinion. I`d like to start off with one of the most recent entries to the FPS world, Destiny 2.

Imagine a cake. Beautiful on the outside yet bland and tasteless on the inside. In short, that sums up my thoughts of Destiny 2. It doesn`t really try to push the limits both story and game mechanic-wise. It feels as if Bungie set out to make a game that wouldn`t fail at any cost and in doing so sacrificed any attempts to make it a classic. Anyway, let`s take a closer look.

The strongest side of Destiny 2 is its game mechanics. Solid gameplay of “shoot everybody until shiny spheres of loot appear out of their dead corpses”. Ultimate attacks are colourful, effective, and I want to say balanced, but I haven`t pvp`d that much yet to confirm it. The movement is smooth, the double jump mechanic takes time getting used to (hello, Titan level), yet no issues that would irritate me as much as to include in this review were noted.

Overall responsiveness of the game is impressive. It comes out as very polished.

The game presents the player with 3 classes that now form somewhat of a standard RPG set: the “punch things until they die” class, the “shoot things accurately from afar until they die” class, and “channel spells unto things until they die” class. Make no mistake, in Destiny all 3 classes will have to shoot and shooting will be preferable in most situations, however play styles will differ. These classes then have 3 subclasses depending on how you prefer to murder things. And each of the subclasses then has two sub-subclasses that dictate how some of the abilities will be carried out. Don`t worry about spending points on an ability you wouldn`t use since there is enough points to unlock everything as soon as you reach level 20, the cap for the game.

As such games go gear has different abilities and perks, but I’ve found myself looking at the big number called “Power Level” and nothing else as opposed to other stats. Weapons are divided into three categories for reasons unknown to me. I tend to switch between the white and the green weapon groups leaving the purple (called Power weapons) out most of the time. This was primarily because these had a very small ammo capacity in them and the ammo was hard to come across in game.

Now as per the game itself it has an introductory roughly 8-hour long campaign that is supposed to introduce the player to the world and its characters. I say “supposed to” since is quite hard to say whether it`s the campaign is doing a bad job or the world of Destiny is as shallow as a big videogame publisher`s (*cough* EA *cough*) love for the gaming community. A generic space-ork race attacks the generic good guy city and cuts the good guys off the righteous juice (in this iteration it`s a giant floating sphere) attempting to claim it for themselves. Your character finds a way to restore the juice and go on a murderous rampage in some parts of the solar system only to be back just in the nick of time and tear the space-ork leader a new one, thus restoring balance, teaching valuable lessons to main NPCs, and so on. It wouldn`t be such a generic drag if the NPCs had any character in them. Instead you`re stuck with a righteous person of colour (blue in this case) that doesn`t understand jokes, a feisty cleric-lady that only talks about her connection to the Light™ and a comic relief character that gets into trouble, makes one-liners that can`t even reach the level of Duke Nukem Forever, and throws a homebrand analogue of dadjokes around. The final nail on the coffin of relating to characters is the protagonist. In cutscenes your character is presented as a mute that has no idea of what is going on or recollection of how he or she got there in the first place. All the talking is done by your ghost, a small spouse-like robot that gives you instructions and communicates with the rest of the world for you. Hence, if you`re after an atmosphere, a good story, or a character to relate to, don`t worry: there`s none.

Endgame, however, is where the good part of Destiny 2 lies. As soon as you stop searching for meaning or engagement you`ll find that the game will offer you quests, raids, and pvp content that is light on meaning, but otherwise quite fun. For most of the activities I recommend having friends or at least making contact with other players. It can also be rewarding to just wander around the map as you can locate lost sectors with loot cases that contain gear, the true end-goal substitute of this game (which is probably not a surprise to anybody).

Beautiful landscapes and polished mechanics sadly cannot make up for lack of atmosphere.

So, in conclusion, this game is a fairly solid experience if you`re looking for a pretty shooter involving multiple landscapes, wandering for the sake of it, and shooting mobs in the face (or what the substitute for that is) just because they`re the bad guys. On the other hand, this game gives no new feelings and no innovation whatsoever.

I rate it 6 out of 10, decent, yet lacking a soul to it.