First Look: Destiny

In the far future, mankind has ventured forth from the confines of its celestial home. We’ve made our mark on the Moon, Mars, Venus and even farther, but our golden age abruptly comes to an end when a cataclysmic event decimates our species. Luckily for mankind, a mysterious white orb known as The Traveler saves us from annihilation and hangs over the last human city – silently watching, waiting, and keeping us safe.

Destiny, made by the creators of Halo, is set to bring the world of the MMO to the console masses in a way like never before. Whilst we’ve seen trailers and plenty of concept art, Bungie recently gave PlayStation 4 users the chance to test out an early build of the game for a weekend – and boy is it good. When you get to the character creation menu you’ll get a choice of three classes: Titans, your typical assault style character with strong armour and offensive abilities, Hunters, a scout type class who stalks and kills their enemy with speed and Warlocks, essentially space wizards who throw bolts of energy from their hands. Once you’ve made your choice you’ll go through a pretty normal process and choose your race/gender, face, hair and facial markings.

Destiny's alpha showed off three different types of gameplay; the first being a story mission that drops you into one of Destiny’s large maps with a prettystraightforward mission to carry out. We found ourselves exploring a derelict cosmodrome, which turned out to be a lot less derelict than we first thought... The visuals in Destiny are wonderful, even in the Alpha everything looked crisp but appropriately ravaged by time. The sound work is also something to behold - with a fairly decent pair of 5.1 headphones we were able to hear the hum of generators, pipes creaking and as we descended deeper into the bowls of the complex, noiseswhich eluded to an enemy biding its time within. Lighting wise the game also excels, married with the aforementioned sound work, the game literally had us jumping at shadows.

The free-roaming side of things once again drops you into an expansive level but instead of being given a singular main mission to complete you’re free to explore the area and pick up lots of little side quests. A lot of these were variations on go there and kill that but as you explore the game world you’ll see other players doing their own thing in the distance. Occasionally a public event might take place where a huge enemy is dropped in and you have to work together with other players to take it down. All of this happens in real time, there’s no matchmaking or waiting in lobbies – people simply drop in and out of the game. There were many times where things were looking pretty desperate and then all of a sudden a knight in shining armour (literally) mantled over a hill and helped snatch us from the jaws of death.

Strikes were the third mission type and very akin to a traditional MMO raid – it’s where a group of players come together to push through increasingly hard waves of enemies until you reach a boss at the end that requires some serious cooperation to take down. These were fantastic in Destiny and truly challenging – you’ll find you and your teammates going down pretty frequently and having to make the mad dash to revive your comrades. Taking over an hour and resulting in some frantic gameplay, these are going to be experiences you’ll want to have again and again.

Enemy wise, you can definitely see Bungie’s heritage coming through, for example, the Fallen Dregs are a sprightlier version of Halo’s Grunts and the Fallen Captains are reminiscent of Covenant Elites. As you’d expect, Destiny’s gunplay is absolutely fantastic - it’s snappy, engaging and you feel deadly. Speaking of guns, MMOs are famous for loot and Destiny has plenty of it. Whether you’re picking it up from enemies, finding it in chests or relieving dead bosses of their spoils, there’s an incredible amount of things to find. Bungie have openly said that they want you to show off your shiny new gun or awesome new helmet with pride – you’ll end up telling stories about how you vanquished (x) or rescued (y) in order to obtain them.

The idea of showing off neatly segues into the social aspect of Destiny; there’s a social hub called The Tower, it’s where all the Guardians hang out, when they’re not saving the Earth, of course. You’ll meet up with your friends, purchase new weapon and armour, upgrade your spaceship, send messages etc. It’s a really cool area andgreat to see people showing off all of their high level equipment.

There’s not just cooperative gameplay either, Destiny features a mode called the Crucible where you’ll hone your competitive skills against other Guardians. You’l take your fully customised character into this mode with all your flash looking armour and tricked out weaponry – the interesting thing is that any experience you earn here will transfer back into your single player campaign and visa-versa. Those who loved Halo’s multiplayer will feel right at home in the Crucible as the way you move and the number of shots it requires to take someone down is pretty comparable – the biggest change is how ready you have to be to take on opponents from above as Destiny seems to have more vertical gameplay.

All in all, the Destiny Alpha test didn’t just whet our appetite; it has us salivating for more. Whether it’s the excitement of not knowing what rare piece of armour or legendary gun is just around the corner, or wondering where that ominous looking dark tunnel will take you, September can literally not come quick enough. Destiny is undoubtedly one of the hottest titles coming to consoles this year.