Destiny (alpha release): First Play

I am your Destiny

If you’re a fan of co-op shooters such as Borderlands or massively multiplayer adventures like World Of Warcraft, you’ll be right at home in Destiny.

The game cherry-picks the best features from these modern multiplayers and works them into an otherwise fairly familiar Halo-like shooter. Destiny is set 700 years in the future, after man has colonised space and started a war with multiple alien races. You are recruited by ‘the Traveller’; a mysterious white, spherical entity who commands you to investigate and destroy these threats before humanity is eradicated.

Your first task upon booting up is to choose your class, picking between Titan, Hunter and Warlock. Broadly speaking, these are Destiny‘s versions of the standard soldier, stealth and mage classes, and each has a different mix of abilities. Our Titan, for example, could smash the ground and dissolve enemies in a bombastic special move. We teamed up with a Hunter, whose special ability was a flaming pistol that would disintegrate enemies with its solar light. Each of these abilities had to recharge, which took time, so they could be used only fleetingly in combat.

After choosing a class, another MMO-style feature presented itself – the character-creation screen. Bungie’s offering has the same options as most games we’ve seen: customisable genders, races, faces etc. The difference here is in the exquisite details and animations: Destiny‘s characters look absolutely stunning.

Into the Breach

Once you’ve created a character, you’re immediately thrown into a tutorial mission. This takes place in Old Russia – a beautiful but decrepit snowy wasteland with gorgeous features such as abandoned space shuttles, rusting industrial complexes and Northern lights punctuating the background.

The game quickly tells you to press the DualShock 4’s touch pad to bring up the Traveller – the small orb that’s recruited you to save the universe. On the most basic level, the Traveller silently points to your objective, but it also vocalises the game’s back story in actor Peter ‘Tyrion Lannister’ Dinklage’s familiar tones.

The Traveller informs you that you’re in Russia to find out what The Fallen (a mysterious alien race) are protecting – thankfully, it’s only a matter of seconds before you come across one of them in the flesh. When you lock them in your sights, vital information immediately appears onscreen: a number denoting their class (in this case a “2”), the name of the unit, and a health bar.

Doing what comes naturally in a first-person shooter, we begin to fire at the enemy drone with our shotgun – the first shot takes off 75% of its health, the second finishes it off. The brief battle startles another couple of Fallen units, but rather than come straight at us, they demonstrate Bungie’s famously high level of artificial intelligence by ducking behind the nearest cover and seemingly communicating with each other before launching a coordinated attack. Fortunately, we’ve switched to the plasma rifle by this point, enabling us to dispatch them fairly easily and pick up one of the game’s collectable ‘Grimoire’ cards.

Suddenly, a massive Fallen ship descends from the sky and fires powerful plasma rounds at us, depleting our rechargeable shield and sending us scuttling off to find cover.

READ MORE: Forza Horizon 2: First Play

You Say Halo, I Say Destiny

While Destiny is the result of Bungie attempting to break away from its Halo roots, the DNA of the famous Xbox shooter is undoubtedly present, particularly when it comes to its gunplay. In fact, if a layman played the game without knowing anything about it, they’d probably think it was a Halo sequel of some description.

On a basic level, the shotgun boasts many of the same qualities as the Halo equivalent – the same distinctive circular aiming reticule, the wide spread and the slow reload speed. The melee strikes, mapped to the R1 button on PS4, feel powerful and fun to land. There’s a shield that recharges whenever you’re not getting hit. These are all features reminiscent of the Halo games that Bungie produced, and which defined Xbox consoles more than any other series.

Not everything is Halo-inspired though: Bungie has definitely learned a lot from role-playing games too. When you shoot at and hit enemies, numbers denoting the health damage pour out of them like lost blood. Ammunition is relatively sparse, so you have to scavenge around for loot (although far less so than in something like Borderlands 2). You can spawn a vehicle when you’re out in the open to travel around quickly. And there’s a levelling system that sees you unlocking new weapons, abilities and power-ups.

These are all features that have appeared in other games before, but like Bruce Lee taking various types of martial arts and only keeping the stuff that worked, Bungie has pilfered the best gaming ideas from the last 10 years and applied them to their excellent shooting mechanics.

Fireteam Bravo

Continuing with the alpha, we decide to engage a few more enemies, this time of a higher Level 5 rating.

As we approach our objective, we come across another player attempting the same mission. It is perfect timing – the next enemy we meet is a large Fallen Captain equipped with a shield. He would have been quite a challenge to take on alone, but he’s no match for two people working together.

Things seem to be going well – we work together for a while without having to communicate verbally, and within the first 10 minutes of hooking up, we’ve killed enough Fallen to reach Level 4. That all changes when we encounter a new enemy called The Hive, which is very reminiscent of Halo‘s infamous Flood enemies in that there are loads of them and they come at you fast.

While we don’t die during this encounter, we do spend a lot of time running away and taking cover so that our shield can recharge slowly.

Tower Records

Tutorial Mission survived intact, it’s time to check out the next part of Destiny’s alpha: the Tower.

The Tower is The Last City of Earth, and in the game it acts as a social hub where you can meet people, take on bounties, buy weapons, upgrade your ship, and much more. As it’s a non-conflict zone, the camera shifts into a third-person perspective. The main objective on the first visit is to talk to Commander Zavala and collect your payment for completing the tutorial mission, which then allows you to buy new weapons and vehicles. It’s here that the game feels most like a traditional MMO in terms of taking on quests and collecting rewards, although in terms of presentation, The Tower has more in common with Mass Effect‘s Citadel.

It’s here that we met up with our first proper human ally, a fellow journalist who has also gotten access to the alpha. Destiny’s term for partying up is to create what’s known as a ‘Fireteam’, which keeps you and your teammates together when you go out on missions. As the leader of our Fireteam, our ally is forced to join us whenever we leave one location and head to another. After performing some highly amusing gestures (to us at least) including waving, sitting on the ground and dancing crazily, we head out on to the next mission.

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