Alright. Destiny... Can you ever review such a large and expansive game? I mean, the DLC that is coming out, and the weekly events... The answer is: Yes. Quite easily. So here goes: What Destiny got right: The gun play is tight. My guardian does what I want him to 99% of the time. The only time I get frustrated is backpedaling and getting stuck on a random outcropping in the wall or door frame and then dead. But that's technically my fault. Most of my kills and deaths were not rages, but I knew what I did wrong, or knew I was caught out of position, or knew I was properly swarmed or flanked. A great feeling from other games that are just *BAMDEAD* "what... what just happened???" Unfortunately this is where this category ends... Time to move onto what destiny didn't realize properly. Team of 3: Probably the most frustrating mechanic right here. If you have the capacity for fire teams up to 6 people, why did you cap at 3!? Playing with more friends is more fun! I can't count how many times we have had to play with 2 groups of 2 just so someone wasn't left out. Why couldn't we do crazy things like play on the same "shard" as our buddies so on the "open" parts of missions we could see each other and help one another out? It could have been epic! But no. If they aren't in your team, you won't see them. Whatever. No trading: Was easily the thing that could have redeemed the crappy RNG of Destiny. At the time of writing, I have purchased all my Titan's gear. And I have a hunter friend struggling to get his light level up so we can play the vault. Doesn't play as often, but still a great friend to play with. I have a legendary item for every slot for a hunter minus the foot slot. And I have legendary feet for a warlock. Trading could easily have fixed this. Even if there is bind on equip, or bind within 20 mins of holding it like most games, that would have been fine. Good luck finding someone to buy your legs from you in real world with a 20 min timer. Not investing in a trading system was a mistake made out of laziness, and a missed chance. Story: Probably the most frustrating part of the story was KNOWING there was one! Why am I always running off alone? Why am I going to these planets we abandoned?! If the guardians were real I'd get my ass chewed out for starting a war on another front they weren't prepared to support. But we just go and run off and do that on THREE SEPARATE PLANETS! It is even referenced in one of the strikes on mars "whether we wanted a war with the cabal or not, now we have one." For a ragtag group of survivors this would almost be tantamount to tactical suicide! Or am I mistaken and suddenly we aren't fighting for survival, its just that nobody bothered to say so? I was waiting for Bungie to pull the stopper and have the tower attacked. How epic that could have been, seeing the gunsmith laying the smack down like a boss... I mean the only times destiny made me go "oh wow... epic!" was when we raised some satellite dish that pissed the hive off... For apparently no gain as we never hear of that AI again, or even know its significance. "Don't ask questions, just go and do what you are told" was the general feel of the game. I'm embarking alone, and breaking most of the rules... But I'm still following orders. Right. A choice or two could have made all the difference in the story as well. But that time has come and gone, destiny is a linear experience, don't question it. Speaking of linear... The level design. Every level will happen the exact. same. way. Enemies will always spawn in the same spot, walk to the same spot, and shoot from the same spot. Doing missions over and over made this glaring "feature" evident and I found myself walking to the most advantageous spot to spawn kill the best. Or in a room that has enemies spawned, after my first encounter there, I knew how to approach it. Kill these guys, move there, kill those guys, rinse and repeat until cleansed. Yay. And the defend missions that aren't even a defend mission! Nobody ever shoots at your ghost stopping his progress. Not once. It is more a "survive 2-3 waves" than a defend mission. Just ONCE I wanted the door to open and another massive wave to spawn forcing me to advance through the doors to have the ghost slam them shut saving my rear end... *sigh* And who decided a game "best played with 2 friends" would be great to have a solo cinematic story? The most lazy writing I have ever seen! Content: Give or take 20 missions, 6 strikes, and 1 raid. Are you kidding me? For $70?! I mean early days on the PS3 or 360 this would be impressive. The last halo game had 8 UNIQUE missions with crap tonnes of Spartan Ops that re-hashed old levels and new levels. Destiny has 4 planets rehashed over and over again, which is made worse when you expect us to grind the same content over and over again. Controversy of the "DLC on disk" content aside, IF and only IF you had that DLC content free and on the disk I could consider the game fully fleshed out, weak as the story is. But you want me to drop $100 for the full experience? That is extremely weak. And the strikes. Why in the world were these done like this?! It doesn't take much to program 3 different versions of each encounter so you can go "oh crap, instead of normal enemies it's just a wave of sword wielding maniacs!!!" Nope. Same as always, rinse and repeat until dead inside. I have completed 76 strikes so far. That is enough strikes to go through the same content more than 10 times EACH. I play through most campaign games twice, once on hard, next on the hardest. Destiny is grinding on normal over and over and maybe you will get something. (spoiler: you won't.) Oh but for completing that lvl 24 strike here is some lvl 16 arms. Because you know. Reasons. Seriously??? Loot for the sake of loot is INFURIATING! If you aren't going to give me something to may or may not help me, don't give me anything at all. What an excuse for a loot system, RNG is frustrating enough, but ensuring crap is the worst kind of reward when boss' aren't even given a loot table. Did anyone ACTUALLY playtest these? Or are we playtesting your game for you? Loot! Okay, so here someone had a great idea that a RNG system would work the best instead of actual thoughtful progression and tables. Again, because of 'reasons'. My Titan has PURCHASED all of my legenday and exotic gear. Because RNG was so bad that the only gear I got was for other classes. What a croc. "We want someone to ask where did you get that sniper? Or that AR? And you can say you spent all night and beat so and so and got this sweet gear! And when you see someone else with it, you will know EXACTLY what they went through to get it!" Yea, and here is my epic story: I walked up to a guy and bought it. With blood from my grinding. Epic story bro. "The game opens up at level 20" No, the game asks you to grind till you bleed and keep going. Because something may happen sometime sooner. Or later. Probably later. Even your update acknowledged your stance on this. "Because we all knew they were blues anyway" when referencing legendary engrams. RNG was SO rampant throughout the "level 20+ endgame that totally redeems the game and makes it a whole new experience!" That I have decided to add RNG to my review score. More on that at the end. Weapon Balance: kind of like your story, there is none. Yea, it works fine in games like Diablo where PVP isn't a prominent point but you encourage it to the point of requiring it for some aspects of the game, and then you fail to balance it in the slightest. Most games make the mistake of making specialized weapons OP. But screw it, let's make AR's that are more accurate than sniper rifles. For *laughs* reasons. I'm laughing and maybe even crying a little because its so bad it almost seems on purpose. And I find myself repeating myself over and over. Just like every other portion of the game where you feel short... There is hope! It doesn't take much to sit down and balance things! It just takes effort! Why has nobody sat down and tested the time to kill with body shots and head shots on each weapon and curved them for PVP properly? I'm not saying every gun needs to be a clone, but when an AR outshines the scout rifle at long range, you know there was no effort made. "New content" In the form of doing your old missions with new modifiers. I won't lie, this was fun for a day or so. Till the rewards were completely stripped because of abuse. Always a knee-jerk reaction. Someone exploited it, so everyone gets punished. How about fixing the system instead of hating the player? If you are going to reward people for playing multiple characters, why punish them? Why cap resources to a weekly timer when you let people do it on each character and POOL RESOURCES. All you did was change the colour of the gear I'm grinding on and said game on! First to bleed gets a blue... erm... "legendary" engram! Lastly... The classes. No balance, no synergy, no story, and no effort. The abilities are uninspiring and every character can do everything. It would have been nice if each character could do something different with the weapons. Hunters could use snipers as a secondary, everyone else as a heavy. Titans could swap out a weapon slot for an elemental shield. Warlocks could use space magic to generate ammo for friendlies, white at 1 min cooldown, green at 5, and heavy at 10. Cool stuff to make me go "oh this combo would be AWESOME!" But no. It's simply "doesn't matter what class you are. Just come with your best toon." I actually just hit the text cap, so the conclusion will be in my first reply.