Destiny Review

Bungie's shooting is the best in the business, and Destiny spent its first year proving that alone is not a game. Moment to moment it is close to flawless: recoil, weapon feel, ability cooldowns and the way a Titan shoulder charge connects were all tuned by people with a decade of Halo behind them. Strike and raid design is genuinely new, and the Vault of Glass, with no waypoints and mechanics players had to decode collectively over days, is one of the most successful cooperative puzzles ever shipped.

Everything around that is threadbare. The launch story was famously gutted in rewrite, leaving a Speaker who explains nothing, a Traveler nobody accounts for, and a Grimoire system that parked the actual lore on a website. Four small destinations get recycled through every activity type until the seams show, and the launch loot economy punished play with random upgrade materials. The core is exceptional; the package built around it in 2014 was not.