I’m sure by now you’ve seen the plethora of less than stellar reviews that Destiny has received. Considering the amount of money thrown behind the project by Activision and Bungie’s track record with Halo, it’s surprising to see such low scores. So does Destiny deserve the hate? Kind of.

Right out of the gate, Destiny will grab you with its stunning visuals. Yeah yeah, 1080p. Forget all that, it’s all about the art style and direction. Destiny’s environments are jaw-droppingly beautiful, from the lifeless surface of the moon to the lush jungles of Venus. Bungie really know how to build a world.

Populating that world is where things start to come undone. Of the four enemy factions, only the Vex come close to having any personality. The Fallen are just a poor man’s Covenant, the Hive are, for the most part, just the Flood and the Cabal are just the Brutes. I know these comparisons to Halo are a tad unfair, but the real problem is that all these factions are inferior to their predecessors because they lack any personality or soul. We can assume the Dregs and Captains have a similar relationship to Halo’s Grunts and Elites, but we never see any of it. No Captain kicking a Dreg when he’s bored, no Dreg’s fleeing in terror when their Captain dies. Just dudes of varying toughness to shoot.

Venus is particularly stunning, though I can confirm killer robots come from Venus, not women.

The shooting of said dudes is fantastic though, as Destiny offers some of the finest gunplay this side of Mars. Weapons within the same class can feel wildly different and each class of special weapon serves an important role. Shotguns rule the roost up close and snipers dominate long ranges, but the addition of the Fusion Rifle into the mix is what really gets me salivating. It’s basically a mid-range shotgun, but it has a charge time, forcing you to time your shots perfectly. Start charging to soon and the shot will go off before you’re aiming at your target, too late and they will have dropped you with an assault rifle or run in close to lay the shotgun smack down on you.

So it’s pretty, the enemies are a bit generic and the shooting is fantastic, but if you’re reading this you still have no idea what Destiny is about. What’s the story, what’s my motivation I hear you say? Honestly, I have no idea. Something vague about the big magic space ball needing to be saved from the Darkness. I don’t know much about the Darkness other than it’s evil and it’s probably not the same Darkness that sang I Believe In A Thing Called Love, but I’m not even 100% on that one.

There is precious little story and what you can scrape up off the floor is dull, cliché and disappointing. Combine that with an absolutely shocking script and it’s very hard to actually care about anything in the Destiny universe other than the sweet loot you’re picking up. I mean honestly, if you can afford to hire Peter Dinklage and Bill Nighy to read your lines, surely you can afford to pay someone half-way decent to actually write those lines. Here, watch this rubbish.

The children are already scared. Hand that man an Oscar.

As I said before, the only reason you’re doing anything in the world of Destiny is for the rewards. It hardly paints Guardians as noble saviours of mankind if they won’t even bother to stop the darkness unless they get some shiny new pants at the end of the fight. Destiny is a loot game a la Borderlands and Diablo.

A lot of people have been ragging on the loot system in Destiny, and rightly so, but as I’ve taken so long to crank this review out, the sneaky buggers over at Bungie have released a patch which rectifies most of the loot system’s mistakes. I’m reviewing the product you will buy, not the one you would have had last week so they get away with it.

The loot system can still be very random, rewarding luck over skill but it’s nowhere near as bad as before. Harder level missions and weekly events now have guaranteed higher level engrams and the engrams themselves will never become a lower level item. Gone are the days of decrypting a legendary engram to find a crappy rare gun.

The main reason this review took so long is that I wanted to complete the raid before bringing the hammer down on Destiny for all its mistakes, because Bungie wouldn’t shut up about how amazing it was. They weren’t lying.

Destiny’s Vault of Glass raid may be one of the finest co-operative shooter experiences available to date, hyperbole be damned. The entire raid requires 6 team members to work in near perfect harmony lest they be smashed to pieces by the challenges it offers. Not to mention the variety of tasks that the raid throws at you. Destiny’s missions and strikes require you to walk places and shoot dudes. The raid has plenty of dude shooting, be sure of that, but it also throws in stealth sections, platforming sections and some pretty intricate stuff that I don’t want to spoil which involves splitting the team into two or more groups.

If the rest of Destiny was as good as the Vault of Glass, we’d have our game of the year right here. As it stands, I’m not giving Destiny a single point more for the Vault because 90% of players will never reach it. You need to be level 26 to even try the raid, but in reality I wouldn’t take a team of lower than 27-28 in there if you want to get it done in less than 12 hours. Add to this the fact that the lack of matchmaking means you need to find 5 friends who are all available at the same time, at the right level and have the drive to complete the raid with you.

 Open the iris!

Am I saying the raid should be easier? No. Should it be open at lower levels? No. Should it even have matchmaking? No, you’d never do it with a team of randoms. The raid should stay as it is, the rest of Destiny just needs to be this much fun too. As it stands, Destiny’s pre-raid gameplay is simply a repetitive grind until you’re ready for the raid.

Get to level 20 as fast as you can, do the strikes until you’re bored and then just spend your time in the crucible. Bungie are still heavyweights in the PvP domain and Destiny delivers on this front. But the PvE gameplay gets old fast and even the PvP will struggle to hold people’s attention for long with so few game modes and maps.

Make no mistake, when I finish writing this review I’ll be jumping straight back into Destiny, but I’m still struggling to figure out if that’s because it’s fun, or just addictive.