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IGN Review of X-Men: Destiny
There was a time when developer Silicon Knights was at the top of its form, creating some of the best games on the GameCube, namely the unnerving mind-funk that was Eternal Darkness and an excellent update of a PlayStation classic, Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes. The developer was a critical darling until its Xbox 360 debut Too Human hit. Considerable attention was paid to the title's development, which was long and much labored, switching (and outliving) platforms a couple of times before finally landing on the 360. Sadly, irksome gameplay and some piss-poor design choices ensured that the game was all but dead on arrival, failing to resonate with fans and not living up to its enormous hype.
I bring this up because compared to the oft-reported and troubled development of Too Human, Silicon Knights' follow-up, X-Men: Destiny, appears to have sprung onto consoles with little fanfare. After spending some time with the title, it's easy to see why. X-Men: Destiny's weak player choice system, boring combat and lame mission structure make for a title that you'll forget as soon as you put it down.
X-Men: Destiny weaves a yarn that takes place after the death of Charles Xavier as you stand at a memorial peace rally in San Francisco for the late X-Men leader. Of course, all hell breaks loose, and your character's mutant abilities suddenly reveal themselves in the nick of time, allowing you to team up with fellow mutants to kick all sorts of ass.
Instead of putting you in control of pre-established members of the X-Men team or as the Brotherhood of Mutants, X-Men: Destiny casts you as one of three pre-made character molds, each with their own background. There's college football star Grant Alexander, Japanese refugee Aimi Yoshida, and Adrian Luca, the son of a powerful anti-mutant proponent (oh, the irony). These have some bearing on the dialogue chains that you get into with NPCs, but the overall story will stay the same as you fight against the Purifiers, an anti-mutant organization that has been capturing mutants and harvesting their abilities for nefarious purposes.
After you select your character and their powers kick in, you'll have to choose between one of three different starting abilities. These are separated into fairly standard archetypal classes, with a heavy-hitting tank class (Density Control), a fast-paced attack class (Shadow Matter), and a "caster" class capable of projectile energy blasts (Energy Projection). Regardless of which character and power set you choose, the game's mission structure is mostly the same throughout with only a few changes in dialogue.
While you won't play as characters from the X-Men universe, you will interact and fight alongside (or against) them fairly often. You'll meet up with familiar favorites like Cyclops, Wolverine, and Magneto, as well as unfamiliar characters like Caliban, Surge, and Avalanche as you make your way through the game's campaign.
The game touts a choice system, supposedly offering players the ability to shape the course of the story through their conversations and interactions with other characters from the X-Men lexicon. While this is a great idea on paper, the execution blows. Your choices also lack any real weight to the game's missions or your interactions. You'll run mostly the same missions and interact with the same characters regardless of the choices you make. Should you opt to commit to a mission for the Brotherhood instead of the X-Men or vice versa, your choice will usually just result in some passive aggressive comments from the other side.
Additionally, making your decisions lacks subtlety, as you'll be faced with either the option to "do what [insert X-Men name here] says" or "do what [insert Brotherhood member name here] says" without any gray area or shades of doubt.
Sure, you'll gain either X-Men or Brotherhood points that will enable you to do different attacks and moves depending on who you decide to align yourself with, but there's really no weight thrown into the decisions you make regardless of what they entail.
But hey, while the story isn't very dynamic, at least the missions are cool and varied, right? No, the missions are extremely dull and repetitive. Basically every mission you have thrown your way is little more than taking on mobs, sometimes with assistance from an NPC and sometimes alone. You'll be tasked to "Kill 30 Enemies!" or "Kill 100 Enemies!" with little variation littered in.
The game attempts to break up the monotony of the missions by peppering in Challenge Arenas, which more often than not will have you performing the same mob fights as in the campaign. Occasionally, you'll get a few modifiers thrown in, such as "kill off more enemies than Wolverine" or "defeat 100 enemies before time runs out", but in essence, you're still killing off hordes of enemies via a super-repetitive, button-mashy combat system.
The game's combat is very simplistic, asking little more of you than to hammer away at the attack buttons with no strategy involved. You get some special moves based on your character's chosen mutant power, but fighting in this game is largely a shallow, mindless affair.
Completing Challenge Arenas rewards you with X-Genes, which allow you to customize your character's ability subsets to be more like the NPC mutants that you meet in your journey and outfits that allow you to look like them, some of which provide specific buffs. You can also find these in secret locations throughout the game's areas, as well as other hidden items if you're a fan of scavenging.
©2011-09-30, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
I bring this up because compared to the oft-reported and troubled development of Too Human, Silicon Knights' follow-up, X-Men: Destiny, appears to have sprung onto consoles with little fanfare. After spending some time with the title, it's easy to see why. X-Men: Destiny's weak player choice system, boring combat and lame mission structure make for a title that you'll forget as soon as you put it down.
X-Men: Destiny weaves a yarn that takes place after the death of Charles Xavier as you stand at a memorial peace rally in San Francisco for the late X-Men leader. Of course, all hell breaks loose, and your character's mutant abilities suddenly reveal themselves in the nick of time, allowing you to team up with fellow mutants to kick all sorts of ass.
Instead of putting you in control of pre-established members of the X-Men team or as the Brotherhood of Mutants, X-Men: Destiny casts you as one of three pre-made character molds, each with their own background. There's college football star Grant Alexander, Japanese refugee Aimi Yoshida, and Adrian Luca, the son of a powerful anti-mutant proponent (oh, the irony). These have some bearing on the dialogue chains that you get into with NPCs, but the overall story will stay the same as you fight against the Purifiers, an anti-mutant organization that has been capturing mutants and harvesting their abilities for nefarious purposes.
After you select your character and their powers kick in, you'll have to choose between one of three different starting abilities. These are separated into fairly standard archetypal classes, with a heavy-hitting tank class (Density Control), a fast-paced attack class (Shadow Matter), and a "caster" class capable of projectile energy blasts (Energy Projection). Regardless of which character and power set you choose, the game's mission structure is mostly the same throughout with only a few changes in dialogue.
While you won't play as characters from the X-Men universe, you will interact and fight alongside (or against) them fairly often. You'll meet up with familiar favorites like Cyclops, Wolverine, and Magneto, as well as unfamiliar characters like Caliban, Surge, and Avalanche as you make your way through the game's campaign.
The game touts a choice system, supposedly offering players the ability to shape the course of the story through their conversations and interactions with other characters from the X-Men lexicon. While this is a great idea on paper, the execution blows. Your choices also lack any real weight to the game's missions or your interactions. You'll run mostly the same missions and interact with the same characters regardless of the choices you make. Should you opt to commit to a mission for the Brotherhood instead of the X-Men or vice versa, your choice will usually just result in some passive aggressive comments from the other side.
Additionally, making your decisions lacks subtlety, as you'll be faced with either the option to "do what [insert X-Men name here] says" or "do what [insert Brotherhood member name here] says" without any gray area or shades of doubt.
Sure, you'll gain either X-Men or Brotherhood points that will enable you to do different attacks and moves depending on who you decide to align yourself with, but there's really no weight thrown into the decisions you make regardless of what they entail.
But hey, while the story isn't very dynamic, at least the missions are cool and varied, right? No, the missions are extremely dull and repetitive. Basically every mission you have thrown your way is little more than taking on mobs, sometimes with assistance from an NPC and sometimes alone. You'll be tasked to "Kill 30 Enemies!" or "Kill 100 Enemies!" with little variation littered in.
The game attempts to break up the monotony of the missions by peppering in Challenge Arenas, which more often than not will have you performing the same mob fights as in the campaign. Occasionally, you'll get a few modifiers thrown in, such as "kill off more enemies than Wolverine" or "defeat 100 enemies before time runs out", but in essence, you're still killing off hordes of enemies via a super-repetitive, button-mashy combat system.
The game's combat is very simplistic, asking little more of you than to hammer away at the attack buttons with no strategy involved. You get some special moves based on your character's chosen mutant power, but fighting in this game is largely a shallow, mindless affair.
Completing Challenge Arenas rewards you with X-Genes, which allow you to customize your character's ability subsets to be more like the NPC mutants that you meet in your journey and outfits that allow you to look like them, some of which provide specific buffs. You can also find these in secret locations throughout the game's areas, as well as other hidden items if you're a fan of scavenging.
©2011-09-30, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved