[Editor's Note: We've been posting our impressions of Destiny since September 3rd. Our scored review was posted on September 18, 2014.] Within hours, l could tell that Destiny wants desperately to be loved by many different types of players. It attempts to weave threads from many popular genres together into one interconnected tapestry, but your experience will depend entirely upon which of those threads you tug on hardest.

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At the very least, it provides blistering firefights and brilliantly crafted worlds to have them in. In fact, the exceptional caliber of its moment-to-moment gameplay is what partially excuses the fact that it never quite realizes its grand design. For as fun as it is, Destiny just doesn't fully commit to all of its disparate parts, making it simultaneously many different things, and none of them at all.

Bungie has a history of excellent world-building, and Destiny is a powerful expression of that excellence. From the moment your AI companion wakes you from your long slumber in the shadow of the colossal wall around Old Russia, the world of Destiny feels grand. Picturesque, static backdrops are slyly blended with wide-open spaces and large vertical terrain features, creating an effective illusion of scale. The many stunning vistas go a long way towards making Destiny's world feel like one that's worth saving, despite the fact that you can’t fully explore everything you see.

Even if it isn't as wide-open as it initially appears, each of Destiny's four main planets are more than big enough to get lost in. Even atop your speedy, instantly summonable Sparrow bike, which gleefully handles a lot like what I always imagined a Star Wars speeder bike might, getting from one end of a planet to the other takes a while. Factor in all the caves, temples, and other structures housed within, and there's a ton of ground to cover. Perhaps not as much as an open-world RPG or an MMO, but then, despite its similarities, Destiny isn't either of those things – and its overall topography has more character than most games of those types anyway.

Even on last-gen hardware, the craft on display throughout Destiny's alien landscapes is masterful in its detail. Every rock face, outpost, and ruin looks lovingly hand-crafted, aside from a few repeating nooks and crannies. Even if I didn't always stop to gawk at how roads look physically carved into the terrain, or how gas bubbles to the surface of the iridescent water pools on Venus, these details silently pulled me in and constantly reinforced the idea that that this is an actual place – a special place. Loading

Consistently excellent music magnifies that sensation, deftly driving the action forward during big firefights, and conveying a sense of wonder and mystery in between them. Even the somewhat over-indulgent load screen animations between worlds are eye-catching. Bungie made lemonade out of lemons here. Going from one planet to the other takes way too long, but it’s wisely used as an opportunity to double down on the idea that all these places are connected.

Sadly, none of that keeps Destiny from becoming the latest example of the friction between open-world design, and tightly directed narrative. Cutscenes are kept to a bare minimum, limiting the story to vague exposition dumps before and after missions. It's not a new, or effective way to unintrusively tell a story though, regardless of how many Emmy Award-nominated actors you have reciting the lines. It says a lot about the quality of Destiny's combat that I gladly continued to move and shoot, despite it never really giving me an emotional incentive to do so.

The Art of War

Destiny retains the fluid, tactical feel of the Halo series, but with an increased sense of speed and mobility that make its firefights feel more dynamic than those of its direct FPS ancestor. That’s partly due to the ability to sprint and slide in addition to each class' mobility skills, which include gliding, double jumping, and even short-range teleportation. Combined with how powerful grenades and melee attacks feel, thanks again to class skills that modify them, this extra mobility allows you to engage foes in a wider variety of ways. Loading

Destiny's intelligently designed combat areas provide excellent opportunities to leverage those options. It’s an impressive design feat when you consider how organically these areas blend with the open spaces that tie them together. I could, for instance, toss out a big vortex grenade to control space and force my enemies to back up behind cover, then sprint towards them, glide clear over their cover to greet them with a shotgun blast, and then catapult up to safety on a ledge above. Cover is smartly placed, and there’s enough horizontal and vertical space to allow for a variety of approaches, even in the most straightforward combat scenarios.

You'll face four different races over the course of your journey, and their armies are each diverse and interesting. The cunning, multi-armed Fallen make excellent use of cover, will actively flank your position, and even attempt to lure you into ambushes. Other foes, like the robotic Vex, can teleport directly into combat out of nowhere, and still others have jump packs, cloaking devices, or massive riot shields to aid their advances. The range of different problems they can give you to solve is downright impressive, which keeps the combat fresh, and exciting throughout.

That is, with the exception of some of the bosses, who are mostly just super-sized versions of existing enemies with a lot more hit points. The two or three bosses that don’t fit that description, like the imposing spider tank, require more from you - you’ll have to find weak spots and coordinate with teammates to to stay alive, which resulted in more than one exciting “we did it!” moment.

On the whole, the combat is so well executed that I never once tired of fighting in the multitude of hours I’ve played so far. That says a lot considering that fighting is, disappointingly, the only way you can meaningfully interact with the beautiful world around you.

A Class By Any Other Name…

Outside of combat, Destiny postures itself as far more than a simple FPS, but while its various RPG elements add some extra layers on top of its well-done combat, they don't feel fully explored or fleshed out. Part of that is because of what a poor job Destiny does of educating us about all of its moving parts, but it's also because it’s so hell-bent on being all things to all people that it unsurprisingly drops the ball in places.

Destiny's class and skill systems are the biggest victims of this. The Hunter, Warlock, and Titan all do the same things (stay alive and kill stuff), just in subtly different ways. Everybody can use every weapon type with equal proficiency, and until you get to the very highest levels of endgame gear, class-specific armor mostly just looks different.

Next to how well-differentiated classes feel in Borderlands 2, or even Battlefield 4, none of Destiny’s classes feel like they bring anything indispensable to a party. As a direct result, playing cooperatively with others feels more like “shooting stuff with friends” rather than a carefully coordinated dungeon party. It’s still a good time, especially during the excellent co-operative strike missions, but it lacks the depth I look for in class-based games. Loading

The RPG element that succeeds the most is the loot game. It doesn’t overwhelm with any sort of statistical complexity, but rather engages by presenting clear, meaningful choices. It gets off to a slow start though. Drop rates seem abysmal until somewhere around level 11 or 12, and gear has too few unique stats until then either. Eventually though, weapons and armor start dropping with interesting mods, and entire upgrade trees that allow you to tailor their feel and performance in interesting ways.

From weapons that reload faster when their clip is completely empty, to ones that speed up your ability cooldowns when you score kills with them, there's actually a decent number of different ways to gear. Especially when you start getting into the legendary and exotic loot tiers after level 20, surprises keep coming from new, even crazier mods.

The problem though, is that the methods for earning post-story gear aren't clearly explained or, in some cases, even alluded to over the course of Destiny's 12-hour campaign. You’ll need to coordinate which bounties you take with what patrols you want to do, grind for several different currencies, and rank up your standing with a handful of factions - several of which are tucked away in the dark corners of the Tower hub. There’s a lot of room for post-story progression, but you either just start stumbling onto it...or you don't. For a game that trips all over itself to be simple and accessible to everybody, that's an unnecessarily confusing curveball to hit.

Destiny and Identity

The half-baked nature of Destiny's RPG elements are just a symptom of a far larger issue: This is a game that’s straddling the borders between too many kinds of experiences, and in its attempts to have something for everyone, it never fully satisfies on any one front.

The competitive multiplayer, called The Crucible, is the chief example of this. The few included maps do sport Bungie's hallmark map design - they’re excellent, in fact. But without private lobbies to organize fights with friends, or any ways to customize the handful of game modes, it’s hard to imagine the multiplayer shooter enthusiast who could be satisfied with it.

The same can also be said of how Destiny allows players to interact with one another - or rather, how it doesn't. Bungie calls Destiny a “shared-world shooter,” and the influences from the MMO world are clear in its overall layout and structure. Yet, there’s no way to communicate with anyone who isn't in your party, and there's no loot-trading either. Omissions like these become a big problem when you try to do the challenging weekly Heroic Strike missions and raids. Both are part of a healthy endgame, post-launch content plan that’s already delivered enjoyable new modes of play. The first raid, Vault of Glass, has given me plenty of incentive to grind for gear and further develop my character post-campaign. It introduces team objective elements to the PvE, and delivers entirely new locales and bosses that you won't get to see anywhere else in the game world.

The problem is, unlike Destiny's other co-op content, neither the Heroic strikes or raids provide matchmaking service, so unless I happen to have high-level friends who are ready to play, finding a party comes down to hitting message boards to look for a group. As someone who played mostly solo, I actually appreciated this sense of separation between me and other players, but people seeking a strong sense of community simply won’t find it here. Why do I need an internet connection for a game that feels so intent on putting barriers between me and other players?