The beta starts off at what appears to be the very beginning of the game: the first mission gets you acclimated to the world, teaching you the basics of movement and gunplay. If you've even dabbled in Halo before, the core combat will feel instantly familiar: Destiny utilizes very similar controls, and has the same feedback loop, with brief but intense action sequences punctuating your movement through a level. It's not a brand-new take on a FPS like Titanfall, but it’s very good. You're guided along by a floating little robot companion called Ghost — voiced by Peter Dinklage, in one of his least charming performances — and pretty soon you gain access to a ship that lets you depart the ruined landscape of Old Russia and leave Earth.

You can literally sit down on a couch and relax

It's once you leave Earth that the game instantly sets itself apart from other shooters. Your first destination in your ship isn’t a new map crawling with enemies, but a place called The Tower, essentially a social hub that acts like a town from an online RPG. You can get new missions and head to arms dealers to grab new weapons and armor, but you can also meet up with other players and head out on adventures together. The whole section even takes place from a third person perspective, as opposed to the rest of the game, so that you can see how your painstakingly customized character compares to everyone else's. The Tower breaks up the flow of Destiny in a great way; instead of just heading from one mission to the next, you can take a break and just hang out in a bustling futuristic city. You can literally sit down on a couch and relax.

When you do venture out into the wilds of space, Destiny offers a surprising amount of flexibility for how you play. There are both competitive and cooperative modes, so that you can play against and with other players, but if you’re largely uninterested in the social aspects you can also play through much of the game solo. (At least, that's true up until level eight, which is the farthest you could go in the beta.) I played through nearly every mission on my own, only occasionally linking up with other strangers, a process that felt seamless. And I never felt disadvantaged. A few of the boss battles — including one against a particularly troublesome flying space wizard — took a bit longer than if I'd had a team with me, but I managed to finish them off no problem. For a game that's built so strongly on MMO fundamentals, it's pleasantly surprising that I can still mostly enjoy Destiny the way I would a traditional single-player shooter. The social aspects don’t feel forced.