Tales From the Borderlands - Episode I: Zer0 Sum

[Tales From the Borderlands - Episode I: Zer0 Sum, Telltale Games, 2K Games, 11/2014]

What-tale Games?

I'll be honest, until The Walking Dead, I'd never heard of Telltale Games, yet now they seem to be dominating the market on some of the biggest titles in all types of entertainment across the board. From The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us to Borderlands, Game of Thrones, and the upcoming Minecraft series, none of which has yet to receive anything below an 80 on Metacritic, Telltale has put together what may be the most impressive library of titles in recent memory. They're making EA look like a small, indie production company that just figured out how to make Hexic into a high definition game for the PS3. On top of their plethora of quality releases, Episode 1 cost a whopping $2.50, which is quite possibly the best deal in gaming since The Orange Box. 

Choose Your Own Adventure...Wizard or Warrior?

One of the new gameplay additions that makes this Borderlands game different from the others is the ability to affect the outcome through decisions you make throughout the game. Unlike other games where your decisions can alter the plot, your decisions about how to respond to situations immediately effect how other characters feel about you and parts of the story as immediate as the following scene.

Is This REALLY a Borderlands Game? 

While making game-altering decisions is a great new addition to the gameplay in Borderlands, Episode 1 just didn't feel like a Borderlands game without the massive arsenal at your disposal, discovered and earned through hours of tireless grinding and mission completion. Although it's pretty clear the future episodes will contain plenty of the old-style FPS game mechanics that made the first three games so much fun to play, but they were sorely lacking in the first go-around in Telltale's 

Borderlands product. It's good, don't get me wrong, but it just doesn't have the feel of the Pandora we've all come to know and love. 

So If It Doesn't Play Like a Traditional Borderlands Game, How DOES it Play?

It honestly did remind me of those old Choose Your Own Adventure books, except you couldn't go back and switch to the other outcome if you didn't like what happened as you could with the books. Once you'd spent that ammo or made that other character angry, you were stuck with the repercussions. On top of that, you didn't get much time to consider your responses, like maybe five seconds, tops. Not only does this add to the sense of immediacy each time you are presented with a challenge but it raises the replayability significantly. This is due to the fact that you want to find out what would have happened if you had just been nicer to that one character or showed more of a spine with another. Although it felt as though many of the "choices" were just going to end up with you getting insulted no matter what response you chose, there were plenty that definitely affected how the game progressed. It will be interesting to see if they carry over your decisions from the first episode into the next four or if the decision-making effect is limited to each episode. Hopefully it's the former. 

A Little Bedtime Story

As usual, I don't want to get too far into the story line so as not to spoil the game for those who have yet to play it. I have to supply a little bit of backstory, but to give away the ending would probably get my figurative Interwebbian head chopped off by crazed jihadi gamers. To that end, I'll just give you the setup and some critique and let you decide if it's worth a play or not based on that. You start the game as Rhys, a lower-tier suit-and-tie at Hyperion who has dreams of middle management. However, instead of the raise and promotion you were expecting, you quickly learn that your former boss has been "Blown out of the g@&&^m airlock," to borrow a phrase from Aliens, and replaced somehow, repercussion free, with your arch-nemisis Vasquez. 

Needless to say this doesn't do good things for your career, with you ending up as Vice President of Janitors. You and your sidekick, Vaughn, come up with a quick plan to get back at Vasquez by stealing a deal he has set up to purchase a vault key for $10 million. Things get a bit off track from there and you end up trying to salvage what you can from the leftovers. 

At the same time, Fiona is a con artist that lives on Pandora alread. Rhys is lucky enough to at least live on the space station where there are working toilets and people don't eat one-another's eyeballs. Fiona is working with some other shady characters trying to set up the deal for a Vault Key planet-side. However, all hell breaks loose and you're being dragged through the desert that looks strangely like the male version of Princess Leia's bounty hunter from Jabba's Palace in Return of the Jedi. You know, the one that's holding a thermal detonator and says, "Yoto, yoto." 

"Where am I?"

"Jabba's Palace." 

"Who are you?" 

"Someone who loves you!" 

Anyway, sorry for the Star Wars flashback. Back to the game. While I will admit to being a bit disappointed with the lack of a real control mechanic and firefights, the place where this game really shines is in its story. Whereas Borderlands 1 and 2 seemed to be a bit disjointed at times when you got off on a side quest run for a few hours, Tales From The Borderlands never suffers from such side trips off the main course. Telltale Games was free to focus on creating a top-quality story set within the Borderlands universe, and they squeezed every ounce of goodness out of the opportunity. This game is fraught with the irreverent, sometimes dark humor of its predecessors. Where it lacks in control scheme, it more than makes up for with a hilarious and overwhelmingly engaging tale of Pandora and its unique and often freakish inhabitants. The only real problem I have with this game is waiting for the next installment to come out!

The Math

Objective Score: 9/10

Bonuses: +1 for having possible the best Borderlands story to come out yet and leaving me starving for more.

Penalties: -1 because, come on, Borderlands is a first-person shooter. I can count on one hand the number of times I fired a weapon in this game. Heck, I'd still be able to count the shots on one hand if half my digits got sheared off in a thresher accident at age nine. I know there are guns coming to the series from hints in the story, but I was a bit disappointed in the almost total lack of them in this episode. 

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10. A standout in its category. Very high quality. You should REALLY go buy this game, especially for just $2.50! If you don't like it, I'll personally refund your money. 

(But not really.)

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Multiplayer

[Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Sledgehammer Games, Activision, 2014]

Wow, that's a long name! 

No wonder people turn to acronyms when talking about most games these days. The names are getting ridiculously long. CoD:AW, tES:S, WoW:WtoLK, FH2, etc. We've even gotten so lazy, or game type titles have gotten so long, that we use acronyms to describe game types like FPS, MMORPG, TPS, and whatever else you can think of. None of this really has much to do with the game itself, it's just an observation I made when I realized it took five seconds every time I typed or spoke the name of this game. It's the same way with movies. The Avengers: Age of Ultron? Seriously? Is that necessary? Wouldn't Avengers 2 suffice? I guess I'm showing my age here by complaining about acronyms, aren't I? I sound like my Grandpa. 

What are you, like forty?

I guess I'm also a hypocrite because I love GRRM's SoIaF:aSoS. Fortunately for me, gaming keeps me young. Without it I'm afraid I'd just be sitting at home, listening to old grunge and indie rock albums from the 90s, complaining about how much better things used to be. Instead, I've managed to retain my sense of childlike wonder as each new generation of console steps up the graphics game and polishes titles to a shiny, impressive state of jaw-dropping wonder. While I've turned into something of a music snob, video games continue to amaze me, and Advanced Warfare is no exception.

Are you ever going to talk about the actual game? 

Yes, eventually. I started writing this week before I had tried out all the multiplayer game types, so that's the place from which those loosely-related opening paragraphs came. I guess I should get to the actual title at some point, though, shouldn't I? Let's start out with the graphics. While Titanfall, Forza Horizon 2, and Destiny have impressive graphics, this is the first game I've played on a next-gen console that really felt like it was starting to maximize the abilities of the console. Take a look at a side-by-side comparison of CoD: Ghosts vs. Advanced Warfare. Even though they're both from an Xbox One, the improvements are starkly evident. 

While the first is an impressive facial re-creation, the second could easily be mistaken for a scene from House of Cards. That's probably due to the programmers using the same facial re-creation technology that James Cameron is using in the second Avatar film. In fact, when I first started the campaign I literally thought that they were using video for the cutscene instead of computer-generated imagery. The facial creases, shadowing, hair, and eyes are the closest thing to actual high definition video that I have ever seen in a game. That fact made the multiplayer take a while to get used to when I first started. Game mechanics aside, and they are deep, the visuals made it so I often found myself so engrossed in the environment that my character ended up suffering the consequences by paying for it with his or her life because I was busy just staring in amazement at the detail in the surrounding area. 

Graphic distractions

The gameplay is some of the most fast-paced I've ever encountered. Some games cause a frantic panic response by simply overwhelming you with an unbeatable number of enemies. While Advanced Warfare has Exo Survival, a style of game that is reminiscent of Gears of War's Horde mode where wave after wave of increasingly large and difficult enemies assault your four-man team, it doesn't rely on such tactics to ratchet up your stress level in the normal multiplayer modes. Instead, it uses a brand-new type of maneuvering to take the game's speed up a notch (or three) over previous iterations of Call of Duty and other similar titles. It takes quite a bit of getting used to, and although I'm not some sort of special forces killing machine, I have played every Call of Duty title since 2, Halos 2-Reach, Titanfall, and (I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit) well over 100 hours of Crucible in Destiny, so I know my way around a multiplayer controller scheme. It's rare that I have to go into an options menu and check out the button scheme in order to figure out how to manipulate a game's protagonist. I can do that on my own 99% of the time. However, I've found myself returning to the Options menu repeatedly because there are so many facets to the character controls that keeping them straight requires more instant recall than any other game I've come across. 

Much of this difficulty is due to the addition of two gameplay mechanics: Exo Abilities and Boost/Dodge jumps. These abilities are both thanks to your Exoskelaton, a sort of super-soldier suit that allows not only special powers like cloaking and extremely fast movement, but also mid-air directional changes that would make Superman jealous. Boost jumps have been oft-maligned as a simple copy of the mechanic in the wildly successful Titanfall title of earlier this year. Although they're probably a bit too similar for me to completely chalk it up to coincidence and ignore the likelihood that Sledgehammer Games didn't, at the very least, have the nearly 1 billion units that the previous blockbuster title's release had cleared in under a month at the forefront of their consciousness when making some of their gameplay mechanic decisions. However, there are some distinct differences between the two. 

First and foremost, Titanfall's boost is about three times more powerful. The boost in Advanced Warfare only adds about six feet to your original jump, whereas the one in Titanfall takes you nearly thirty feet into the air. The other main difference is that there's a secondary boost (called a "dodge") in Call of Duty. It won't add to your altitude, but you can change direction in mid-air. It offers a shorter trajectory correction that pushes you forward, backward, right, or left. This little option has saved my bacon a bunch of times already, not to mention that the two boosts have sped up the overall gameplay in CoD multiplayer considerably. Call of Duty's multiplayers were already a bit above my head in terms of the number of people playing who seem to not only have no need of sleep, but no need of a job, family, or any of the other normal life obligations that should keep any average person from playing the game 24/7. I may not be the best gamer in the world, but my 44,095-point Xbox Live gamer score belies the fact that I'm, at the bare minimum, a competent player. And yet these guys just annihilate me like I'm a blind, deaf, and dumb 2-year-old with no thumbs. It's embarrassing, to be entirely honest. 

The Exo Abilities are basically just bonus effects that slightly aid your character in several different ways. The shield has been pretty useless for me so far. You have to have it aimed directly at an opponent for it to stop their fire, and I have enough trouble just pointing my laser-sighter machine gun at people. I can't be bothered to move a riot shield around 120 degrees to try in vain to save my worthless life. By the time I get it anywhere near the path of the bullets, I'm already dead. Overclock allows you to run at a heightened rate of speed. It's somewhat useful except for the fact that a simple jump and secondary boost does a better job of moving you along and it is more effective at moving you out of the firing line in the process. Exo Stim is supposed to give your character extra health points, but if it does they aren't enough to keep me from inevitable massacre. I'd need at least two or three of these at a time to make a noticeable difference in my kill/death ratio. The cloak is actually fairly useful at distance, but if an enemy is anywhere near you, you just look like translucent rainbow jelly. Exo Mute silences your movements, thereby making you harder to spot on enemy radar. I have yet to open up the Hover, Ping, or Trophy System Exo Abilities, but it's pretty obvious that Hover allows you to remain in the air for a longer period. Ping shows enemy Exo movement like Stim and Hover. The Trophy System is a passive aid that destroys up to two enemy projectiles when they come in close proximity to your character. 

I can't emphasize enough the speed of this game. I've probably been dying every 5-10 seconds on average. That's a bit much, even for an older gentleman like myself. The leaders who come in first place are still posting 10-15 deaths per five-minute match. Everything happens so fast compared to even the quickest of online multiplayers. On the one hand, it's a bit aggravating. On the other, it keeps you on your toes and you certainly don't get bored easily. The addition of the Boost/Dodge abilities can keep you alive when you would have easily been dogmeat in previous iterations of CoD, when used correctly. The Exo Abilities, while not the overpowering advantage that a Titan gives you over a Pilot, add just enough of an edge to help you eek out an extra kill here and there. They did a fantastic job of adding a plethora of new mechanics without completely changing up the basic way the game is played. While Titanfall and Destiny felt like totally new ways to go about the online multiplayer experience, there's something familiar about Advanced Warfare. It's like they just gave Modern Warfare 3 a healthy dose of steroids and some technological doo-dads and sent it on its way. It is certainly quicker and more stressful than any of the previous Modern Warfare games, but it isn't a complete deviation from the formula that has proven so successful over the years. I guess what I'm trying to say is they did just enough tinkering to make it feel fresh without going overboard and turning it into a completely different game. I, for one, am pleased with the outcome. 

Multiplayer Modes

First, let me get my complaints out of the way so we can get to the good stuff. I only have one strong one, and that is the elimination of Squad Modes. I was so glad when Ghosts came up with this co-operative multiplayer mode that allowed you to take on artificial intelligence with your fellow gamers rather than always facing down enemies that seemed to have been trained by R. Lee Ermey himself. I enjoyed being more evenly matched against my foes rather than feeling like I did when I was 12 and that dude who always played as Guile in Street Fighter 2 showed up at the arcade because I knew I wouldn't be winning any more matches after that. Without Squad Mode, it seems like there's always a "Ranger98" or "Seal85" who is obviously current or recently retired special forces member there to take me out from some ridiculously long distance with a shot I couldn't make by accident if I had 100 tries at it. 

Okay, enough complaining. The ability to customize your characters for your specific style of play is unprecedented. You have 13 points to spend on various perks any way you see fit. You can choose to go the Rennaissance Man route like I did and try to get a little of everything, or you can focus solely on your weapons or Exo powers and really max them out. This really is a multiplayer gamer's dream year's cap of perfection so I'll stop ruining it by acting like a baby because I suck at the stuff. Here are the offerings in Advanced Warfare. 

Same old, same old

Many a CoD veteran will be glad to see that lots of their old favorites have returned to the multiplayer mode list. Standards like Team Deathmatch, Domination, Kill Confirmed, Search and Rescue, and Capture the Flag are back and better than ever. For the uninitiated, Domination requires you to capture and hold one of three points around the map for as long as you can. The team that holds the most points the longest wins. Kill confirmed requires you to pick up a pair of dog tags that appears where a recently dispatched enemy met his or her untimely end. Grab the tags and you will get the full 100 points of XP gained from a normal kill in other games. Allow a member from the other team to beat you to the tags and you only get half the points a kill would normally bring. Search and Rescue is similar except for the not-so-minor detail that if you happen to be the unlucky chump that gets dispatched, you'd better pray one of your teammates gets to your tags first or you'll be watching the rest of the round from the sidelines. I didn't especially care for this game mode because, as I'm sure you've guessed, I spent a LOT of time in "Spectator Mode," watching other gamers run around the map while my sad ghost was powerless to do a thing. Capture the Flag and Team Deathmatch are pretty self-explanatory. If you don't know what they are by now, I'm afraid there's nothing I can do for you except hope your mom lets you out of the basement sometime this decade. 

New and unique

Although Advanced Warfare contained a majority of game modes that have been tried and true in everything from Halo 2 to the first Modern Warfare, it was some new twists on old modes and other never-before-seen game types that make this Call of Duty look and feel like something you haven't seen a dozen times before. 

Hardpoint

Although Hardpoint isn't a new game mode, the way it's handled is somewhat of a change from the traditional multiplayer game. As in Domination, your team is required to capture and hold a specific spot or "hardpoint" on the map. However, instead of three there is only a single spot and it is constantly moving. In my short experience with the game, I'd say the hardpoint makes at least five moves throughout the 5-7 minute long game. You can have your entire team strategically placed around a solidly held hardpoint, only to have it disappear and return somewhere completely across the map. This manages to keep complete dominance from occurring as can often happen with 2 of the 3 zones of control in Domination. This seemingly small and obvious shift in the pattern of play makes all the difference in this being just another retread and it being a new and exciting way to approach the game's multiplayer. 

Uplink

This is where the game really shines, in this writer's humble opinion. Among the new types of multiplayer mode is a highly enjoyable game titled Uplink. It's essentially Capture the Flag with some futuristic and sport-like twists in the game mechanic. One of your team members has to grab a module and carry it across the map to a satellite uplink module. It's kind of like a cross between rugby and football with lots of bullets thrown in for good measure. This was clearly the biggest change in the multiplayer game modes and felt at times like more of a sports game than an FPS competition. Of course, the other team is constantly trying to take out your ball carrier with heavy machine guns and energy weapons, but other than that it had all the makings of some sort of future-ball sport match.  

Momentum

I'll be honest. I didn't enjoy this game mode as much as many of the others. It is also similar to Capture the Flag, but in it there are multiple flags and your team gains momentum (and XP) the more flags you carry to their final destination. The problem that I had with it was that I seemed to die with more frequency in this mode than any other, for some reason. I'm guessing it was the close proximity of both teams to the flag points that made that happen, but that's a regular component in most of the games where something needs to be captured and held or delivered. It also could have been that this was the final game mode I attempted and it was after midnight, so all of the kids had gone to bed and the only players that were left online were the hardcores who spend 40-50 hours per week at one online multiplayer title or another. Whatever the reason, I had trouble lasting more than five seconds with any given life and the constancy of my demise was rather frustrating. That said, the idea behind Momentum is a good one and I will definitely be giving it another chance during the light of day when the overall player skill level dips a bit more with a higher population of average FPS gamers like myself online. 

Maps

So far, Advanced Warfare is limited to four maps in its multiplayer modes, but what maps! They're large, contain a plethora of unique elements like sniping spots and close quarters combat areas, and they had sometimes as many as four or five levels on which battle takes place. With the addition of the Exoskelaton suits and their aid in three-dimensional movement, this felt every bit as widely traversable an environment as Titanfall and its parkour-like wall-running warriors. While none of the maps were quite as big as the ones in that other jet-pack toting multiplayer hit, they never felt small or confined due to the wide array of vertically varied areas that you were able to traverse. As I learn the maps more closely, as is inevitable in all multiplayers, they could begin to feel a bit more confining and limited, but in my first few days with the game I never felt like I'd run out of places to go. As a matter of fact, I only ran into the "end" of a map on a few occasions, and even then there were always at least two or three choices of where to head next so I never felt cornered in by limitations in the environment. 

 A brief summation for the gamer nation

I'll admit, I was skeptical about this game when I picked it up. I was actually planning to review Shadow of Mordor this week but it turned out to be too long to finish (as many RPGs do), so I made the decision on-the-fly to cover the multiplayer aspects of the latest in this, the most popular war simulating FPS in history. Looking back on that decision, I have no regrets. I had enough time to give each game mode its due without selling any of them short on time and I enjoyed the heck out of the experience, to boot! This isn't just the next Call of Duty game. It's a radical shift in how the franchise looks at its most popular of offerings, the multiplayer modes, and Sledgehammer's first foray into the CoD universe has most definitely thrown down the gauntlet to Treyarch and Infiniti Ward, the other two companies in Activision's new three-year development cycle for the series. I look forward to many more hours enjoying this title's unique game modes, including its fascinating take on the not-so-traditional war multiplayer.

The Math

Objective Score: 9/10

Bonuses: +1 for taking some real chances in the way they approached what has become a somewhat formulaic and predictable gaming format with only cosmetic changes being made to what was essentially the same game. Now let's hope they've taken the same approach to the campaign!

Penalties: -1 for all the dying. I mean, come on, every 5-10 seconds? I know I'm not a multiplayer super-hero who spent time in the special forces and uses actual military tactics in the game, but that's still a pretty excessive rate of frequency of death, and I'm not exactly a noob at this sort of thing, either. 

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10. Very high quality. A standout in its category. 

See our scoring system here.  

Destiny

[Destiny, Bungie, Activision, 2014]

One of the Biggest Video Game Releases in History, You Say?

Well, probably, but not as big as Activision Blizzard initially reported. Although they announced $500 million in first day sales, they only shipped $500 million worth of units to stores, but the actual sales were quite a bit lower. They really only made about $325 million in sales during the first five days on Destiny. However, that's nothing to smirk at, and Call of Duty: Ghosts did the same thing claiming $1 billion sold on day one when the actual number was also significantly lower. It has been one of the most hyped games the public has ever seen with the television marketing campaign costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $6.7 million. However, the fact that they didn't release early copies to critics for release day reviews was a bit disconcerting. When a movie does that, you know it is going to be a stinker. The reasoning Bungie gave for the decision, and it does make sense, is that they wanted critics to have the ability to play a fully populated MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) rather than one with only a few other critics online at the time. With MMOs, there are thousands of people online at the same time occupying the same virtual worlds, so it would make a difference in how the game appears if critics gave it a try without all of the actual players running around doing missions in the area. It would also make some parts of the game unplayable as they require three-man teams to even begin, much less complete. Anyway, enough with the hype, let's get to the meat of the game!

Gameplay

I'll cut to the chase. This game is about as polished as they come with regard to mechanics. It plays like a Porsche drives. Smooth. You start out by choosing between three types of protagonist. There are Titans, which are the tanks of the game. They can take massive amounts of damage without dying, but lag drastically behind the other two in movement and damage recovery. The second is the Hunter. This character class moves quickly and easily with a high agility score. Unfortunately it takes forever to heal with the lowest recovery setting of the three classes. The third type is the Warlock. This is your typical mage that can recover quicker than the other two, but doesn't have very dangerous attacks outside of its special magic moves. The Warlock isn't the quickest of movers, either. All of that said, I've played all three characters and it seems like Bungie did a pretty good job of balancing out their various skills and deficiencies. Each character also has two subclasses that define their special moves. You should choose your subclass early because any upgrades to one won't transfer over to the other. Pick a subclass based on its special moves and stick with it throughout the game. 

Beyond that, you can choose between Human, Awoken, and Exo. You can customize the look of your character, but race and the appearance are only cosmetic. They don't effect how the character plays at all. Humans are, well, like us. They managed to survive the destruction wrought by the Darkness, dubbed the Collapse, and are just trying to survive in the last city not controlled by its minions. The Awoken are humanoids with bluish skin and an ethereal glow about them. They are based on mythological creatures such as elves, vampires, ghosts, and angels. The Exo are either machine or cyborg, I've read both definitions. They supposedly survived the Collapse but have no memory of their history before that. 

There are four species of alien enemies that fight for the Darkness: the Fallen, the Vex, the Hive, and the Cabal. The Fallen are scavengers that are attempting to take over the Earth. They are filthy urchins that constantly look for anything of value left behind after the Collapse. Vex are robots that employ a hive mind, all connected to a single consciousness. They came to our universe through warp gates from another dimension and mostly populate Venus. Hive are a species of undead that live on the Earth's moon. Their strength is in numbers and they tend to attack in hordes. Finally, the Cabal are massive creatures that employ thick armor and huge metal shields for protection. They generally stick to Mars missions and are the last species you encounter before finishing the campaign. None of the species like each other and you can often sit back and watch firefights where they kill off one another, leaving a much smaller force for you to take out before moving further through the game's many maps. Unfortunately I had to dig up nearly all of this information about the enemy species online because so little of their background stories is covered in the game itself due to the painfully thin plot. But more on that later. 

Special Moves

Each character type has two special moves. The first is called a Super Charge and it is the more powerful of the two. The second is a melee attack that has various effects depending on character type and subclass. All special moves can only be used sparingly and take time to recharge. Grenades act the same way. 

Titan

The Titan's Super Charges are titled Fist of Havoc and Ward of Dawn. The Fist causes the player to jump in the air and come crashing down, slamming both clinched hands into the earth causing high levels of damage to any nearby enemies. Ward of Dawn creates a small shield through which the player can fire but no projectiles can penetrate. The Titan's melee attacks are dubbed Storm Fist and Disintegrate. Storm Fist is simply an overpowered punch that does a lot more damage than your average pop to the jaw. Disintegrate actually has nothing to do with disintegration. After you smack an enemy you absorb any incoming attacks and transform them into ammo, health, or a quick recharge for Storm Fist. 

Warlock

The Warlock's Super Charge attacks are referred to as Nova Bomb and Radiance. Nova Bomb hurls a bolt of damaging light at the enemy. Radiance boosts your skill recharge speed, damage resistance, and melee damage resistance for a brief period. The Warlock's melee attacks are called Energy Drain and Scorch. The first one, strangely enough, drains energy. Heh. It removes health from your enemy and speeds the recovery of your health, grenades, or Nova Bomb. More than any other character class, I found the effects to the Warlock's Super Charge attack to be vastly superior to its melee attack. 

Hunter

The Hunter's subclass' Super Charges are Arc Blade and Golden Gun. These two are easily the most visually appealing of all the special moves. Arc Blade generates a knife of pure energy for about eight seconds, letting you attack as many enemies as you can in that time period. For most, one shot is all it takes. Bosses may require multiple hits, but the attacks come so fast that they can't do anything but reel in pain from the impact. With Golden Gun, you fly up into the air in a yellow whirlwind of flame, landing with a fiery pistol in your hand. You have three highly damaging shots with the revolver that, again, take out nearly anything but a boss with a single shell. The Hunter's melee attacks are Throwing Knife and Blink Strike. It's as if Bungie had to balance the beauty of the special moves with the plainness of the melee attacks. Throwing knife is decently effective, but no more impressive in graphic design than a knife thrown in Call of Duty. Blink Strike is also unimpressive, being merely an extended melee attack with more range than your standard stab with a kitchen knife. 

Bang Bangs and High Fashion

There are a plethora of weapons and armor to choose from in Destiny. Your character carries one primary weapon, one secondary weapon, and one heavy weapon. The primary weapons include auto rifles (machine guns), hand cannons (revolvers), scout rifles (hunting rifles), and pulse rifles that fire three-round bursts. The secondary weapons are the shotgun, fusion rifle, and sniper rifle. Heavy weapons are just a rocket launcher and a machine gun. Each weapon group can have a variety of upgrades. I won't bore you with every single option as that list would take up three pages and this review is long enough already. Some examples are Quickdraw, Upgrade Damage, Kinetic Damage, Extended Mag, Hawkeye, Warhead Verniers, Reactive Reload, and Void Damage just to name a few. Upgrades are available on every weapon and must be earned in battle. On top of that, you have to have enough Glimmer, the primary currency of Destiny, and, with many, additions like Ascendent Shards, Weapon Parts, and Plasteel Plating. 

The armor consists of four different pieces: the helmet, gauntlets, chest armor, and leg armor. Each one carries with it bonuses, just like the weapons. Not only do they have the same upgrades as the guns, but they also hold bonuses for Intellect, Discipline, and Strength. That's just a short way of saying your Super Charge, your specialized grenades, and your melee attack, respectively. You also wear a class identifier, which is a scarf for the Titan, a cloak for the Hunter, and a bond for the Warlock. You can also purchase these pieces of clothing in order to ally yourself with one of the cults (More on them later). While wearing a piece of cult clothing, all of your reputation points go toward that cult rather than your Vanguard score. It makes little difference beyond allowing you to purchase items from specific vendors. There is no bonus or upgrade given by wearing one piece over another. 

Campaign

While the gameplay in this game is fantastic, its one shortcoming is in the story. I suspect the reason for so many of the hot-or-cold reviews that have been coming out is the plot. It is very vague and there isn't much to it. The Traveler - a massive, moon-sized, planet-looking thing - comes to Earth and teaches us about space travel. Humans populate Mars and Venus. Then, the Darkness, the Traveler's ancient enemy, destroys nearly all of mankind. A small group of humans, Awoken, and Exo survived and are fighting the minions of the Darkness. There. That's the whole thing in four sentences. Of course there are more detailed mini-stories in the missions, but that's the gist. The missions usually consist of traveling to somewhere, killing a bunch of minor enemies, then killing a boss and going back to the Tower for a reward. Usually I'm worried about giving away too many spoilers in a review but with Destiny it's hard to do so because there's just not that much to spoil. It's unfortunate that the story doesn't have much depth because the rest of it is spectacular, but sadly that's the case.  

For players that were expecting the next science fiction epic like Halo or Mass Effect, they will be sorely disappointed with Destiny. The universe is sparse and barren. The massive hype of the next epic science fiction masterpiece has fallen painfully flat. For players that just wanted a finely polished FPS MMO, there are few out there that are better. I believe that the main culprit behind all of the highly polarized reviews, both from professional critics and users, is the thin plot. It's like Bungie spent so much time building lush, verdant landscapes and intelligent, believable AI that they ran out of time and threw the story together in the last thirty minutes before the deadline. I fully expect that Destiny 2 will flush out the universe quite a bit due to all the negative press. At least I hope so, because the franchise has such great potential that it would be a crying shame to let it remain so unfulfilled. 

There is a soft cap of 20 on every character, but it is possible to go beyond that ceiling by collecting "Light Points." The only way to get light points is by equipping gear that has a certain light point amount assigned to it. With this light-infused gear on your character, your level can rise above the level 20 cap. I've seen players online reach as high as 27, but I'm not sure there is a true cap on your character. Due to the limit of 100 Vanguard/Crucible marks (other currencies) you can accrue per week, it's hard to tell this close to the game's release what the true limit is, if any. It isn't necessary to join a cult in order to get gear with high light points, not to mention damage/defense numbers, but it helps. 

Multiplayer Games

Initially the pure multiplayer aspect, dubbed the Crucible, left me feeling more than a bit disappointed. There was only a single game type on the Xbox One. I'm not much of a multiplayer addict. I just prestiged my first character on Call of Duty: Ghosts last month if that's any indication. Due to that fact, I've done less-than-spectacularly in the Crucible. That said, I've managed to level up to 24. They equal out the leveling for the purposes of multiplayer, but I suspect from my numerous deaths that the same can not be said for the weapons and armor. I'll shoot someone five times with a high-powered rifle and they just hit me once with a machine gun and I'm the one that goes down. Something's not right about that.

Vanguard

The Vanguard is a game mode where you take on Strike missions with two other players. There are four levels of Vanguard mission to choose from of varying difficulty. The game requires that you undertake these missions with three players, but that doesn't mean you have to have two other friends online in order to complete them. The servers do a good job of matching you with similarly-leveled players. These missions offer you Vanguard Reputation and Marks that can be spent with the Vanguard and cult merchants in the Tower to purchase special armor and weapons. There is a limit of 100 Vanguard/Crucible Marks per week that can be earned. I'm not sure if that's to keep the multiplayer from becoming an unbalanced mess, to keep players coming back each week for more, or a little of both. Either way, I've maxed out my Vanguard/Crucible Marks for the week so my desire to run these slightly more difficult missions has wained until next Monday. 

Crucible

The Crucible is the game's true multiplayer portion. It started with only one game type on day one of the release, but it has since expanded to four. That's still a sadly low number for the developers who essentially created the multiplayer craze with Halo, but it's enough to keep a casual multiplayer participant like myself happy for the time being. The four game types are called Control, Clash, Rumble, and Skirmish. In Control, two teams of three players have to capture three zones and hold them. Doing so increases your point total for every kill. Clash is classic team deathmatch with six gamers on each team. Rumble is an every-man-for-himself game where every one of the six players is out for the others' blood. Skirmish is just a smaller version of Clash where the teams are made up of three players instead of six. In Crucible matches, you win Crucible Reputation and Marks, which are spent on weapons and armor from one of the three cults. 

Join a Cult

There are three factions in Destiny. Bungie refers to them as "cults." They include The Future War cult, the Dead Orbit cult, and the New Monarchy. You have to reach level 20 before you can join up with one of them, but they're the only way to get the most powerful weapons and armor in the game. Well, almost the only way. You can stay non-affiliated and use your Crucible Marks to buy things from the Crucible salespeople in the Tower. All four factions' pieces of armor contain a light point amount. As mentioned before, light points are the only way you can level up your character above the soft 20 cap. From what I can tell, the cult contacts in the game (there are three, one for each group) and the two Crucible salespeople (a non-political, general group) have the best weapons and armor for sale when compared to the Vanguard leaders.  

There are advantages to choosing one cult over another based on the way you choose to play. Each one has an effect on two of your three attributes, those being Intellect, Discipline, and Strength. Choosing a cult will give you the opportunity to gain bonuses to these attributes through their armor. If you purchase Dead Orbit armor you get a bonus to Discipline and Strength, reducing the cooldown time of your grenades and melee attack. Joining the Future War gives boosts to your Intelligence and Discipline (grenade and Super Charge cooldown). The New Monarchy offers you the chance to get bonuses in Intelligence and Strength (Super Charge and melee). Each group has a history that isn't really covered in the game and I won't get into here. You don't use Glimmer to purchase items from the Dead Orbit, New Monarchy, Future War, or Crucible vendors. Instead, you have to earn Vanguard and Crucible Marks. These are an entirely separate type of currency that must be earned by doing Strike missions for Vanguard marks or Crucible battles for theirs.

Music and Environment

Two places apart from the gameplay where Destiny really shines are the lush soundtrack and the impressive, varied battlegrounds. That shouldn't be a surprise, though. Bungie used the same duo of composers that wrote the music for the Halo series, Michael Salvatori and Martin O'Donnell. Even Paul McCartney collaborated on the project. Yes, that Paul McCartney. The music fits the game perfectly, building with the action and easing off into lush soundscapes for the menus and load screens. The suspenseful parts of the game were made even more intense with spooky ambience. There are even seamless transitions between portions of the game where there normally would have been only silence. 

The environments are as sumptuous and varied as the planets on which they represent. The Earth portions take place in what used to be Russia and it is every bit a decrepit wasteland as Mad Max or Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The moon looks just like the footage we've all seen dozens of times in movies and on television. The Red Planet appears like the shots that were beamed back from the Curiosity rover. Some poetic license was taken and "ancient" ruins were added to give the maps some variety. Finally, Venus emerges as a tropical rainforest after it had been developed by terraformers. Suffice it to say the graphics in this game are second-to-none. 

Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock...

According to www.howlongtobeat.com, Destiny takes ten hours to complete the main story and seventeen-and-a-half for the campaign plus extras. I found that to be a bit of an underestimate. I did all of the missions in the game including the Strike missions and easily spent twenty-plus hours on the campaign before I even touched the multiplayer modes. Now, I'm a bit of an OCD perfectionist when it comes to finishing a big game that I'm enjoying (That's a nice way of saying I'm anal), but even so, it isn't something you can do in a day like the Call of Duty campaigns. So plan on a good week or so unless you're one of those people who partakes in eight-to-ten hour marathon gaming sessions. 

The Math

Objective Score: 9/10

Bonuses: +1 for being one of the smoothest games I've played, mechanics-wise, not to mention it's just plain beautiful. Plus, your sidekick, Ghost, is voiced by Tyrion, Game of Thrones' Peter Dinklage!

Penalties: -1 for the paper-thin plot. I mean, come on! What did they spend, twenty or thirty minutes writing the story? This is supposed to be the next big science fiction franchise, but instead it's merely an FPS MMO, albeit a very good one. Here's hoping Destiny 2 brings a lot more to the universe than Bungie's first outing did. -1 for the painfully long load screen scenes. I realize that it would take light years to reach Venus, but that doesn't mean you have to take it literally in the game for the sake of realism. I probably spent at least 2 hours of my life during the last week watching my ship hover in space between missions as it loaded up the Tower or the next mission. 

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.  Well worth your time and attention.