Destiny: Rising Closed Alpha Impressions and Review
Didn’t make it to the Closed Alpha yourself? Read my thoughts to see why I ultimately recommend it…
Destiny Rising is much like “Face/Off (1997)” with Nic Cage and John Travolta. It’s an okay movie, and will make for an okay analogy, for a pretty okay game that I ultimately recommend.
What we have here is a game that looks like Destiny. Feels like Destiny. It even plays like Destiny. A game that I have loved for well over a thousand hours. But it’s not Destiny. Underneath, it’s something different, something different entirely. The face of Destiny… controlled by the soul of something else… Make sense?
The most frustrating thing is that over the course of my time with it, I ended up really liking it.
But it takes a minute. Destiny Rising starts like sandpaper to the mind, presenting you with some truly terrible dialogue, that does not get better no matter how many chances you give it. Right around when you start skipping through dialogue, it throws you through slogs and slogs of tutorials, most of which teach mechanics you understand immediately. But, I could see the potential, so I let it sandpaper my brain, enduring it best I could.
Before it could completely smooth my mind. Destiny Rising forgoes the sandpaper and starts beating you over the head with dozens of weird new resource types, damage modifiers, some downright awful matchmaking, and gacha odds that make you want to jump off of a cliff, and more. Many of these underlying systems feel like the antithesis of modern Destiny 2, which has done a great deal to simplify itself as much as it can without taking away from the looting and shooting.
Because of that, you can really feel how the complexity is so needless and convoluted. There is a specific activity for every resource, which makes it so that no matter what you do, if you want to progress, you need to play just about EVERYTHING the game has to offer, with little wiggle room. And get ready to spend A LOT of time in menus trying to understand and manage it all.
To really give you an idea of this, there were several game sessions I had where I booted it up, only to spend the first 15 minutes JUST navigating the menus, for one reason or another. It makes it much more a “menu” type game, than it’s parkour leaning brother, Destiny 2, and if you’re not prepared for how heavily Rising weighs in that direction, you’re going to get disappointed almost immediately.
So how about when it’s not a menu game?
When it’s not beating you over the head, confusing the crap out of you, or making you roll the dice on characters… I can decidedly say it’s some of the most fun Destiny content I’ve ever played.
The fresh ideas here actually brilliant, and I hate that it is this way. The new roguelite infused activities bring a fresh and fun take to build crafting, the included strikes are the perfect length of time, hard content is challenging and immensely gratifying to finish, and the PvP and PvEvP content is refreshing and really fantastic. I’m even enjoying the 1/1 rip off Gwent mode too. And Sparrow races?? Come on man.
Despite my disgust for the underlying system it’s attached to, I surprisingly found that collecting characters with unique static weapon types and abilities is to the game’s benefit. This is because of the way Rising presents its missions, which prompts you and your teammates on the ready screen to select a good mix of characters to build a well-balanced team. I only played with other random players, and I attribute us being able to clear difficult content easily because of this. Rising makes building teams with good synergy a cinch, and the added bonus is that before the mission starts, you know exactly what role you’re going to play for your teammates.
Weapons and abilities feel so good to use, to the point that it’s fun just to mess around in the “open-world” doing bounties here or there, just so you can play the game. Mythic weapons and exotics are also, super fun to collect and use. And I was using touch screen controls the whole time, and thought these things, even with that handicap. Let that sink in.
With regard to how the game plays, I could not be more positive about it. In fact, the question that I am having a difficult time answering is: Is this actually a good and fun game? Or am I blinded by my desire to be playing ANY new Destiny content? With Destiny 2 on life support, it’s easy to see how a fresh can of literally anything else is exciting in the Destiny community.
In fact, if they manage to port this to PC and consoles, and get cross play up and running… I would probably temporarily stop playing D2, and move into playing Rising instead, up until I hate it. If Bungie was smart, they would realize this and forbid Netease from doing exactly that. There’s no telling how much time I would sink into a proper PC port. I can’t reiterate enough just how nice it is to be playing “new Destiny” content, with frequent updates, and good, unique meaningful chases.
But don’t get me wrong. After all I’ve said here, I think it should be said that I would trade all of this without a second thought if Destiny 2 could be ported to mobile in place of it. The real tragedy is that Bungie leadership is so brain-dead, they didn’t realize that the mobile space would have netted them higher player counts, more profits, and happier existing players across the board. From there, a Nintendo Switch port would be just a leap away, and that’s a huge market they’re not tapping into. But whatever, I digress. I’m just a player, right? What do I know?
Switching gears to conclude this thing. If I were to break Destiny Rising down, it’s built on 50% of Destiny’s DNA. Great shooting and abilities are where you’re going to derive most of your enjoyment. And credit where it’s due, the let’s say, 20% unique ideas that are being brought to the table here, are really superb ones that elevate the experience. That 70% mix of a game is what I can recommend you try, and I think a lot of D2 players that do will get hooked if they give it a chance. It’s just that remaining 30% of convoluted gacha bull crap, poor story, evil microtransactions, and resource overload that really bring the whole package down a few notches. But, despite that… I recommend it.
Originally published at https://backloggd.com.