Destiny: The Taken King Reviews
Bungie could have thrown in a bit more content given the price tag, but what's offered in The Taken King is definitely solid and certainly adds to the Destiny experience, making this a must-buy for fans of the game.
The Taken King is an important step forward as a franchise and more often than not feels like the Destiny we should have gotten last year. Bungie is finally adding meat to a game that was mostly bones. Year 2 is off to good start with a story that matters, improved loot drops and leveling system. At the end of the day, Destiny: The Taken King has become an easier adventure to revisit and an even easier recommendation for new players. Now, who wants to raid?
The Taken King isn't so much a Destiny expansion as a thorough reworking, building on the foundations laid by the version 2.0 update to make the endgame both more compelling and more accessible. The campaign itself is strong, varied and engaging, introducing a great new setting that should fuel quests and strikes for months to come. Come back Guardians, and bring your buddies with you - Bungie looks to have delivered the Destiny we've all been waiting for.
With impressive storytelling, tight controls, and a sense of purpose, The Taken King is not just an expansion, but a noteworthy improvement to the Destiny series as a whole.
The Taken King is not only a fun and rewarding experience unto itself, it is a great expansion for the Destiny universe and elevates the game in nearly every way.
Destiny: The Taken King successfully adds refreshing content to a game that has been growing stale over the past few months. Not only that, but just about every aspect of the game has been revitalized with the expansion and the 2.0 update. Depending on your view on grinding for gear after completing everything else, you should be able to get upwards of 30+ hours (per character) to complete all of the newly included quests before you reach that moment.
Perhaps the best that can be said about this expansion is that it's ultimately a step in the right direction for one of last year's most disappointing games and offers a glimmer of hope that Destiny might, within a few years time and a handful of updates, actually be a consistently great game rather than a pile up of both great and poor design decisions that frustrates just as often as it delights.
The Taken King resets Destiny for the better. It brings a lot more fun to the table while taming all the things people complained about up to this point in the game, well almost all.
Destiny did not need all of its innumerable growing pains, and many of its scars will never fade and should rightly never be forgotten. But The Taken King is proof that it wasn't fruitless. This is the game we were excited for back in 2013, and that we were struggling to find over the past year. The Taken King is what Destiny should be and should have been all along.
Destiny takes the best parts of Halo and combines them with the worst parts of Borderlands.
Bungie set out with a goal for Destiny: The Taken King and they have mostly succeeded. While some of the nagging problems from the original game persist – boring patrol areas, recycling of areas and enemies, and bullet-sponge enemies – Destiny: The Taken King does more than enough to make up for the sins of its predecessor.
The Taken King is a solid package offering several more hours of fun, engaging new gameplay.
Bungie has delivered a helluva final act to what's been a very surprising, highly purchasable rethink of this wayward franchise.
Destiny: The Taken King may not have made this Bungie's best series yet but it's certainly changed it for the better while offering tons of new, fun things to shoot.
An essential update and a sensible improvement
Refined and balanced, a better offering than before
Destiny shows improvement with The Taken King, but there is still work to be done before it occupies a place in the canon of key games of this generation.
This is the first sign we've had that Destiny just might become the game many think it could be.
Providing that the upcoming raid is strong and we see good support and content-rich expansion during Destiny's second year, we could see this MMO-shooter go from a game beloved by a dedicated core of fans to one that excites the mass market for years to come. It got this RPG fanatic invested in a shooter for the first time since Hexen, and it might just hook you, too.
At some point, it dawns on me that my new friends-in-loot and I have become the sad souls playing the dollar slots in Vegas at 2 a.m.—sitting alone with watered-down drinks in hand, blank faces peering into a screen, moving only to insert another token and pull the lever. But so what. They can't stop, and I can't stop, and none of us can stop and oh god, will I hit it big tonight?