Destiny: The Taken King Reviews
The Taken King is a solid package offering several more hours of fun, engaging new gameplay.
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.
Destiny takes the best parts of Halo and combines them with the worst parts of Borderlands.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
Destiny: The Taken King takes what was a good foundational game, and enhances nearly everything about it, taking the great gunplay and environments, and adding more of the good, while negating the bad with system overhauls, new modes, and new ways to enjoy Destiny.
This is the perfect time to enter the Destiny universe, and if the changes and additions introduced in The Taken King are any indication of how Bungie's world will evolve, I'll gladly continue to bring my light to the fight against the darkness.
Destiny: The Taken King is the first expansion in the second year of Destiny and it changes so many of the core concepts, from its interface to its mechanics, that it feels like playing an entirely new game.
I can honestly say that I have never played a shooter as much as I have played Destiny. Not Call of Duty, not Halo, Not Far Cry or Battlefield. I've clocked in hundreds of hours in the game since its release last year (I wouldn't be surprised if there are people who have thousands), and with The Taken King it looks like it'll just continue to increase.
If you're willing to do the social networking and accept the time commitment that Destiny requires to reach its endgame content, you'll be treated to the first massively multiplayer online game built around the core of first-person shooter gameplay, a unique entry in the world of video games, and a growing universe where you and your fellow Guardians are all that stand between the Light, humanity's last hope, and the Darkness that threatens to wipe us out forever.
The Taken King is one helluva good apology for the mediocre mis-start that was 2014's Destiny. All of our grievances have been addressed in some way. The loot system is fairer and more sensical, there's an actual story worth emotionally investing in, plus the combat's had an adrenaline shot thanks to new enemies, gats to gather, and exciting new subclasses.
The Taken King might not make up for that first year and all of its shambling about, but it puts Destiny on a path that, as someone who spent all of last year whining endlessly to anyone who would listen, I can finally shut my mouth and just enjoy the game. If that isn't an incredible feat, I don't know what is.
Hours 20-through-30 have made me a believer in "The Taken King" and the future of "Destiny." Bungie has set out to right past wrongs with this expansion's wealth of content. But it's not just about the quantity of content. "The Taken King" reimagines how players interact with the game world. These changes are all for the better. In year one, it was difficult for serious "Destiny" players to defend the lack of story and the structure's repetitive nature. "The Taken King" creates a community that fans can be proud to be a part of.