Destiny: The Taken King Reviews
A lot of fuss was made when the price point of The Taken King was announced and despite a vibrant community, the vanilla Destiny was originally rife with issues and needed many improvements. But now Bungie has fixed most of those issues and as a result, Destiny: The Taken King is one of the most fun, fulfilling and social shooters you'll play this year and next.
Rather than call it an expansion, The Taken King proves to be an overall facelift for what once was an empty, repetitive shooter. Worlds feel more lively with the constant Taken threat interfering with classic Cabal, Fallen, and Vex enemies. Allies in the Tower and Reef have much more to offer and make your guardian feel more relevant in a period of galactic combat. While you still cannot expect a tale of epic proportions, Destiny embraces what it always has been at its core – a shoot and loot festival.
For newcomers to the series, 'Destiny: The Taken King' presents a much larger and more user-friendly 'Destiny' experience, and that's after a year of crazy highs, and RNG lows. For veterans, it feels as though we have to take two steps back before we can go forward, but the way is paved with fun things to do. If you've been putting off playing 'Destiny' until it got better, now's the time.
The Taken King shows Destiny is willing to reach for everything it might be, and it's hard not to look forward to what comes next.
I think what I'm trying to say is: I like Destiny. It only took me a year to admit it.
It doesn't fix everything that was wrong with Destiny, but The Taken King does enough in all the right places to make it a highly enjoyable FPS experience overall. A renewed focus on narrative and a streamlined progression system helps to push Destiny in the direction it should have been heading all along.
Bungie has finally delivered something akin to promises it has made in the past. Destiny is still not the open-world exploration adventure everyone thought it was going to be, but it is carving its own path in the videogame world, and it's getting better and more fun with every step.
Most of what made the original Destiny a good game is still there, but the overhauls and tweaks to the lesser parts have given Destiny the sort of boost it needed. It was hard to see how this could serve as a long term franchise after the initial release but now, I am counting down the days until year 3.
Destiny: The Taken King is a worthy investment for any fan of the original game and a pretty good one for those who weren't exactly thrilled with the initial experience. Sure, there are some downsides, but more or less, the expansion manages to show that Destiny can provide a great time for a huge number of players.
Destiny: The Taken King makes the Destiny universe worth exploring and finally makes it a fun experience. The endless grinding and vague, confusing storylines are gone. Now we have a clear, understandable and enjoyable storyline with a streamlined levelling-up system.
Much of the late game still feels like a needlessly punishing grind as it embraces artificial difficulty before fun
Destiny: The Taken King is a testament to game-as-service that feels richer, less random, and more fun than the game Destiny started out as. It's telling that the base game is being phased out in favour of a "complete" package: this is much closer to what Destiny should have been from the beginning.
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?
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.
This is the first sign we've had that Destiny just might become the game many think it could be.
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.
Refined and balanced, a better offering than before
An essential update and a sensible improvement
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.
Bungie has delivered a helluva final act to what's been a very surprising, highly purchasable rethink of this wayward franchise.