Destiny: The Taken King Reviews
Year Two of Destiny is de-Dinkled, has upped the difficulty, given you a sword, and finally become a game you can invest in.
I think what I'm trying to say is: I like Destiny. It only took me a year to admit it.
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.
The Taken King focuses Destiny's story and lets players forge a more memorable experience, lifting the entire game as a result.
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.
After filing our initial review of Destiny last year, I said that the experience lacked soul, put the game aside, and felt I wouldn't be coming back. Around the beginning of the summer I needed a game that I could pick up and play for about 30-45 minutes at a time and jumped back in. Before I knew it I was hooked, playing the DLC content, running Strikes, rolling a second (and now third!) character. "The Taken King" and Destiny 2.0 have taken that experience to a new height that is worth diving back into for old players and warrants the price of investment (into the new Legendary Edition) for new players. Bungie has put in so many small, new tweaks and wrinkles that it will take dozens of hours before you'll see and do everything. Destiny is not perfect and is still a grind that is best experienced with friends, but the addition of new and repackaged content fleshes out the experience to a point where it becomes an easy recommendation for shooter fans.
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.
Slowly but surely, Bungie is morphing this chimera of a game into something more presentable.
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 the make-good effort Destiny players have been waiting for
This is the first sign we've had that Destiny just might become the game many think it could be.
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.
Destiny finally feels like the big deal that Bungie wanted us to think it was last year.
Much of the late game still feels like a needlessly punishing grind as it embraces artificial difficulty before fun
Destiny's biggest expansion to date makes the game a whole lot more enjoyable and easier to recommend.
Refines and improves the things that made Destiny great while fixing things we didn't realize were broken.
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.
The Taken King is a sophisticated return to Destiny that makes it the best its ever been.
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.
Whether you're an ardent fan who has logged into Destiny every week since launch, or someone who set down the controller the moment the credits rolled at launch last September, everything has been tweaked and changed for the better for everyone. And if you've yet to sample Destiny's brand of compulsive sci-fi shooting, with a year's worth of modes, missions and updates also behind it, there's no better time to jump in.