X-Men: Destiny – Review (XBox 360)
| Game Name: | X-Men: Destiny |
| Platforms: | Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, Nintendo DS |
| Publisher(s): | Activision |
| Developer(s): | Marvel Studios, Silicon Knights, Inc. |
| Genre(s): | Action-Adventure, Role-Playing, Brawler |
| Release Date: | Sept. 27th, 2011 |
| ESRB Rating: | Teen |
X-Men: Destiny is a game of tremendous unrealized potential. If you’re an X-Men fan you’ve probably wondered at some time in your life what you would do if you suddenly developed mutant powers and were thus caught in the conflict between homo sapiens and homo superior. You’d surmise that you’d have to make some difficult decisions, and you’d have to live with the inevitable consequences of those actions. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. X-Men: Destiny’s creators at Marvel Studios and Silicon Knights clearly pondered these matters during project conceptualization, but judging by the final product, it appears their ambitions were thwarted by a protracted development cycle and the contractual obligation to wrap things up and release their barely finished game.
There are still remnants of what must, at some point, have been grander, more ambitious storytelling ideas. Despite being exposited in a rushed, confusing motion comic introduction, the premise is an interesting one: Professor Xavier has been killed by super-villain Bastion. Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters has been destroyed, and the remaining X-Men have relocated to San Francisco. The city has been split between mutants and humans, and tensions are running high. You’re playing as one of three new mutants: Grant, an aspiring football player from Georgia, Adrian, the son of an anti-mutant extremist out to avenge his father’s murder, and Aimi, a Japanese girl that barely escaped the mutant concentration camps of her home country. You’re thrown in the thick of it as you discover your powers the very moment fighting breaks out between mutants and a group of anti-mutant extremists known as the Purifiers.
You’ll have to decide whether you want to fight the Purifiers as part of Cyclops’ X-Men or as part of Magneto’s Brotherhood of Mutants. Either way, both factions are working together against the Purifiers. No matter which character you’ve chosen, and no matter who you support, the game’s unnecessarily confusing plot unravels the same way, with little variation in the missions you’ll be completing. Most of the time, X-Men and Brotherhood quest-givers will be standing right next to each other with what is essentially the same quest, and they’ll treat you as neutral, no matter whose side you’ve fought on so far.
X-Men: Destiny desperately wants to be a serious action roleplaying game, but it is, regrettably, too shallow to be more than a perfunctory, repetitive brawler. There are passive bonuses and active abilities to be unlocked, but the differences between upgrade trees are minimal. No matter how you level your character, you’ll still spend most of your time alternately mashing the light and heavy attack buttons, and occasionally activating a special ability. The quests consist almost entirely of clearing confined sewers, laboratories, or warehouses of same five types of Purifiers. You get to kill even more enemy mobs in the Challenge Arenas, which would be indistinguishable from regular quests if they didn’t have to be completed within a certain time-limit. The endless recycling of enemies and environments can be disorienting. Going through identical room after identical room, I constantly felt I wasn’t making any progress, and after a while I feared I had accidentally turned around and was going backwards. The monotony of it all is only broken up sporadically by generic boss encounters, all of them variations on fights from other, more enjoyable superhero games.
The game’s refusal to straightforwardly communicate mission objectives and basic functionality is a constant source of frustration. For instance, if one happens to fail a Challenge Arena, it won’t inform you that the arena is repayable from a menu. If you’re slightly obsessive compulsive like me, you’ll find yourself wandering aimlessly for a while, looking for the quest giver to restart the challenge. Similarly, there is no option to bring up your quest text, so if in a cutscene you happen to miss what you’re supposed to do, you may as well just reload your last checkpoint and reorient yourself. The game also doesn’t inform you of your leveling progress – the only way you know to upgrade another power is by frequently pausing the game and bringing up the skill menu. It’s genuinely surprising that a developer as experienced as Silicon Knights would neglect to include such standard user interface features.
X-Men: Destiny’s production values are decidedly sub-par. Graphically, it looks at best like a souped-up, previous generation title. The low polygon count and stock animations make even the most iconic X-Men look silly, but “sexy” lady mutants like Mysique and Emma Frost are particularly hideous. It also doesn’t help that, with the exception of Nolan North’s performance as Cyclops, the voice acting is almost universally laughable.
Considering what this game looks like, its wealth of technical problems is indefensible. Even after a full install to the hard drive of my XBox 360 Slim, it suffered from textures not loading, the frame rate dropping to what seemed like single digits, and frequent crashes. Even after almost a month on the market, the Xbox 360 version of X-Men: Destiny remains unpatched.
When Activision announced X-Men: Destiny last year, they promised “a rich, branching storyline that features a deep element of choice.” Even if you come to terms with the fact that X-Men: Destiny utterly fails to deliver on those promises, the basic gameplay is so unbearably repetitive and dull, it’ll make the 4-5 hours you’ll spend playing through it seem like an eternity.
