Recent reviews by Speno

Mercenaries completely break the balance. mercenaries often make up more than half of an empire's power and they just, replenish themselves for free. And it seems like big events in the game haven't been modified to account for it. For example, there's flags that check ai fleet power to determine their heavenly actions, that lead to really boring end games because they all make the same decision.

Only dlc I've turned off.

This game makes me feel like a jedi

Area you can access right from the start of the game apparently is meant to be accessed way later and has had me stuck for four hours just trying to get anywhere without drowning. What kind of game design is this?

Edit: Then I apparently got to the end of the game, 6 hours in, but it was impossible to progress. If I hadn't looked it up I would've been the most confused person the planet, nothing tells you you aren't meant to be there, apart from it being challenging.

I expected it would be more than at face value... I was wrong.

Good and unique overall. It is difficult to recommend though due to some frustrating design decisions. e.g. the game will often "teach" you that certain items can't do certain things, but then later it turns out they can do those things. I actually felt that the game was mainly me trying to figure out what the developers were tryign to tell me. And don't expect too deep a story either.

Get this

Very high quality but extremely short game. Three times more expensive than it should be - I finished the main story in 40 minutes.

Amazing

Great and original

After 6 years of Destiny, this game (ignoring the raids) is still a far inferior experience to any of the Halo games. We STILL have learned barely anything about what the hell is going on. We STILL have no grimoire in-game. We STILL have one-time use shaders. We STILL have overpriced dlcs that add a few hours of content and require you to grind for hours just to play the actually interesting content (raids) that most people won't want to play anyway due to their extreme difficulty There is STILL no way to change the difficulty of missions, and the difficulty is extremely easy (why is there such a difficulty jump between solo content and raids???). The enemy ai is STILL god-awful.

Speaking of ai and difficulty, ensuring the game is still at least a challenge is important - gamers enjoy games for their challenge, not because they like watching alien heads explode over and over again (okay maybe we enjoy that a little). And unfortunately, this is mainly how you will be dealing with enemies, because while the weapons are cool, you will only be doing very little with your lacklustre range of abilities (although this has improved a smidgen with the new classes). It's frustrating because we KNOW they can do this, they've done it with contest mode in raids.

As for the narrative, while Destiny can pull off sufficient self-contained stories, it is absolutely infuriating that every one of them hints to some sort of grand overarching plot that we still know nothing about. The biggest thing we've learned is that the darkness takes the form of foreboding triangles. But I often get the sense that even Bungie has no idea where they are taking their story, they very clearly don't want to commit to anything and leave everything open-ended (over 6 years of content too). Some of the characters' lines are really, really bad, which makes them difficult to relate to, especially when they take themselves so seriously.