Destiny First Look Alpha Review

Posted on June 20, 2014

This past weekend, I had the chance to play the Destiny First Look Alpha on the PlayStation 4. It was a fun opportunity to see and play the game before its release in a few months. I thought I would share my experiences for those that didn’t get to play.

My Experience

After loading into the game, I was given the choice to create one of three Guardian classes: Titan (heavy weapons), Warlock (wizard), or Hunter (fast scout, weaker of the three). Each has their own unique abilities and skills. I was also given the ability to choose my character’s sex, race, and customize their physical characteristics. Unfortunately, there wasn’t an option to name your hunter, you simply went by your PSN ID. That could be something added in later though.

For the majority of my gameplay, I chose a female human Hunter Guardian. She looked pretty awesome, here she is below in all her glory:

After her creation, my game began. I was loaded onto Earth and told by a voice to proceed with caution to my destination. I battled against enemies called Hive. Eventually, I ran into a Wizard boss type Hive guy. He was extremely hard and dodging him and the other enemies proved very difficult. I died countless times. And then something cool happened. My friend came on and loaded into the game too. He joined my session and the two of us took down that pesky Wizard and all his minions.

After that, we left Earth and went to “the Tower.” It’s a home base type place where you see all the other users on the server, buy weapon upgrades, and such.

After wandering around the Tower, we went back to earth and completed more missions.

Strike?

I have a question mark there, because I think that’s the mode I was playing. It could have been Explore mode, however. Unfortunately, no way to double check since the Alpha is over.

Whatever mode it was, for the most part, I played in that mode. My friend and I wandered around Earth, found missions and completed them. You could join up with other Guardians if you wanted. We found a few people a few times and helped them out with their missions. It was fun for awhile, but after a few hours, it started feeling a bit stale. The missions all started looking the same. The enemies we battled were all the same too, they just increased with difficulty. It was still fun, but this isn’t a mode that I will be playing for hours on end. Earth was gorgeous, however!

Here’s a vid I captured of Strike? gameplay:

Crucible

This was by far my favorite mode. It was Guardian vs Guardian, Call of Duty style. Within Crucible, there were different modes you could select with different rules (like Call of Duty’s Team Deathmatch, Domination, Capture the Flag, etc). The only one available in the Alpha was Control. In Control, your team had to capture and hold three target areas on the map. Teams received points for killing opposing players, defending held zones, capturing zones, and such. What’s cool is that your character and all their weapons and armor customizations that you’ve obtained from other modes, such as Explore and Story, are available in this match. Level advantage doesn’t occur to keep the playing field equal.

I played Crucible for quite a few hours, but there only seemed to be two maps available during the Alpha. The maps seemed perfectly sized. Not too large, not too small.

Here’s a vid I captured of Crucible gameplay:

The Weapons

I was pretty satisfied with the weapon selection in this game. You find weapons as you explore the world, or you can buy your own, you can complete missions to win them. They’re futuristic looking, but operate just as any modern weapon would. Shotgun, semi-auto AK type, auto mini type, frag grenades, and such. You are bound to find one that fits you. Personally, I loved the first weapon given to players which was full automatic, and didn’t really care for any of the others I picked up, so I mostly stuck with that for the duration of my gameplay.

Cool Perks

There were two cool things you could do in this game that I loved: double jumps and personal aircraft load-in.

Double jumps are exactly as they sound. You jump once, then jump again mid-air to jump higher. It just felt so cool. I heard that double jumps were specific to Hunters, however, I briefly created a Titan character before the Alpha ended, and she seemed to be able to do it too. Hers had an awesome glide after the second jump. I don’t know if Wizards can double jump, as unfortunately I ran out of time to try out that Guardian class.

The other thing I loved was the personal aircraft. You could load it up and fly around the terrain, saving yourself lots of time if your destination was pretty far away. You can also load it during the Crucible gameplay if you need to get out of a hairy situation quickly. But mostly it was just so damn fun zooming about on it.

Final Thoughts

Overall I really enjoyed the Alpha. I’m eager to try out the other modes and especially the other Crucible modes and maps. This game was beautiful and the mechanics were flawless (at the Alpha stage, at that). The servers seemed very stable. I didn’t have a single disconnected or laggy session during Cruicible, or other areas of the game. I’m very eager for the Beta, and game’s release!