X-Men Destiny – Review
Platform | Release Date
X360 | September 27, 2011
PC | September 27, 2011
WII | September 27, 2011Developed by Silicon Knights
Published by Activision
The Pitch:
A rally in San Fransisco may be mutantkind’s last hope for peace with humanity. Three young mutants are about to discover that they have the power to change the world, and their destiny is in your hands.
CONTROL YOUR MUTANT’S DESTINY – Make core power and faction decisions, leading to an epic choice between the X-Men or the Brotherhood of Mutants.
DISCOVER YOUR MUTANT IDENTITY – Players choose among three all-new mutant characters, each with a unique background that is unraveled throughout the game.
As far as superheroes go, the X-Men have had a pretty good run when it comes to videogame adaptations. There have certainly been some low points, but compare the releases bearing their name to those featuring a man who is neither bird nor plane, and Charles Xavier’s pals come out looking pretty good. Whether it’s because of the Konami arcade game,
or the brilliant X-Men Legends games, it’s easy to approach one of their tie-in titles with optimism. Unfortunately, X-Men Destiny will betray that optimism immediately.
Developed by Silicon Knights, the people behind the widely panned Too Human, as well as the critically adored Eternal Darkness, the game sees you step into the boots of a new mutant rather than an established character. You get the choice of three newly mutated beings; a brawny jock, an anti-mutant protester who looks remarkably like Cole from inFamous, and a young Japanese girl. Of the three, the Aimi Yoshida (the Japanese girl, in case you couldn’t figure it out) is easily the most charismatic, with the others being absolute replications of a template you’ve seen a million times before.
Template or not, the character you choose has nothing to do with the power set available to you. Immediately after the first cutscene you choose density control, shadow matter or energy projection. The first gives you a super strong rocky coating, the second gives you ghostly blades and enhanced speed, and the last amounts to being able to fire balls of energy from range. Comparisons to a ‘Warrior, Rogue, Mage’ setup are warranted, until you realise that whatever your powers are, and whichever variations you unlock during the progress of the game, you’re still going to be mashing the same button over and over.
X-Men Destiny is a button mashing brawler of the worst kind. I might have been super strong, or have sparkly balls of energy to shoot, but I was just spamming the attack buttons to repeat the same combo over and over. When my power meter was full I would throw out some special moves, typically to spread out the enemies in front of me, but that quickly became monotonous too. The game regularly throws up a remaining enemy count marker, as if it needs to remind you that yes, once again, you need to beat everybody up to proceed. Yawn.
What are you proceeding too? Well, either more brawling, or bizarrely out of place Prince of Persia style platforming. Apparently, the 
gift of mutant powers means that you also get outstanding grip, and the sorts of free running skills that would make Ezio Auditore jealous. Fortunately, that particular assassin won’t be hunting you down. He can just stay in his game, enjoying genre leading platforming rather than the bland collection of ledges that Silicon Knights threw into one of the least inspired game designs I have experienced in years.
These sections aren’t unwelcome, if only because they offer a break from the mindless repetition, but they are terribly unimaginative, much like the story. Each of the characters on offer has their own tale of woe, and you can choose to ally yourself with either the X-Men or the Brotherhood as the two sides are pushed towards war by an initially unseen party from recent X-Men lore. Promises of replayability are smashed as you realise that NPCs react exactly the same to Aimi as they would to Grant (The Jock) or Adrian (Cole from inFamous). The voice actors behind the player characters put a different spin on things, and there are alternative cutscenes at a few points, but this is essentially the same story told the same way three times over. Replayability value – it has none.
Oh, and what a brief story it is! Typically at Splitkick we don’t discuss game length, however in X-Men Destiny’s case I am going to make an exception. I completed the game in well under 4 hours, much closer to 3, including deaths. I started after getting home from work, and I was done in time for the ten o’clock news. The worst part – the game forces you to watch the cutscenes whether it’s your first, second or third playthrough. At an estimate, there is at least twenty minutes of this stuff, which leaves X-Men Destiny’s offering looking even more paltry.
Does it have any redeeming features? Well, there aren’t many bugs, none that I experienced at least, and the collectables open up new variations on powers and costumes. This latter quality highlights what Too Human told us about Silicon Knights – they understand loot. Unlocking classic costumes and adjusting your power set for speed, power or a number of other x-powers just about stops you from tearing your eyes out from the boredom. Just about.
Visuals? They suck. The audio? It sucks. The difficulty? Well at least the game has the good decency to be easy so your brain can think about other things.
X-Men Destiny is at best inoffensive, at worst it is a dark mark on the X-Men name comparable to “X-Men: The Official Game”. Do not go into this expecting the quality of Raven’s X-Men Legends, nor the depth. Don’t even go into this expecting the superior brawling of Raven’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Don’t expect Raven’s understanding of X-Men… wait, spot the trend yet Activision? You OWN a studio which makes outstanding X-Men and Marvel games. Give them the franchises back, so I can stop having to endure crap like this. Do not buy, do not rent, do pretend it never happened.
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Maybe there’s a reason why everyone though it was coming out in a year… because it shouldn’t have been released this year. The common thought is that it was a contractual obligation to hold the X-Men / Marvel license for games and that it didn’t matter if there was a good game or not.
I so wanted this to be good…sounds like it got a force unleashed 2 treatment.
I never tried TFU2, but I heard it suuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked.
FU2 was so God awful. Shoot, repeat, shoot, repeat, FORCE PUSH!11!~~~DO IT AGAIN!
How disappointing. Eternal Darkness was great and I must be one of the few that thought Two Human was awesome – that’s right, I said awesome – but this game sounds like a disaster from a gameplay perspective.
It’s nice that it’s not a technical abomination, but how does a company think a four to five hour game is worth a sixty dollar price tag? I don’t hate Activision, but I sure don’t think they are good for the industry anymore.
Soooooooooooooooo easy to get the 1000 achievement points. Only reason to rent this game