On the off chance you've been living under a rock, Destiny is a Sci-fi shooter that purportedly has RPG/MMO elements. Its been hyped and anticipated for at least the last year and a half... you may have seen pictures of a giant moon thing just hanging out over a city...

It cost a half billion dollars to create, supposedly, and has made back  maybe 75% of that (375 mil, off the top of my head), which makes it something of a disappointment.

Well...

Sure.

Lets look at the facts: Aside from having levels to your character, and requiring an active internet to play... in fact on my 360 it requires not just Xbox Live, but a Live Gold, so I'm effectively paying for internet twice... it really doesn't have much of MMO or RPG elements. Its a shooter set on a fantastic (as in Fantasy) post-apocalyptic world.

So, it's not gonna compete well with Call of Duty. In fact, I'm gonna go on a limb and say it plays objectively worse than CoD, though I'm hardly an expert. Its not a bad shooter, I should say, but merely inferior in some small ways.

Fer Ex: In the last shooter I bought, and this is sort of an industry standard now, I could heavily customize my gun, swapping grips, stock, even recoil springs and sights. Never mind the paint jobs.  Destiny? Um... no.

Now: Maybe you've seen those awesome commercials where you have a couple of armored gun toting badasses doing a firing line march or jumping and teleporting through mini-gun ogres and stuff?  Looks a bit like actors in costume rather than CGI, right?

Yeah. Destiny neither looks like that, nor plays like that.  In twenty or thirty hours of play I've never even seen a kill-cam shot.  Now, I haven't played ever class and subclass (levelling is a bit grindy...) but I also haven't been able to do a jump-teleport attack, and grenades don't do much damage to boss-mobs, which generally require ten or twenty minutes of grinding down from a full fireteam to kill.

So you have a failure to meet expectations. Hell, I'm wondering where all that money went? That half billion dollars in development?   Musta gone to the advertising department.

Then we get to the odd decisions, some of which I've come to expect from Bungie games.  You've got a space ship, since Destiny plays out over about four planets (Earth, Mars, the Moon, Venus), but its pretty much just a load screen element. You can pay through the nose to upgrade your space ship, but again: Its just a load screen element. "better Spaceships" just look different.  On the other hand, you start with a hover bike, because crossing the maps on foot is an exercise in tedium unless you are in a story-mission. Of course, high level players can get bikes with guns on them, which is a rather painful lesson to learn in PvP when you are just starting out (seriously? PvP doesn't scale to levels worth a god damn, so if you bought destiny to sci-fi shoot other players in teh face, well... guess you'll be playing for twenty or thirty hours just to qualify as a contender.)

Destiny isn't a bad game. With more modest aspirations it might have been praiseworthy as is, and the concept seems sound.

But really: If you want a sci fi shooter with space ships and you don't care much about real world physics and limitations? Play Warframe. Gun toting space ninjas that actually fucking play like you'd expect Space Ninjas to play.  And while the developers clearly have no idea how guns actually work, you still have a veritable truckload of customization options suitable for, well, fantasy space ninjas.