Review: Improvements abound in 'Destiny: The Taken King'

A year into a committed relationship is roughly the time when the romance starts to lose a bit of its spark. You’ve heard most of your partner’s stories, you’ve seen their embarrassing junior high photos, and you’ve become accustomed to their quirks. There just aren’t many surprises left.

That’s a little how I feel about Destiny, the epic sci-fi shooter birthed from the same loins that gave us the original Halo trilogy. As a guy who’s sunk roughly 500 hours into the game since its release last year, I’ve pretty much seen it all. I’ve vanquished alien armies with my arsenal of futuristic weaponry. I’ve massacred thousands of rival Guardians, the protectors of Destiny’s besieged solar system, in online play. I’ve explored every inch of Venus, Mars, the moon, and the rusted ruins of post-apocalyptic Earth. No raids remain unraided, no strikes are left unstruck.

To be honest, this relationship is getting a bit stale. Which makes Destiny: The Taken King kind of like having your partner greet you at the door with two tickets to Paris and a bottle of champagne.

Releasing just days after the one-year anniversary of Destiny’s initial launch, The Taken King is a $40 downloadable add-on (it's also part of a $60 Legendary Edition that includes the original game plus the two earlier expansions). And while this isn’t a full-fledged sequel, The Taken King provides a ton of stuff to see, do, collect, and, of course, shoot in the face.

The Taken King’s story-driven campaign revolves around Oryx, an alien demigod who looks distressingly like the demon from Fantasia that gave me bed-wetting nightmares as a kid. Oryx is very, very angry that we killed his son, Crota — the big baddie from The Dark Below — and he’s plotting his revenge on the solar system from a monstrous spaceship parked in the rings of Saturn.

To that end, Oryx has abducted countless numbers of Destiny’s aliens — the Fallen, Vex, Cabal and Hive — and twisted them into weird, shimmery shadow creatures with new weapons and abilities. Fallen Captains can lob giant spheres of toxic darkness, Cabal Phalanxes’ shields have repulsors that can knock you flying, and Vex Hobgoblins, who were pretty big pains to begin with, now have freakin’ energy mortars. Cynics might cry, “They’re just the old enemies with new skins and new guns!” — and that wouldn’t be entirely incorrect — but the Taken are still unfamiliar enough to feel novel.

In preparation for The Taken King’s release, developer Bungie recently tweaked and tuned several core aspects of Destiny. They simplified the character advancement system, raised the maximum experience level from 34 to 40, and streamlined objectives into something very much like an RPG quest log. They’ve also expunged Game of Throne’s star Peter Dinklage’s lackluster voiceover for Ghost, your wee robotic sidekick. (Your A.I. pal is now voiced by Nolan North, star of approximately 829 other video games. He does a fine job, though I still kind of miss Dinklebot.)

But what makes The Taken King so refreshing is that it actually feels like a cohesive story now. Characters who were little more than window dressing in the Guardians’ home base are now featured in cinematic cutscenes and plentiful radio chatter, particularly Cayde-6 (voiced by Firefly and Castle star Nathan Fillion), the droll mentor to Destiny’s Hunter class. As we learn more about Oryx’s agenda through an interconnected series of missions and quests (including an awesome mini-arc that unlocks a new subclass and superpower for your character), we see Cayde-6 and pals banter, bicker and take pot shots at each other. It’s a small thing, sure, but in Destiny’s visually lush yet emotionally barren universe, it feels like a big deal.

The Taken King’s campaign includes stops at familiar Destiny locales that now open up into brand new areas with new objectives, enemies, plot chunks, and gameplay mechanics. Guardians will crash Crota’s funeral on the moon, fight a giant Shank in the bowels of Rasputin’s bunker, steal a cloaking device for Eris Morn’s ship, and very likely get lost in Oryx’s creepy floating castle.

If these names and places are gibberish to you, fear not: The Taken King aims to make Destiny playable for first-timers, and the expansion will give newbies the option of immediately elevating a single character to level 25, the minimum recommended starting point for The Taken King’s content. If you have the time, though, try to play through the whole thing from the beginning. Destiny’s intertwined game mechanics can be a bit confusing if you’re simply plopped into the deep end.

What’s also impressive about The Taken King is how much more there is to do once the story bits are finished. You might journey to Oryx's Dreadnaught to fight the Shield Brothers, a pair of Cabal giants who feel like oversized Super Mario enemies. Or enter the Court of Oryx, an arena that allows players to trigger ultra-challenging public events. Or try the two new online Crucible variants — including Destiny’s take on capture the flag, dubbed Rift — across a fresh set of multiplayer maps. Or take on a Hive warrior in the Dreadnaught's prison, which is cloaked in paranoia-inducing near-darkness. Or venture deep into the Vault of Glass, home of the original Destiny’s co-op raid, for a mission that reveals the fate of the legendary time-trapped Guardian named Praedyth.

(Speaking of raids, The Taken King’s new end-game uber-mission, called King’s Fall, goes live on September 18. It’s the one thing I've yet to play, but I’m betting it will involve killing Oryx once and for all. And that it will be ridiculously, wondrously hard.)

Bungie and publisher Activision envision Destiny as a 10-year series of expansions and sequels, and it will always be something of a work in progress. The Taken King smooths out many of the original game’s rough edges, beefs up its lore, introduces a staggering amount of new content, and even makes a lot of the older stuff feel sort of fresh again.

That said, for every element of Destiny that Bungie has improved as the game enters its second year, there’s another that could still use work. Newcomers jumping into The Taken King might be perplexed by the number of moving parts in the game that aren't particularly well explained, something that’s always been one of Destiny’s core weaknesses (and isn’t helped by the encyclopedia-like Grimoire card system, which remains in desperate need of a complete overhaul.)

And once players hit level 40 —which shouldn’t take more than a solid afternoon of play — the familiar loop of repeating missions in the hopes of securing better weapons and armor begins to set in, especially since this gear feeds directly into your character’s Light level, a secondary benchmark for determining the activities you can tackle. With The Taken King, there’s now a lot more variety in the places you can go, the loot you can hunt for, and the aliens you can perforate in the hopes of getting that sweet new fusion rifle or rocket launcher, but that lingering sense of deja vu never quite goes away.

But while The Taken King isn’t perfect, it’s a step in the right direction for Destiny. And it might be enough to make you fall in love all over again. For another year, at least.

What’s Hot: Cool story missions; Memorable character interactions; Lots of new places to visit and new guns to play with; Improves some core gameplay systems;

What’s Not: Still more work to be done; Could be overwhelming to newcomers; Pricey for players who already own the game; R.I.P. Dinklebot

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