Review: Destiny
Score:
64%
Version Reviewed: 1.01
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Nothing like having a square jaw when you need to save the Earth, and that is exactly what Jack Lander has, in his first adventure from Black Bull Studios. Destiny is “a classic space shooter”. I joked with Steve and Rafe when they passed this one to me that it’s very much like the old Buck Rogers arcade game, but there are lots of games in this genre – so Destiny as a game isn’t exactly an original concept.
You’ll be flying your craft (the Talaria) into a 3D landscape, and making sure that you clear your path of obstacles and enemies with your gun, making sure you can pick up all the power-ups as you travel along. Graphically, this game is of a high quality, there's a lot of pixels being thrown around the screen.
My only problem is that with all these graphics being rendered, a lot of detail is being lost. The backgrounds can be murky, making it hard to make out which graphic is a bullet, an enemy, or a powerup. The screenshot below on the right is one of the levels that really drove me mad. Once you start throwing in a significant number of obstacles and enemies that don’t have a huge amount of colour contrast compared to the surface, it starts getting very busy, very quickly, and the playing field gets very hard to read.
On the other hand, I love the fact that you can switch the orientation of your screen from portrait to landscape quickly from the menu, and that you can move the third person camera angle to higher up from the ground until you find something you’re most comfortable with. This is quite important because, although you can’t tell from the screenshots, your craft never leaves the ground – this isn’t like dusting crops, it’s more like controlling a really fast tank.
As well as the screen orientation, you can also define the controls to any key configuration that you like. This is pretty important to me – one of the things that confuses me is having so many arcade style games with different controls on my phone. I like to have a standard layout, and Destiny lets me do this.
Graphics aside, the gamplay is pretty smooth. There's a consistent frame rate, even on early S60 devices like the N-Gage, and you can happily throw your craft around the screen. Up and down controls act as a throttle - you'll move further into the screen (with the camera angle pulling back a touch as well) so you'll progress through the level faster, but you'll have less distance (and therefore reaction time), to avoid the obstacles. It is nice to not be limited to one speed, and depending on my mood, slow and easy is one way - banzai running is another.
There is also a hot-seat multiplayer system where you pass your phone around up to four people each time you lose a life, to see who’s the best square jawed hero. A nice touch, but I don’t see it being played this way very often.
Destiny offers a lot, but it is notoriously hard to get a 3D style arcade game right. With such a small screen available, your graphics need to be just as clean and crisp when they are on the horizon as when they are next to you on the screen - the player should never have to wonder what is going on - Destiny is walking a fine line on this point.
For a first release, Destiny shows off Black Bull Studios as being great programmers, looking for the perfect application. Destiny might not be the one to make them well known - it’s a good solid application that doesn’t disappoint, but ultimately it doesn’t inspire either.
Reviewed by Rafe Blandford at