X-Men: Destiny is suppose to be that one game that finally allows you to create a mutant the way you want it and have the freedom of choosing paths, but somewhere down the line it faltered.

The game follows a completely different continuity from previous X-Men games by using the current X-Men comic series, where Charles Xavier is dead and Emma Frost and Cyclops are now in charge of a somewhat broken X-Men team in San Francisco. A rally to bring peace between humans and mutants goes wrong, thanks Magneto’s brotherhood.

When starting the game, you have three different characters to choose from. Aimi Yoshida comes from Japan, after her father placed her on a boat to San Fransisco. With no answers she is confused as to why her father abandoned her. Grant Alexander is a football player who is at the wrong place at the wrong time. Adrian Luca was raised to be a “purifier” and to hate mutants, until an incident happened that changed the course of human/mutant relations.

During the intro a catastrophe awakens the mutant power of the character you selected. You then choose how your character will play throughout the game. Your character is thrown into the middle of a war between other mutants, mutant haters known as “Purifiers”, and other villains from the X-Men Universe. Your character will choose between 3 different mutant abilities: Density Control (physical abilities), Energy Projection (energy blasts), and Shadow Matter (weapon manipulation and quickness).

As you progress, you are given choices like which side you want to take, which gains favors with either the X-Men or the Brotherhood. During specific scenes you will unlock one of two special powers that will help you along your journey. For my first playthrough I chose Aimi with energy projection skills for long-ranged combat.

The game had me mainly pressing square, triangle and learning combos. Combos will change as you spend orb points. You can level up skills and learn to combo them with your gained abilities, allowing for longer attacks, extra damage and status effects. With the projectile mutant abilities by the end of the game, two skills (beam and energy blast) alone won me the game with no problem. Again, it’s just using square and triangle for attacks over and over again, which took out nearly everyone.

While your character has their own mutant abilities, you also get to customize the mutant genes they carry. Offering multiple mutant genes, including 2 characters not in the game, you can customize their physical attributes, allowing for more damage and abilities, defensive attributes for shields, and a special gene that increases health/healing factors. Overall you get about 45 different mutant genes, 3 per mutantthat includes Cyclops, Gambit, Wolverine, Psylocke, Magneto and more. Character costumes are also unlockable, and by equipping all 4 character specific genes and costume, you unlock a powerful force. Abilities also level up by spending points gained by defeating enemy.

Difficulty wise the game felt no different. In medium or hard difficulty, the AI played exactly same way. The only difference was that the enemies do more damage. Carrying over my skills from the first playthrough, difficult mode was easy. This time, I chose the second skill set rather than the my first choice (choosing the energy blast over the laser beam) and knowing the bosses weaknesses just made the game a breeze. Overall I only died about 7 times total. 5 of them were on the normal playthrough, and for an achievement you had to die 100 times.

It seems like Silicon Knights  just pushed the game out without polishing it, since there are choppy frames within lackluster fights. There are certain epic battles that make the game look awesome, but then it goes back to being choppy. The horrible music didn’t help, which I didn’t pay any attention to.

The game had a neat concept, but about midway through, they just dropped the ball on the plot, which had many possibilities. The ending felt rushed, as it just required you to run around buildings or defeat X amount of enemies over and over.

The game is about 4-5 hours long, but is actually less if you don’t factor the long talking scenes. It doesn’t help that these dialogue scenes can not be skipped. The mutant powers you can select and the incorporation of the X Genes allow you to create a unique and powerful mutant who can take care of any threat. You will probably just equip Cyclops’ ability to gain extra mutant abilities, Wolverines regeneration abilities, and Colossus/Emma Frosts Defensive Armor to make the game easy. The game allows you to play new game plus, but keeps you with the same character and mutant ability you chose. Each character has a specific story and lines in the game, so it’s up to you if you want to do the same thing over to level up and play with all the powers. This is a game that is better to rent than to buy.

Grade: C-

Available now for the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 from Activision

Chris Del Castillo

Growing up Chris watched a lot of the original Saturday morning cartoons and developed a love for arts and animation. Growing up he tried his hand at animation and eventually script writing, but even more his love of video games, anime and technology grew.

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