Review by: Brandon "X-Gene" Cackowski-Schnell

X-Men: Destiny is the worst kind of licensed game. It’s short, uninspiring, poorly written and shoehorns in the license in a way that plays like the game was made solely out of some sort of license inspired contractual obligation. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I would think this game was a movie tie-in game, which should tell you everything you need to know about it.

Professor X is dead, killed by Bastion, a sentient robot from the future, and Magneto is in hiding. During a San Francisco peace rally held in Professor X’s memory, Cyclops, leader of the X-Men, is making nice with the mayor of San Franciso when the rally is attacked by the Purifiers, a group of anti-mutant zealots. Against the backdrop of the rally you’re asked to pick your character, a choice between the young daughter of Japanese mutants, a teenage Purifier supporter and my character of choice, a lunkheaded football player with no thoughts of mutants, or anything else, in his head. As mutant powers usually manifest during puberty or times of extreme stress, the rally’s explosive attack is a nice framing device for letting you pick your base power from the choices of stone punching powers, energy shooting powers, or dark matter blade making powers. Unfortunately the opening is the most interesting and dynamic part of the game and things quickly go downhill from there.

The game is labeled as an action-RPG, but in reality, there’s more in common with action games like God of War than anything else. You get experience points for defeating enemies but the only thing you can level up is your abilities. There are choices, some based on what your next tier of powers will be but most affecting whether you side with the noble X-Men or the selfish Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. This is where the RPG elements end though. There’s no character progression beyond powers, nothing to buy, no meaningful side quests or character interaction of any sort. Even the choices are meaningless as it only affects who fights alongside you and some minor story bits. The plot is largely unchanged regardless of which faction you join up with which is ridiculous given how ideologically different the two parties are.

There are, however, a lot of are walled off fights with increasingly powerful enemies. The game takes place in an earthquake ravaged San Francisco and this earthquake has made some liberal rearrangements to the city’s highways and byways, turning the town into an endless corridor of buildings and rock outcroppings. The strategy quickly becomes: move to a new X-Men marker, fight a bunch of dudes with the number of enemies conveniently displayed in smashable text, have an unskippable, poorly written conversation with a famous mutant, move to the next marker and repeat the previous steps until you come to a boss battle which isn’t much different from any of the other fights. Along the way you can find challenge arenas to score more equipment but they only differ from the main missions in that they’re timed, because everyone knows that the way to make a boring fight more interesting is to add a timer.

The plot incorporates the idea that mutants’ powers are being stolen and given to the purifiers, an odd choice given how opposed to mutants they are, and as a result, mutant genetic material, called X-Genes are littered throughout the streets. Putting aside the ick factor contained in consuming another person’s DNA to obtain powers, the idea is a good one on paper. Genes fall into three categories: offensive boosts your attacks such as giving you frosty knuckles courtesy of Iceman, defensive boosts your health bar or increases your mana retrieval rate and utility is everything else, such as speed boosts that shock enemies, or the chance to dodge projectiles. If you find all three X-Genes from a particular mutant and find their costume you can equip all of them and unlock their special X-Mode power.

In reality the system is far less interesting. Part of the problem is that some of the powers are extensions of each other with no real discernible difference other than one you allows you to upgrade it to higher levels and the others don’t, such as with the offensive genes for Juggernaut, Avalanche and Colossus. Others are carbon copies of each other save for some minor appearance tweaks. Finally, the genes and costumes you acquire are totally random so it’s impossible to plan a power-up strategy. In fact, I played through the entire game and never came across enough X-Genes and costumes to unlock the X-Mode power for any of the mutants. When one of your game’s features is based on an entirely random collection system, something is wrong.