Destiny: First PS4 Hands-on Experience Preview

 Preview: We Had A Date With Destiny

April 28, 2014 By Mont Brown

In our hands-on experience with Destiny, we think Bungie are taking an over saturated multiplayer experience and turning it on its head. Destiny is a redevelopment of formulaic shoot-em-ups long over due a new direction.  We spent the first few hours on patrol missions which we think is a great place to begin.

The patrol structure is purposely designed to be laid back and a great way to ease you into the gameplay's control mechanics with locations that cover both indoor and outdoor environments. You can explore till your hearts content searching for hidden treasures, collecting uraniums, triggering beacons for side missions, disrupting enemy mining operations and assassinating enemy leaders. The options are truly immense and the great thing is that it can be done your way.

Along your patrol you will come across other players also on patrol, these may occur in the form of social events that will have you tasked against a larger more challenging event. When this happens you may choose to follow the new player on their mission or find your own path to venture like Chuck Norris the Lonewolf. This seamlessly dynamic fluid matchmaking events is really what helps to make Bungie's Destiny game feel uniquely different to other similar games in its genre. We really liked how other gamers could randomly appear in our game to interact and socialize while on Patrol.

Strike missions are a little more upfront than Patrol. These co-op style games have a clear mission agenda with big boss battles and loads of treasure to gather at the end. Strike missions were created to be played over and over, presenting a prominent source of entertainment for most fans looking for direct objectives.

Our first hands-on experience on a strike mission took us to the devil's lair as seen in the video clip down below. Making our way through an old abandoned warehouse. We were armed and ready for a fight. Strike is just one of the many interesting elements in Bungie's new re-thinking process when it comes to Destiny's co-operation gameplay with each of the 3 different guardian classes fulfilling a particular role during battle.

Warlocks operate as the brawn and heavy artillery in the dynamic trio, they can annihilate clusters of enemy using destructive Void energy. Hunters are fast on their feet, they can dish out a lot of pain from both medium and long range positions, while Titans operate in the positions of support.

Each of the three classes also have their own specialized explosive grenades and super special skills that gamers can access by pushing the R2 and L2 buttons at the same time. Apart from this, each class does have very little differences, especially when using the abundance of weaponries found across the world of Destiny.

Each weapon has its pros and cons, for example an automatic rifle may be great for tearing down the enemy in quick short burst but may have limited cartridge size, or a sniper rifle could have excellent accuracy but slow to reload. These are all the things players will have to take into consideration when choosing between shotguns, side arms and sniper rifles in the heat of battle. We will have more on the weapons of Destiny later this week so make sure you stay tuned for that. Players will be able to level up the array of guns discovered in Destiny with each weapon specially designed by Bungie's very own weapons designer.

Destiny Available to Pre-Order Now

We are super excited to see the finish product after our initial run-through of the game. The gameplay was a lot of fun and the graphics were outstanding. We think fans of the FPS genre will most certainly be in for a treat, but what we really enjoyed above all this was the ability to simply decided what we wanted to do, when it came to Destiny's social and matchmaking features.

There is still more to discover from Destiny with more details set to be revealed at this years E3 2014 event.  Destiny will be launching on September 9, 2014 on Playstation 4 and is available to Pre-Order Today.