X-Men: Destiny (Xbox 360)
The X-Men series features plenty of stories focused on the uneasy relationship between humankind and mutants. On one hand, there are definitely mutants with superpowers who use their abilities for selfish or evil purposes, but humans tend to lump all mutants together and end up mistreating mutants who are interested in a more peaceful coexistence. The X-Men believe in a future where neither side needs to fear the other, but the Brotherhood believe that mutants must instead assert their superiority over humans or they’ll be made to suffer constant prejudice. X-Men: Destiny makes an interesting proposal in how the player can approach this ideological divide, the player able to actually choose which side they wish to support, and while the title is meant to reference this idea of choosing your fate, it actually seems much of this action role-playing game is predestined to go a certain way.
X-Men: Destiny begins in what looks like a major step to mend the rift between humans and mutants as a man named Luis Reyes has organized an effort to have San Francisco be a city safe for mutants and humans alike. While this is quick to gain support from the X-Men, regular citizens aren’t so easily swayed, especially those who are members of the Purifiers who aim to wipe out mutants. An attack on Luis Reyes’s rally ends up triggering a cascading series of disastrous events, San Francisco getting torn apart as no one is quite sure who is responsible but everyone is quick to fall back on their prejudices when it comes to who to blame. In a strange turn of fate, you play as a character who showed up to the event a human and only discovered thanks to the attack that you were harboring mutant powers all along. There are three possible characters to pick from, Aimi, Adrian, and Grant all having unique backstories that sadly don’t amount to a whole lot. Their character histories will pop up in occasional small bits of dialogue, Aimi coming to grips with her father sending her away from Japan on her own and Adrian is the son of a famous Purifier and has to readjust his world view immensely, but Grant was just a college football player. It’s hard to say you miss out on any deeper story by picking Grant though because of how little their past matters in the grand scheme of things, but generally making choices matter is one of the game’s weak points.
Over the course of the game there will be moments where you will be asked to assist the Brotherhood or the X-Men. Sometimes it’s more a choice of choosing to accept or decline a mission while other moments you must directly refuse one to aid the other, and over time you’ll curry favor with a faction for assisting them with their side missions. The choices here try to at least not frame the Brotherhood as outright evil in their efforts, the game wanting to depicting them more as extremists like with one early choice involving whether you go for the Brotherhood’s more destructive solution to a problem or the X-Men’s safer approach. On occasion you can even say the Brotherhood does have a point, like at one point where you discover a group called the U-Men are harvesting mutant DNA for experimental use, the Brotherhood’s stance is to wipe out all the data and DNA in their facility. However, something curious happens if you choose to go with the X-Men over the Brotherhood in this situation, and that is you basically fight a group of enemies in the same place as you would have with the Brotherhood. In fact, most choices are less about results and more about which superheroes or supervillains fight alongside you in the nearly identical battle afterward, and save for the final chapter of the game, all boss fights will be similar and the story unfurls without diverting its course. You still have to fight the same heroes and villains on both sides of the story until you reach the last missions where the fights that change still aren’t too different anyway, and what’s more, you can just choose to go with the either side when it matters so earning points with either faction isn’t too important. There are a few times you can’t do optional missions along the way if you’re too chummy with one side, but otherwise the main result of picking your allies is a short cutscene after the story wraps up.
X-Men: Destiny has frequent subtitle inaccuracies that can outright say different things than what the characters are saying, but it is a shame that this game squandered ideas that could have worked. The card-throwing Cajun Gambit actually leads a third faction that nearly provides an interesting perspective from someone who hasn’t chosen a side in the conflict, and the Purifiers being the main antagonistic group you face could have meant the Brotherhood could have moved away from being the “evil” side in this conflict. The bones of the narrative overall are fine for setting up frequent conflict with superpowered opponents and more tech or weapon-focused foes alike, and while it is definitely a shame your choices don’t matter, the truth is a game’s story can be good even if your decisions are just an illusion. Sometimes it’s less about diverting the path of a narrative and more about adding a personal stamp to the tale through how you make your character speak at certain times, but while it would be reasonable for players to be a bit disappointed that the game tried to use narrative control as a selling point despite your limited impact on the plot, the real issue is this could have been the way X-Men: Destiny diverted your focus away from the actual action on show. With a compelling narrative to make you think, then you wouldn’t notice how repetitive, shallow, and mindless the constant battles end up being.
When X-Men: Destiny begins, you pick which of three powers you want to commit to for your run through the game. Density Control manifests mostly as coating your body in stone for stronger strikes, Energy Projection is about firing beams and blasts, and Shadow Matter at least seems a bit more imaginative as you form weapons of darkness around you. Shadow Matter is the quick attacker of the three though, and ultimately the basics of the three powers aren’t really going to change how you approach most battles because you don’t need to change up your strategy for a shocking amount of them. Hammer the X button repeatedly to do your basic attack string and that’s usually going to be enough to wipe out a standard enemy. Point yourself to the next one and keep up the button pressing and soon that crowd of foes will be gone and it’s fairly likely you got away without much damage. The game reuses the same basic enemies for an embarrassing amount of time and even their replacements don’t shift their tactics up much to make you need to reassess your battle approach, but what’s worse is the game does throw in a few new enemies from time to time and they still can’t break you away from effective monotonous attacking.
A guy with a gun pesters you from afar and you just run up to him to unleash your basic combo. An enemy has a flamethrower that can deal heavy damage if you stand in his path, so you go behind him and do the attack string. What’s even sadder though is the bosses are often barely a step up from the regular enemies save for a few cases. A battle that sounds exciting like taking on Gambit or the Juggernaut doesn’t even require you to take their powers very seriously. Even if they do manage to land a hit while you’re in their face smacking them around, you can often weather it easily enough and then go back to pounding them brainlessly without fear you’ll lose the fight. Part of this comes from the fact the game is way too friendly with health pick-ups, most every battle arena and boss fight having containers full of them laying around to bail you out. There are some efforts to try and discourage your X mashing antics, one robotic foe has stomps that force you back so you at least need to take a break if it starts doing that, but even the final boss doesn’t require much thought to wear down, although that’s partly because they’re basically a slight upgrade to a different enemy type you’ve faced a few times before with no trouble. Funnily enough, the penultimate boss is perhaps the only one that can be called a good fight, as you need to identify patterns to survive and damage sticks thanks to there being no healing on hand. There are a few other attempts at pattern bosses, but they’re so straightforward they become repetitive and dull in their own ways.
The saddest part of the brain dead combat though is the role-playing game side of things actually provides you with a lot of interesting options that could have thrived in a better game. Your mutant powers do manifest new abilities over the course of the story, and there is some potential use for abilities that can hit multiple enemies at once if you want to speed things up for example. You are made to choose which of two power options to go with at these moments, which could have lead to diverse playstyles if there was really any need to use stronger powers beyond trying to push through a battle a little faster. A more interesting touch though involves your suits and collectible X Genes laying around levels and serving as rewards for doing optional Challenge Arenas. The Challenge Arenas at least sometimes introduce a new objective like destroying objects instead of just beating all the baddies, although that actually tends to make them easier, but the rewards can give your character new options and advantages in a fight. You can set an Offensive, Defensive, and a Utility gene based on powers from recognizable X-Men and Brotherhood members, so you can have something like Ice Man’s ice enhance your attacks, Toad’s pheromones weaken enemies near you, or Surge’s electricity give you a lightning fast sprint. However, if you commit all slots to the same hero and put on their related costume, you can also basically copy their unique power, so you can do things like unleash the earthquake powers of Avalanche if you commit to one mutant set-up or mix and match boosts based on the individual use of the genes. With options like turning your dodge into a damaging charge though you can make easy battles even easier and powers that boost health or defense can discourage needing to worry about danger even more too. You do get experience from beating enemies for leveling up powers and genes to make them more effective, but again, these are too much for this game’s pitiful combat encounters even though they would be smart inclusions in a game that actually knew how to put up a fight.
THE VERDICT: In X-Men: Destiny, your destiny is to mash the X button to easily trounce the constant waves of uninspired and repeated enemies in your path. For the most part, a new boss character still won’t ask you to break away from mindless basic attack strings, and things like stronger mutant powers and the ability customization are more like ways to more efficiently clear yet another bland battle. The plot about picking sides sadly can’t muster up much of a difference for whichever allegiance you go with, but the narrative about mutant struggle did bring in enough characters and raise some questions that could have made for a good set-up to a superhero story. Instead, you’re left to easily smash your way through to the next mission, even the excitement of recognizable characters often ruined by how underwhelming a battle against them can be.
And so, I give X-Men: Destiny for Xbox 360…
A TERRIBLE rating. X-Men: Destiny presents a brisk 8 mission story that is ultimately unambitious despite the hints of potential, but the narrative isn’t doing much wrong itself besides failing to match the subtitles. It could have worked harder to make the two paths more distinct, but the focus is more on the Purifier threat and what evolves from investigating the attack on the Rally. Individual lines can be poorly written and it’s a shame the game didn’t want to explore things like the three playable mutants’ backstories more, but there could be a version of X-Men: Destiny where the choices weren’t hyped up so much and the story could just be a way to guide the action. Of course, when we look at the action, that’s where the game becomes a tedious slog, and while it interrupts itself at points to make you do simple climbing segments that are almost not worth mentioning, X-Men: Destiny can’t hide the fact it’s battles are almost always as basic as they were at the start. New enemy types aren’t disruptive or dangerous enough and your basic attacks are too reliable to really necessitate digging into other abilities to gain an edge. Even that penultimate boss is good not because of opening up attack options for you, just that it poses a threat that you respond to in ways beyond just running up and hammering the attack button until the fight’s over. The game does give you a guard and parry that could have been necessitated more and making certain enemies smart enough to counter standard attacks could force the player into fights where they’d need to actually shake up their battle strategy. It’s not like X-Men: Destiny is walking in uncharted territory here, there are plenty of games that incentivize breaking away from a standard attack combo in a myriad of ways, and it could even be as simple as making the basic attacks too weak to harm the bigger foes. Instead, X-Men: Destiny lets you settle into the yawn-inducing rhythm of pointing in the direction of enemies and unleashing the same attacks over and over without much need to think about anything else, and so it’s hard to get enthused about anything beyond those moments where a recognizable character crops up and brings up warm memories of what they did in better X-Men media.
The sad truth of X-Men: Destiny isn’t that it had flawed ideas, it is that it had a wide range of good ideas but they were squandered thanks to an inability to follow through on them. The mutant powers and character customization would thrive in a game with a more robust combat system, and the story could host interesting branching paths based on how you choose to handle the threat to mutantkind. You have these strong systems and concepts but then all the game can manage is a mostly linear adventure where the fights fail to draw out the depth of the player’s abilities. It’s like if you built two full railroad stations, a track, and a locomotive, but you did it just so you can travel to your next door neighbor’s house. X-Men: Destiny shouldn’t have been a slog, but when it came time to actualize all the ideas in the development team’s heads, there were no thoughts left for the actual concrete elements of the action.