I have a feeling Silicon Knights had some loftier ideas when they first started this game. That, or they had a vision that they just didn’t know how to get to.

If you’ve seen the ads, then you know the big shtick of X-Men: Destiny. It’s supposed to be about discovering your powers and trying to find your place in this brand new world. Hell, the game could be using X-Men as an analogous vehicle to adulthood and growing up. It could even have been about simple political differences, left-wing versus right-wing, anarchist versus government, or a variety of other ideals in the world.

What the game instead ends up being is “follow these rails, decide what powers you want, do a few quests for one side or the other, and then no matter what choices you’ve made so far, join either team that you wish”. The game is pretty much structured that, even if you’ve been batting for the X-Men up until that point, you can still choose to go Brotherhood instead.

It might not be the fault of Silicon Knights, though. Granted, I’m willing to give them a lot of leniency despite Denis Dyack being a dick. I enjoyed Too Human, after all, and would have loved to see more games like it. I just feel like this game was supposed to be more, and just didn’t have the time to be anything more than it was. I don’t just mean “longer than five hours”, either.

The game feels like Silicon Knights took the Too Human engine and gameplay and reverted it back to more traditional controls, much to my chagrin. I honestly loved streaking across the battlefield slicing and dicing robots apart, throwing in the odd combination here and there to unleash new attacks or abilities.

These mechanics still exist, but have been reverted to simple button mashing. The finesse is gone. I know it seems simple, but it makes a big difference. Slaughtering one’s foes in torrential waves of death just isn’t as elegant when you have to be mashing buttons. Then again, I was the sort of person that knew how to play Too Human properly.

Instead, you’ll be pressing the same buttons repeatedly, and if you’re lucky you’ll choose an abilities path that will grant you combat moves that will actually change things up a bit.

The game didn’t necessarily need more powers, though. It could have used more time with your powers and more abilities to upgrade them. Ultimately the only benefit you get for leveling abilities is greater strength or a longer duration. There’s only so much customization offered, and in the end your character won’t feel all that different from another player’s.

Which is ultimately the problem with the story as well. You don’t get to choose much of the outcome of events. Granted, this is how it happens in any game. Dragon Age has the same final dungeon no matter what you choose throughout the game. The difference is in what soldiers or clans are there to assist you and what walls of text are placed in the ending. Still, there’s enough choice and enough subtle differences that it can still vary from what another player has chosen and thus seen.

The closest sort of choice you have in X-Men: Destiny is whether you’ll complete quests for the Brotherhood or the X-Men, and some of your choices will lock out certain quests. There’s no weight of destiny, of really making choices.

If X-Men: Destiny were priced at a budget and marketed as a beginner’s RPG, it might have been different. It introduces the concepts of customization and choice, after all, which are pretty big factors in a role-playing game. Yet instead, it was billed as a more grandiose epic, and on that front it simply failed to deliver.

As such, I cannot quite recommend this game so readily. It’s not bad, but it’s not really good either. It simply exists, you’ll play it for a few hours, and when you’re finished, well, you’ll be finished. You won’t be tempted to return for a second helping, and a year later you won’t be thinking “man, that game was fun, I should give it another go”. You’ll simply have played it, and the world will move on.