TL;DR: Destiny is not the game I wanted it to be, but it is a ton of fun and shows promise for the future.

As I'm sure most are aware, I've been one of Destiny's biggest supporters since it was first announced. My favorite game company was stepping back out on their own and making the game they wanted to make. What I wanted was a game with amazing gameplay, a huge cinematic story, and longevity. So far Bungie has delivered two out of the three, I think.

Gameplay:

Destiny's gameplay is great. Perhaps the best out of any shooter I've played. The combination of great controls and movement, with a good variety of guns, with super powers works wonders. Moment to moment Destiny is amazing.

I like the different races and how they play differently. The Hive will rush you while they pin you down with long range mortar fire from hard to kill units. The Vex are delightfully numerous, slow, and relentless. All too often I've found myself backed up against a wall by a wave of Vex and wonder how I got in that position. I love the way they lose arms and legs as they die depending on where the final shot hits them. The Cabal feel big and heavy and have a great unit variety. When combined, you're left trying to land precision shots on guys with shields, while dodging incoming rocket fire, while staying out of the crosshairs of heavy machine gun fire, while being harassed by the nimble Psions. Their standard foot soldiers are nothing special, but I love the depth of their lineup. Plus the way their pressurized suits explode with a headshot is pretty great.

The Fallen are something of an exception. I like their units' look well enough, but there's something lacking in terms of danger. Dregs are pushovers despite being a bit nimble. Shanks are not even up to the level of cannon fodder. Captains are neat visually, but aren't tough or dangerous. Their typical flack cannon type gun misses so often, even on Archon type bosses, that I can mostly stand still and not get hurt. The only Fallen Units I fear at all are Vandals. Some of the high level ones have good rates of fire and the sword variants and the cloaked sword variants can be overwhelming with two or three units charging at once.

Missions have been somewhat mixed. The early missions in Old Russia are pretty easy. Missions on the moon and beyond seem to keep getting better and better. I liked the House of Exiles' attack on the Hellmouth. The Hive in general have a great sense of fear and mystery to them. The Vex on Venus are great to fight against and can occasionally overwhelm with numbers and combined arms tactics.The Cabal have been the most fun to fight.

The environments of the four planets have been pretty good. My favorite is easily Mars. It may not be any bigger than the others but it feels huge. The scattered bases and open areas and the Buried City were all great fun. One of my "must haves" for Destiny was getting to go down a street of Freehold with buildings all around me and fortunately, Destiny delivered. Venus... for some reason I... it's not that I don't like it... more, the colors don't agree with me. Size wise it is probably fairly large. Content wise it has a nice variety of buildings and caves and Vex structures. Somehow, I think it could have every good thing and I'd still prefer the other environments though. The Moon is great. Its surface isn't nearly as big as the others, but it still surprised me a few times. Down into the Temple of Crota and the Hellmouth are some great battles and environments. Old Russia is good as well but for some reason feels more contained than the other places. Maybe more of it is indoors? I'm not sure. It might help once the other sections are unlocked.

My favorite mission so far has been the long mission through the Cabal's bases on the way to the Vex spire. Second favorite was The Sword of Crota, for obvious reasons. Third favorite was assaulting the House of Winter's Ketch. I haven't been on an alien ship since the Truth and Reconciliation and it felt great. I was getting giddy as I got closer and closer and realized I'd be going inside. It was a pretty good battle at the entry ramp too!

Public event wise my favorite so far has been preventing Vex sacrifices. If you haven't played it, a strange glowy Vex device spawns in a somewhat defendable location then waves and waves of Vex try and walk into it. It sounds simple, but the difficulty ramps up quite nicely and I have not gotten Gold on either of the two examples I've played so far. I would like to get a closer look at the thing they are trying to approach. I've been so busy defending it I haven't had time.

Story

Unfortunately, Destiny's story as it currently stands is a mixed bag. On the positive side it just oozes hints at more to come. The Fallen have leadership problems. The House of Devils and House of Winter have lost their Prime Servitor which is very important. The Prime of each house is half of a house's two part leadership. What's more, the Servitor's make the Ether that Fallen need to live. I think it might be what they breath. Killing Servitors might literally be denying them room to breath. The Hive are in league with some very dark powers, plus there is every hint in the world that Crota will eventually return. That some of their temples were powered by a dark energy source from beyond the solar system is both scary and a great hint at more to come. The Vex are pretty amazing and frightening if you read up on them. They aren't just Time Traveling Robots. They, in the span of days, have the ability to convert entire worlds into machines that they control. We delayed them doing it on Venus during the mission and Strike and the Cabal are putting up quite the fight against them on Mars. The intelligence of the Vex is also terrifying. In one of the Grimoire cards there was a captured Vex unit perfectly simulating the actions of the researchers studying it. Not just how they would study it, but their lives outside the lab! The Cabal have a lot of depth in their story as well. They don't necessarily want to be on Mars but they are solid soldiers and deal with it. Then there's their tendency to go through rather than around anything that gets in their way. This includes enemies, mountains, and entire planets. It is said they blow up planets that are in their way. Maybe they really are Vogons?!

Also, it is worth noting that it was the Fallen, not the Cabal, that The City had to battle back at Twilight Gap. Apparently the combined force of all the Fallen houses made a coordinated strike on The City. They may have even attacked The City itself as it is said that Fallen Walkers (spider tanks) exchanged fire with The City's big guns! Very interesting.

Now the bad. As it stands Destiny does not have the narrative strength of any Halo. There are only two meaningful story cutscenes, the one with the Queen and the one with the Exo Stranger after your first big encounter with the Vex. There are a lot of questions but very few answers. It's not even a case of smooth on the surface but with a ton of hidden depth. Yes, there's a lot of neat stuff in the Grimoire but the missions themselves are fairly shallow. It's not that Destiny itself has no depth, there's some wonderful story outside the game, but for those that only play the game it is going to feel incomplete. And even for those like me who are going to read every tidbit... it still feels a bit incomplete. Halo wasn't very deep either, but on day three it had a beginning, middle, and end. I always expected Destiny would have no immediate end, but the middle is shallow too. I think the current structure would work if there was say twice as much in game content, but with only five short-ish mission per race it feels like you didn't learn much even after beating all the missions. That's unfortunate and that's why Destiny will likely get some low review scores. :(

Longevity

All that said, Destiny shows a lot of future promise. As previously stated, we have multiple references to a power or powers outside our Solar System that are fueling and perhaps even commanding our enemies. I can't imagine that those powers will remain a mystery forever. We know the Hive, Vex, and Cabal have all conquered many worlds. Any success we have against them now is only a setback for them. They will return and probably with more power. The Fallen are interesting. It's unknown (to me) if there are any left beyond our solar system but their power struggles are different than the other race's. There's a lot of questions there that feel like they will be answered. What dark power was powering the Hive and leading the Vex? Who is the Exo Stranger and who was she talking too? Someone who had to cut engines and remain hidden... I highly doubt she is an agent of The Traveler. For what she said about choosing sides, "even if it is the wrong side", I'm not entirely convinced she is even a force for good.

Gameplay wise there is plenty left to do now that I've hit level 20. I have not yet fully upgraded even one subclass or beaten all the standard strikes, or played all the multiplayer modes, or played the Raid, or even just gone exploring. It is also extremely likely that there are other missions we have yet to play. The Destiny Tracker site has been exactly accurate so far and it lists killing people for the Queen which Bungie just confirmed yesterday. It lists going back to Old Russia to hunt down another Fallen Kell. It even lists a Raid on The Reef, which seems highly likely as we've seen prerelease scenes of Guardians walking on The Reef and all we've gotten so far is a pair of cutscenes. There are some interesting faction things like some sort of voting system that will eventually come into play for rewards. With Halo I always wanted more Halo. Firefight almost fufilled that, but its bad online laggy implementation held it way back. Destiny seems like it can deliver more and more gameplay and is actually fun to play with a team.

Right now, even the fastest advancing of us can't really claim to have seen all of Destiny, but whether the way Bungie is doing things is the best way is... for now... very uncertain. If they can deliver more content, especially story heavy content and answer at least some of the questions they've posed then it might come out ok. If not... it will still be fun to replay, many of us have replayed the Halos many times over with zero new content, but it will not have the story and popular culture impact that Halo had...