Bad news, X-Men. It appears your destiny is to appear in what very likely might be the year's lamest full-priced game.
X-Men Destiny
For: Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Wii, Nintendo DS
From: Silicon Knights/Activision
Rating: Teen Billy O'Keefe
The bad vibes rush in almost instantly, too.
X-Men Destiny's premise drops you into the shoes of your own custom-designed mutant - except it doesn't, because outside of a few choices regarding attack strategy, you're not allowed to design your character at all.
Destiny provides three rather bland character designs from which to choose.
Even a pitifully rudimentary character creator would have done wonders for this game getting off on the right foot.
Then again, once the action starts, that begins to feel small compared with what follows.
Destiny's quest structure is pretty straightforward.
Numerous recognisable X-Men show up to poke fun at your inexperience and hand out objectives during an attack by an anti-mutant force known as the Purifiers, and a stock morality system allows you to fight alongside or turn against the X-Men.
This might make for a cool story if Destiny didn't continually distill down to a rote series of "Defeat X number of enemies" missions.
It doesn't even matter which side you pick.
The mission remains the same whether you're good or bad, and all that changes is the 12-pack of clones you deal with on the way to encountering another 20 enemies and doing the exact same thing.
Destiny flashes a flicker of inspiration with its X-Genes, Suits and X-Mode systems, which let you upgrade and alter your mutant's look and abilities as you accrue experience in combat.
In contrast to how simplistic everything else is, these systems are almost overdesigned, with needlessly complicated menus and formulas masking a system that, beneath the clutter, offers a lot of combat options for your mutant to explore.
But again, it doesn't matter, because Destiny does little with it when the action plods along.
The game's combat is insultingly easy and mindlessly simple even with a multitude of powers at the ready, and the excessive animation attached to every attack bogs it down even further.
Throw in some unintended graphical slowdown - a baffling problem given how little Destiny's obsolete graphics appear to challenge either system's horsepower - and the tedium reaches critical levels.
A simple combat repertoire might have sufficed if there was a sense of speed and elegance to mixing moves together, but Destiny never even comes close.
The best and worst news about the full-priced Destiny is that it's over quickly - four hours and change if you don't poke around to find collectables.
The short length would seem to fly in the face of the upgrade and morality systems.
But by the time you get a glimpse of the finish line and face a final boss whose attack philosophy is no more complicated than the hundreds of grunts you already took down, it's clear the game has nothing better to do than just end.
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