Micro-Management Overload
A Review of Destiny
Richard Roy
Destiny bills itself as the definitive, 3-D, real-time God game. Well, as far as I know it is the ONLY 3-D, real-time God game and after spending enough time with Destiny, there may well be reasons why this is so. This is a shame really, because Destiny is an extremely ambitious game that tries to add elements that other similar styled God games have left out. Unfortunately, the end result is a game that tries to do so much that it becomes overwhelmingly tedious to the point of frustration.
As with Microprose's Civilization 2 (Destiny's obvious inspiration), the goal of Destiny is to guide the development of mankind from the Stone Age to the Space Age. Starting from a single settlement, called a COH (Center of Habitation), you must slowly advance both technologically and culturally through research and management of your cities. With each new advance, further options are added to build new production facilities, military equipment, and access to further specialized areas of research. Be the first to wipe out your neighbours or build the first space launch facility and victory is yours.
First the good points about Destiny. The amount of user defined options gives it near infinite replayability for which Destiny's designers must be applauded. Everything from the starting point in history to begin (for those wishing short games) to the resource availability, natural disasters, terrain effects, and victory conditions, virtually guarantees a new experience each time you sit down to play. In addition, the huge variety of buildings, units, and research categories makes Destiny not just ambitious but truly epic. The online encyclopedia alone can provide you with hours, if not days, of reading material.
The first thing you'll notice about Destiny is that it's lacking that sense of wonder that made Civilization 2 so appealing. Compared to Civ 2's beautiful terrain, Destiny's gameworld is a veritable wasteland. Even when viewed in 3-D mode, the landscape is essentially featureless except for the occasional unit or city. One of the best aspects of playing Civ 2 was exploring the darkness around your first city and gradually pushing back the frontiers of your territory. In Destiny the whole world is already presented to you from the start of the game negating any need for exploring except to find the locations of neighbouring cities.
As dry and desolate as the terrain is, opening up your city management screen does not do much to improve things. Managing your cities is like running a spreadsheet. While admittedly very intuitive, it lacks any sort of visual flash - it's simply scrolling through menu after menu of decisions to make. What's even worse is that many times Destiny won't register your mouse clicks right away. Combine this with Destiny's real-time based engine (with an option for turn-based) and you have the makings of frustration in the extreme.
Even more annoying are some of the gameplay quirks. To raise your education levels within the cities you must build academies and progress up to schools, and later universites. This is all fine and dandy, but Destiny needlessly complicates things by having you maintain a ratio of schools to your population. In order to keep your education level up, you must constantly check and make sure you have enough academies, and the worst part is that the incomplete documentation does not tell you what these ratios are. Even stranger is the fact that your national education level is calculated according to the average of your cities' education levels. This means that if you conquer a city that has a lower education level you could be shooting yourself in the foot since your ability to do higher level research is based on your national educational level. Likewise, starting a new city at any time other than the beginning of the game is a definite no-no! Even with the ability to use options like facility autostart and governors handling the routine tasks of keeping your people housed and maintaining your education and health levels, the amount of micro-management is excessive and tedious. You would be wise not to create or conquer more than three or four cities.
Speaking of combat, the tactical 3-D combat module is, in a word, horrendous. This element of the game is just plain ugly and doesn't add anything to the game - if anything, it detracts from it. The units themselves look like an homage to cardboard cutouts. They lack any sort of animation and when moving appear to just float over the terrain. In real-time mode, once combat is joined, battles degenerate into a click-fest with the computer pounding your units while you frantically attempt to navigate the menus to issue your orders. Fortunately, you can have the computer automatically calculate the battles which provides much more satisfactory results.
Maybe if Destiny had been released before Civilzation 2 I would have have sounded more positive in this review. But, as it stands now, Destiny is outclassed on every level by Civ 2. Quite simply, there is no reason to purchase Destiny if you already have Civ 2, unless you're a die-hard strategy gamer willing to put up with Destiny's many problems. And if you don't already have Civ 2, what are you waiting for? One of the best PC games ever released is waiting for you!
Gamer's Zone Scorecard
| Product: |
Destiny |
| Company: |
Interactive Magic
|
| Cost: |
$49.95 |
System Requirements:
486/66 Mhz Processor, 8 MB RAM,
Windows 95, Double Speed CD-ROM, SVGA.
Breakdown:
Fun Factor 2
Graphics 2
Sound 2
Interface 3
Replayability 4
Overall Score:
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