X-Men Destiny

We’ve heard a lot about X-Men Destiny, Silicon Nights newest title, but San Diego Comic-Con is the first time anyone has had a chance to play the game, so we eagerly jumped into the fray and tested out of new found mutant powers.

The game starts at a mutant peace rally, where players have the opportunity to pick between the game’s three main characters: Aimi Yoshida, a fifteen-year-old Japanese girl, Grant Alexander, a good ‘ol American boy from Georgia who has dreams of playing professional football, and Adrian, a member of an anti-mutant group called the purifiers. We chose Grant because he’s buff and because we love America.

At this point in the game, we also got to choose our primary power set. These three power types function a bit like traditional classes in a RPG. Density control allows you to control the density of your body mass and basically hit things harder. Energy projection lets you do a lot of long ranged attacks, and shadow matter lets you do some cool teleportation moves and basically functions a bit like an RPG rogue. We chose shadow matter, because we have a fascination with Nightcrawler, and because we love America.

The peace rally quickly turns into chaos as Magneto seemingly attacks the crowd. As pedestrians flee, a gang of anti-mutant Purifiers attacks. Fortunately, our mutant powers have just manifested and we handily beat them down. Each character can perform light and heavy attacks to unleash a breadth of combos, but the more they attack the more they build op an energy meter that can be used to unleash powerful super moves. With shadow matter we are able to create a tornado of black energy and take out several enemies by sucking them towards us.

After crashing through the city streets we come across our first X-gene. These X-Genes act as power modifiers, basically changing your powers in one of three ways: attack, defense, or utility. We got one of Avalanche’s utility X-Genes, which allows us to create a slide of dark matter enabling us to quickly move across the environment. Other X-Genes will allow you to beef up your attacks, create buffs, or heal yourself. A player who collects all three types of X-Genes belonging to a specific mutant – as well as their costume – will unlock new powers in something called X-Mode. While X-Mode is activated, players will take on new abilities specific to that mutant. If you have Quicksilver’s suite and all his X-Genes equipped, for example, you will be able to perform short burst of speed, in which all of the enemies around you slow down and you dash around the environment.

Our time with X-Men: Destiny left us hopeful. The game still has a few rough edges. The combat is a little simplistic, we still haven’t warmed up to the new characters, and we’d like to see how player’s choices affect events later in the game. However, X-Men: Destiny could be one of those titles that comes together in the end. Check out the games newest trailer and screens below.