Activision and Silicon Knights have come together to offer X-Men: Destiny, a brawler with light RPG elements, and the element of choice. Does X-Men: Destiny offer a title fans of the series can be proud of, or does it fail to deliver?

Once in a while we run into a title that probably should’ve been canceled. X-Men: Destiny surely falls under this category and completely face-plants with poor graphics, horrible technical issues, and a bunch of selling points that accounts for nothing more then really bad gimmicks. To be fair there are some decent positives, unfortunately there are far too many negatives to recommend this title.

Let’s start on the presentation. X-Men: Destiny suffers from every issue that an under-developed title suffers from. The graphics just aren’t that great and that’s being kind. Character models, aside from the costumes look really bland, and they don’t animate any better. The cutscenes also suffer from a ton of slow-down and just aren’t paced very well. In fact, they're really just there to pad an already shallow experience. Granted some of them are somewhat enjoyable, however the issues above just kill it.

One of the bright spots is the audio, which has a good variety of voice talent. The conversations are also not half-bad, and resemble the system seen in Mass Effect. Everything else though just really isn’t impressive. There's also absolutely no context to why or how you got your powers. I guess if I go to a pro-mutant rally or attend next year's Comic-Con I'll develop powers of my own.

The gameplay like the presentation is a mixed bag. The combat can become extremely repetitive to say the least. In all honesty, it’s nothing more than a shallow button masher. In the beginning you can select between three characters and power-sets. In theory, each offers a unique way to play, however that really isn’t the case. None of the powers fundamentally change the way you play the game. Players will still be mindlessly mashing buttons and dispatching enemies in the same boring ways. It doesn’t really matter whether your attacks are ranged, quick, or up-close, since as I stated before the game doesn’t change.

You can customize your character by equipping various suits and offensive, defensive, and utility genes that you collect. Each gene offers bonuses, and also has a visual touch, which is a nice addition. This feature makes no sense though, and actually hurts the title. There’s no sense of identity since you’ll be swapping everyone’s powers in and out. I’m really not sure what Silicon Knights was thinking. Why make the player choose a base power, and then allow them tweak with a bunch of basic sub-powers? It would have been much better to just allow the player to choose from a large list of pre-defined powers from the get go.

The level design is poor to say the least, and closely resembles that of Too Human. It’s almost like they cherry-picked ideas from Too Human, failed to implement them any better than their previous disaster, and said “Hey, this is unique. Buy this!” Did they not realize it really wasn’t good the first time? It’s actually quite insulting to both us and fans of the studio. Platforming sections are also included, but like the combat they really don’t offer any enjoyment. They just serve as a buffer between the boring combat sequences.

Last but not least we come to all the technical bugs. Man, where do I begin? X-Men: Destiny has an awful frame-rate that dips well below 30 frames-per-second. This just puts the nail in the coffin to an already poor experience. That’s not all the issues though. There’s tons of screen-tearing, clipping, freezing, and just general bugs and glitches. It’s a complete mess from a technical standpoint.

X-Men: Destiny is the result from a title that should have never made it to gold status. Nearly everything is highly unpolished, and without a doubt X-Men: Destiny is not worth $60. Do yourself a favor and save your money. At least we can hope Spiderman: Edge of Time will be better.