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The Taken King is Destiny at its addictive best—and worst

“And to keep up with the virtual Joneses, here I am in the Dreadnaught dutifully gambling for new gear. This cold, sinister ship feels more like a palace imagined by Slayer than Caesar’s Palace, but then again—both are dark, windowless places full of elaborately constructed Skinner boxes. At some point, it dawns on me that my new friends-in-loot and I have become the sad souls playing the dollar slots in Vegas at 2 a.m.—sitting alone with watered-down drinks in hand, blank faces peering into a screen, moving only to insert another token and pull the lever. But so what. They can’t stop, and I can’t stop, and none of us can stop and oh god, will I hit it big tonight?”

Is a month of training enough to turn a shooter zero into a head-shot hero?

One month ago, an A.V. Club staffer embarked on a quest to not suck at first-person shooters. With his training at a close, it’s time to look back at our Shooter Tutor experiment and see if he succeeded.

An A.V. Club staffer embarks on a quest to not suck at shooters

Shooter Tutor is a month-long mini-series that finds a first-person shooter expert (Gameological contributor Ryan Smith) attempting to teach a hopelessly bad FPS player (A.V. Club staff writer Alex McCown). Every day for 30 days, Alex will play the Xbox One edition of Destiny in hopes of becoming—at the very least—an adequate FPS player, and each week, both Ryan and Alex will recap their respective experiences. In this first installment, Ryan lays out his curriculum but learns that his very low expectations may not have been low enough:

“That’s a ponderous way of saying that Alex—in the parlance of his new peers—is a total first-person shooter noob. And as such, I had to start him in shooter kindergarten. When he booted up Destiny as a newly revived Guardian on a post-apocalyptic Earth, he looked like Bambi trying to jog on a frozen pond. His aim was off and his movement was all herky jerky. His blue-skinned avatar stopped dead in her tracks like she wore cement shoes when firing at enemies. Worst of all, he didn’t even know to aim down the gun’s sights, which is essential to nearly every FPS of the last decade.”

Every December, instead of searching for a group consensus, Gameological looks back at the year in games through individual perspectives. These are the staffers’ personal takes on a few games that have stuck in their minds for whatever reason—big or small. These are simply the Games We Liked.

Illustration: Luke Meeken

—Our favorite games of 2014, part one

"Eventually, however, the spontaneity and moment-to-moment thrills grew thin, and a realization began to sink in. There’s little to Destiny that calls for this massively multiplayer experience. It offers lots of distractions—various modes and missions, a large armory of guns and armor to earn, and several factions to ally with—but everything flows from a single repetitive activity: flexing your trigger finger. It’s possible to carve out a worthwhile existence in Bungie’s new solar system, but that requires a deep, abiding, passionate, unquenchable love for shooting aliens and robots with massive guns."

—Review: The “shared-world” thrills of Destiny wear thin over time