‘Destiny Rising’ Is Gacha Hell With Decent Gameplay, But No Clear Audience

The closed alpha went live for Destiny Rising yesterday, the NetEase-made mobile game that Bungie had close to nothing to do with and…you can immediately tell. While NetEase skated by things like gacha monetization, an avalanche of currencies and a convoluted power gain system in its initial reveal, all of that is on full display in the alpha, even if you cannot actually purchase anything yet.

In other words, Destiny Rising is what it was always going to be, a mobile game. A very stereotypical mobile game.

There are some positives here. I actually do think this plays pretty well, especially if you hook up a Bluetooth controller (I just cannot do FPS touch controls). It does…feel like Destiny, to a certain extent, so credit where it’s due there. Outside of its close-up character models, it actually looks halfway decent as well, I mean, for what it is. Maybe like, late PS3 graphics, but still, it’s passable, and as this is an alpha, perhaps it improves in time. I also theoretically like the idea of playing as different Destiny heroes with unique kits and set weapon classes as that breaks up the more traditional formula of the main game. However, given that the system is inevitably hooked into gacha mechanics, that sort of ruins the whole thing.

The worst part of the core game itself is the writing and voicework. The world does not remotely carry the same tone as the main game, not even close. My Wolf character is incredibly annoying as says things like “a friend in need is a friend indeed!” The legendary Kabr is the biggest dork you’ve ever met. Skorri greeted me with a “Yo!” The awful script is matched only by the worse voicework, and that is even excluding AI “filler” voices for unfinished recording that sounds less like AI and more like a text-to-speech program from 2009. All of this is so bad it encouraged me to play the game silently most of the time.

And then there’s monetization.

The gacha system almost perfectly mirrors any other gacha system you’ve seen. Four and five star characters where the latter have a 1% drop rate and at best, a mercy timer. And they are no doubt going to be stronger, especially if you can “dupe” them to unlock further powers. I don’t think guns are part of the gacha system, at least not from what I can tell, but the store and currency system is so labyrinthine I cannot even tell what is or is not sold half the time. But yes, this will of course be a game where it’s possible to gamble dozens, hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get the best characters, including the beloved “goth Warlock” who will be in an upcoming banner. I got this Well of Radiance-using devil Exo as my big pull who is yes, better than all my other characters instantly.

The unfortunate part is that I can see how a Destiny mobile game might have actually been kind of fun, with higher quality writing and voicework and not drowning in the muck of the unfortunately “standard” mobile gacha monetization that is a signature of NetEase. But this seems even worse than what they did for Diablo Immortal.

I have no idea who this game is made for. If you’re a Destiny player, it may have some novelty but at its core it’s a clunkier, smaller-scale, small-screened, badly written, badly voiced, non-canon, gacha mess of pay-to-win. I don’t know why you’d play this over the main game for any significant amount of time.

And I’ve said that this is less a mobile game aimed at Destiny players, rather a Destiny game aimed at mobile playser, but I’ve played enough gacha games to know that a big draw of those games are, if we’re being honest, a bunch of waifus and husbandos, and that is really not the vibe here, goth Warlock aside. In general, the character design and art direction is quite poor.

Given how many other big franchises have struggled with mobile adaptations over the past few years, it is hard for me to envision Destiny Rising as a big success. I do hope I’m wrong because best case, this can just print at least some split revenue for Bungie as it struggles without them really needing to devote anything to it other than just loaning NetEase the license. But the more I play the more I wish Bungie itself made an actually good mobile game here, as I do not think this worthy of the franchise and in some ways, may even actively harm the perception of it.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.