Destiny

The Good
The program itself seems pretty stable. The online encyclopedia based on Time-Life books is a nice touch. You can find this game in bargain bins and on eBay really cheap!

The Bad
Destiny is a baffling game. The interface is boring and not especially well laid-out--so when the designer wrote in his manual notes that he wanted Destiny to seem very familiar to Windows 95 users, I guess he wasn't kidding! But I kid Bill Gates…

The ground-level, "3D" perspective was unique to 4X games at the time of Destiny's release, but it is also entirely unwarranted, as it merely leaves the player struggling just to get his bearings. It doesn't help that the 3D graphics are extremely blocky and unpolished-looking.

The icons of Civilization are replaced here by tables with columns filled with names and numbers. This means that what the Civ player can easily see at a glance, the Destiny player can discover only after more digging and thought. Too much brainpower is expended on processing information when the player should be focussing on his plans for world domination.

The real-time play option is only helpful in the early stages of the game when not much happens and you need to speed things up. The ability to fight out (again, "3D") tactical battles within the larger strategic game sounds like a good idea, but it isn't executed well. Besides the fact that these battles bog things down and distract from the big picture (a problem Sid Meier has studiously avoided in his own games), they are so simplistic in terms of your command options that it really isn't worth the time to play them out manually. Fortunately, there is an auto-resolve option.

While the game box promises more depth and control, the game itself just adds more layers of complexity where they aren't necessary. "Let's see, should I send an emissary, dignitary, or ambassador on this diplomatic mission?" naturally leads the player to the next introspective question: "Why should I care? I'm supposed to be a god-king, not some bureaucrat at the State Department!" Yet Destiny is also simple and flat where Civilization (and Civ II, and Civ III) has oodles of depth and personality. All of the tribes you have to choose from seem pretty much the same. Where are Caesar, Napoleon and Genghis Khan when you need them? Finally, the scientific discoveries that should sound unique and exciting sound instead like they were given generic placeholder names that were never spruced up for the final product. "Chemistry IV? Wow, and I had thought Chemistry III was an exciting discovery!" Unfortunately, there are lots of boring discoveries and other key game concepts that you will have to look up in the online manual; I-Magic was too cheap to include some of the full tables in the printed documentation. Too bad, then, that the link to the online manual through the in-game interface doesn't even work.

The Bottom Line
This game was destined only for bargain bins, collectors' closets, and the not-so-cherished memories of gamers who wanted "a better Civ"--but who certainly didn't get one.

The Good
It fits into the Civilization genre, one of my favorites

The Bad
It was unplayable - free-camera 3D with no presets in the days when 3D accelerators were not yet available, made it next to impossible to see what was going on in the main map view. What made them think that full 3D was an important enough feature for TB strategy gamers to build the game around it?

The designers clearly were not Civ-style gamers themselves, as they maximized the need for micromanagement instead of providing good abstractions.

And clearly, if 100 technologies in the tree is part of a classic game, 1000 should make a great one, right? So let's have technologies like "Adobe construction I", "Adobe construction II", and "Adobe construction III".

And strategy gamers are military types, so they must love acronyms, right? Let's get rid of inaccurate terms like "city" and replace it with "COD" for "Center of Development".

Ugh. I don't see how anybody could have been clueless enough about making games as to commit to developing such a monstrosity without finding a few players who would want to play it.

The Bottom Line
If Outpost was the most poorly realized game concept in PC gaming history, Destiny would have to be the most poorly conceived one. Every single design decision on this game was made the wrong way. It's amazing, if you think about it.