Destiny Stone Review

Destiny Stone is one of the most extraordinary games on Facebook. It completely eschews Facebook’s love affair with timer-based management sims to offer players a 2D side-scrolling platformer with combat, RPG stat progression, an equipment system, and an item crafting system as deep as anything you’d find in a console game. There’s even a story-based plotline to follow with characters you can recruit and optional little dialog sequences to unlock. Where most Facebook games expect you to pay for the right to play it for hours on end, Destiny Stone is content to let you play as much as you like.

By
Share this
  • Share this on Facebook
  • Share this on Twitter

Destiny Stone brings 2D sidescrolling platform-jumping gameplay to Facebook with some fun RPG item-crafting, too.

Destiny Stone is one of the most extraordinary games on Facebook. It completely eschews Facebook’s love affair with timer-based management sims to offer players a 2D side-scrolling platformer with combat, RPG stat progression, an equipment system, and an item crafting system as deep as anything you’d find in a console game. There’s even a story-based plotline to follow with characters you can recruit and optional little dialog sequences to unlock. Where most Facebook games expect you to pay for the right to play it for hours on end, Destiny Stone is content to let you play as much as you like.

Destiny Stone is built largely around playing the side-scrolling segments. The controls are a bit strange (up arrow to jump, left and right arrows to move, w key to attack) but should be easy enough to manage if you’ve ever played a Flash sidescroller. Each level is short and allots you 300 seconds to finish it. Various materials you can use for crafting or customizing items are scattered throughout each level randomly. You clear a level when you get to the end and whack open a pink treasure chest there. Choosing Adventure mode lets you play whatever stage you please while Continue Story lets you, well, continue the story. Some levels demand you have so much experience before entering, giving you time to grind for item crafting ingredients.

Destiny Stone

The trick of crafting items is that your inventory space for carrying ingredients is sharply limited. You can carry 8 “tiles” of items out of a level and you can store 12 tiles in your house. You will rapidly fill these tiles up, forcing you to either start throwing items away, selling them, or spending real money on more storage. The game is playable no matter which solution you pick, since most items require less than 20 ingredients. You can also combine many types of ingredients into rarer types (like chunks of Iron Ore into an Iron Ingot).

Destiny Stone

When playing in Continue Story mode, you get little cutscenes between levels. These cutscenes help develop a story where the heroine, Penelope, decides she wants to find a magic artifact called the Destiny Stone. You meet a large cast of characters, some of whom will assist you in dungeons as Jewel Guardians. (They can help you get items you can’t reach by yourself.) Sometimes the text boxes in the cutscenes glitch out, but you can progress the story anyway by clicking the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

Destiny Stone

The side-scrolling levels are also prone to glitches, particularly as you get to later levels and there’s likely to be more enemies onscreen at once. Even with the glitches, though, Destiny Stone is really fun to play. Instead of having to wait on timers you can play it as much as you like, only paying if you want more storage or want to buy ingredients instead of finding them. The action component to the gameplay really is refreshing and the item crafting is pretty compelling. Facebook could definitely use some more console-style games like this.

The good

    The bad

      80 out of 100