SSX for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 is only three-and-a-half years old, but let’s be honest: we haven’t had a proper, joyous SSX about bright color, big music, and even bigger air in over a decade. Starting with the original on PlayStation 2, EA Sports Big’s snowboarding game took the glutted extreme sports genre and revitalized it with a splash of wonderful absurdity. No real world snowboarder could pull of the aerial feats commonplace in SSX, let alone in the middle of a cloud of fireworks, but the series had an intense tangibility in its best moments. At its peak, nothing else felt like SSX and we miss it terribly.

We want you back, SSX. This is everything we loved about you that we want to see in you on modern day machines.

No matter how many hours you muster with a finished game before launch (and I've managed to bag a full two days with The Taken King, and several days with the game after the 2.0 update) there's no way to tell exactly what can occur when a globe-full of Guardians suddenly turns up to the party. A large part of what makes Destiny great is its capacity to inspire its community of players, and while what I've played has me pretty much convinced that it's going to be the business, I've decided to hold off from serving up a complete review.

Within these slides you'll find my final thoughts on the main campaign, along with numerous additional story missions. You'll also find my verdicts on the four new Strikes, as well as initial impressions of the new loot system and other endgame pastimes found aboard the new area, The Dreadnaught. Keep your eyes on the site, as you'll get additional slices of review as the Raid, King's Fall, goes live this Friday. That, and the ongoing revelations that follow over the coming days, will allow me to eventually strap a score on the end.

If you're a veteran Destiny player then ask yourself one question: What would you change about it? It's not a hard question, huh? It is hard to think of a game in recent years that has seen a fan base burgeon so quickly and with such dedication, but which openly harangues it from all angles for its faults. The problem was that Destiny always felt so darned close to fulfilling all of the promises made pre-launch.

Very palpably, The Taken King moves to address some of the loudest roars of incredulity. Namely, the lack of a genuine story which left many cold, the confusing loot system which gated off all the best stuff behind random loot drops (forever 29, anyone?) and, most potently, the necessity to repeat the same content endlessly in order to progress. If one or all of these bugbears reared up when you pondered the question at the top of this slide, then prepare thyself. Bungie has been listening.

The most immediately appreciable changes are in how Bungie has adapted its world to cater for a legitimate story. The main campaign now has a proper arc, with the bombastic introduction to the big bad Oryx at the outset as the spark that sets off the escalating plotline. NPCs, who were once nothing but voiced vendors (quickly flushed out of useful gear and forgotten) are fleshed out properly as tag-along characters. Among them is Cayde-6, the fantastically charming Hunter Vanguard with a penchant for breaking the rules.

If you wondered what might have been had Bungie injected the modicum of humour that it had apparently planned from the outset, back when David Cross was on board to pen some lines, then the answer is in Cayde: a delightful dash of personality. Ghost's seen an overhaul, too, not just with his re-voicing at the chords of Nolan North. He's chirpier, funnier and is now capable of scanning certain elements of the world around you to serve up a slice of the exposition that was once upon a time reserved for Grimoire cards nestled in Bungie.net.

Then there's the loot. Oh the sweet, delicious loot. Say what you like about the random nature of the drops in vanilla Destiny, but the gear you could find was inspiring in its trend-bucking and often infatuating in visual and audio design. Guns and gear are equally as fun to discover and play with here.

It's a difficult process for those weaned on Year One's most infamous Darkness blasters, mind. Within minutes of play I'd discovered a rocket launcher, a fairly common Blue one by The Taken King's standards, which utterly trounced my fully upgraded Gjallarhorn for damage. Throwing Gjally into the vault felt like sacrilege in all the right ways. What you've got in the loot reset button is something the game so desperately needed and, while there'll likely be a few new favourites around the corner, for now, at least, digging through all the new guns is a joy.

There's a lot more of it, too. Those shiny green, blue and very occasionally purple engrams that burst forth from enemies now do so with almost careless abandon. As you power through the story, you'll find yourself picking through winnings with regularity, and not just to dismantle stuff to clear some room. For the campaign, at least, there's a heavier emphasis on having fun with the various guns, now much more easily associated with the various makers of the world.

The stats of blue/Rare level gear are always worth checking, too, as once you do start filling out your slots with purple/Legendary kit you'll be able to upgrade them via the Infusion system. Rare gear can actually be more powerful than base Legendary gear, and so can beef the latter up beyond its regular output. All of these aspects, along with the new algorithms working behind the scenes to ensure you're less likely to get the same bit of loot twice, make sure that much, if not all, of the previous complaints about RNG and Forever 29 are assigned to the past.

The here and now is all about The Dreadnaught. This gigantic battleship has crested into the solar system, displaced a portion of the rings of Saturn and is now splurging out Taken, existing enemies from the world of Destiny that have been, for want of a better term, Oryx-ed. Or Taken. Which is what they're called. Huh. The incredibly nitpicky among Destiny fans might have had reason to grumble that previous enemies were oddly familiar to those found in Halo (Phalanx = Jackal, Dreg = Grunt) but these rejigged versions are wholly fresh. Your first run in with each variety inspires grins aplenty, from the shield-buffing Vex Goblins to the blindness-inducing Fallen Captains.

The Dreadnaught itself is both home to a bunch of the new story missions, and also a new destination for between-mission Patrols. Rather than be a quick fire dash between flashing mission nodes, however, here you're able to take part in a larger variety of pastimes. There's a whole batch of secret chests to discover, the means by which they're opened as yet unknown. I managed to open one chest by following a series of riddles and tasks. To say I'm looking forward to having Reddit's help finding the others is an understatement.

The four new strikes are by far the best that Destiny has seen thus far. It's the boss fights that do it. Each one comes loaded with memorable encounters, not just because they are bigger or have bullet-soaking health bars necessitating long old fights (Gjallarhorn's abandonment ensures that Bungie needs not rely on these types of encounter anymore, thank the Traveller).

These boss fights and the scenarios that lead up to them feel almost Raid-like, though not nearly as tough. Fights require active communication. Take the Shield Brothers, for example. The titular Cabal duo have a complementing defensive shield and forward rushing melee strike to share out between them, so fireteams have to call out who is where and deploying what in order to adequately best them both. Arguably the most excellent boss comes in the PlayStation exclusive Strike, Echo Chamber (available in autumn for Xbox owners). In an admirable anti-cheesing move a giant mecha- eyeball shifts Guardians around the room with moving plasma walls.

It sounds incredibly boring, but holding all of this new stuff together are a set of menus you’ll have to look very far afield to find outdone. They’re smooth, functional, look great and manage to house all the complexity normally contained across a keyboard of hot keys and a mouse, only in a single stick and a couple of buttons. Said it would sound boring, didn't I?

Honestly though, after just a couple of hours play, darting between comedic chatter with Cayde-6, through a trip to the Court Of Oryx (more on this boss-spawning side activity later, too) and then into the depths of a boss fight on the Dreadnaught you never knew was even there, you can't not appreciate that all of this is tied together via such an easily navigate-able, smoothly implemented UI. This one's to you, unsung UI artist somewhere in the back rooms of Bungie HQ.