I can't decide if this game sounds fun or not. Someone give me a ten-cent summary of this. Obviously, it's an FPS.
Is it a huge time suck that takes forever to do anything with tons of grinding for infrequent random drops? It often sounds like that.
Yes, but they promise to address that. and now they already partially fixed that if you take mission from Queen (exactly the same mission as you already have played hundreds of time before, but now with proper loot). The mission is RANDOM (man.. why bungie LOVE random things) so the best method to finish it is jumping back and forth between 2 area until randomly got the earth mission. it can be finished in 15 minutes and great for playing solo because there are lots of hiding area (you must not die if playing solo in queen mission).
Is it like Borderlands? I liked Borderlands.
dunno, i have not played borderlands.
Is multiplayer critical to enjoying the game?
nope and yes. You can play solo if you want but other people sometime will disturb your gameplay or stole your progress in finishing missions.
its both PvE and PvP. The PvE is very repetitive, the PvP is confusing with no minimap. But the gameplay itself is enjoyable both in PvP and PvE. Basically its like Halo Online. Plays the same as Halo, but with much more repetitive PvE gameplay, and you can brings more friend (up to 6 players for some mission).
The Story, The Mission, and The Marker is often unclear. So be prepared to google often if you play alone.
Is it massively multiplayer?
yes and nope. Its presented as massively multiplayer but the player count is very small. only 3-6 players.
so its like playing and MMO with a group of friend (destiny best played with friends to fill the party), without disturbed by other random players.
EDIT:
early in the game, it presented you with The Freedom to finish mission with The Strategy that you like. Its fake. dont let that increase your expectation. Destiny is not like that. The Freedom to finish the mission the way you want, only appear in that mission. on every other mission, you cannot do the thing that you have done on that early mission. on every other mission you must wait Dinklebot to finish blabbering. you must wait for waves of enemy. you must wait.... for something.
The Waiting - Destiny's most used and annoying feature.