Not ground breaking in any way, but still a decent game.
After playing about 4 hours of the game, I fail to see why this game was blasted with negative reviews. It's by no means a step ahead as far as ARPG's go, but it is still a solid game experience. The combat is somewhat simplistic, and most battles can be won with simple button mashing, but players can string together fun and elaborate combos if they want too. The graphics aren't too bad, not cutting edge, but certainly not last gen as some have suggested. You could easily get about 12-15 hours of gameplay out of X-Men Destiny if you found all the collectables and took the time to play all three characters.
The most prominent complaint about this game is the inability to play as one of the X-Men. I for one was glad to play and create my own, albeit very limited character to fight with the X-Men. There are literally dozens of games out that allow you to play as your favorite characters, and this one at least tried to mix it by changing that formula.
I imagine that a lot of the ripping reviews were written by comic book affcienados who hated the fact that this new X-Man was not included in some awesome comic book series, or hated the fact that the character is essentially a bad @$$ new mutant, which is fair enough I suppose, but if we started hating and not playing games that had massive inconsistencies in story lines, most games would suck and we would be very bored gamers.
This game is a solid game that you could have fun playing as long as you don't expect it to blow you away with industry shattering story telling and innovative mechanics. It is simply average and worth a rental, and you should just play it yourself and decide.