That’s some unbelievably tough competition.XDefianthas to either give players something completely different, or absolutelynailthe basics.
Clean movement, solid gunplay, easy to dive into.
Essentially, this is the vanilla ice cream of arena shooters.
You’ve got the Echelon, fromSplinter Cell- they’re the flankers.
Then there’s the Cleaners fromThe Division- they’re the DPS.
Libertad hails from theFar Cryseries, they’re your support characters.
Phantoms, fromGhost Recon, are your tanks.
And Deadsec are the hackers, fromWatch Dogs.
Tell me, Ubisoft - did anyone actually ask for this?
I chose Echelon as my class.
Most players were going round first with an M4 and then the AK-47 once they’d unlocked it.
But I’ve never been a fan of those sorts of game modes in shooters.
Always have, always will.
It’s messy, unintuitive, and leads to unjust deaths.
I enjoyed this mode a lot more because it felt like there were actual consequences to dying.
But look at me.
I’m not even talking about XDefiant anymore, am I?
I’m talking about staple game modes in tonnes of different arena shooters.
That’s the trouble with XDefiant.
There’s really not much to grab onto and think,thisright here is the game’s identity.
This is why I’d play this game.
Instead I was just left thinking, “Yep.
It’s a vidyagame.”
Is it gonna pull me away from Apex?
I don’t want to give the wrong impression here - XDefiant actually feels quite good to play.
The gunplay was decent.
The movement was serviceable.
The matches were fast-paced, and the kills were satisfying.
There are lots of games nowadays with much better gunplay, with vastly improved movement.
No one’s going to be drawn to XDefiant simply because it features classes inspired by other Ubisoft games.
They’ll play it to see if it’s worth their time over the likes of COD or Overwatch.
And those games are spectacularly good at what they do, whereas XDefiant is… just okay.
