XDefiant Review [IGN]

Call of Duty figured out the fun of grounded but fast-paced competitive play in this vein way back in the late 2000s, and XDefiant is clearly chasing that same success with its solid FPS design. Though the weapons are all pretty standard for military shooters like this, they still feel distinct and satisfying to use – the AK-47 hits harder and kicks a little differently than the M41A, for instance, and it feels meaningful to pick one over the other for your play style. Guns are also, for the most part, appropriately deadly, but you’ll get the most out of them when you spend time mastering the way recoil pulls your aim and what benefits you get from equipping a specific scope or stock. XDefiant pairs that with class abilities like healing teammates, dropping shields, and launching explosive drones, which can change the flow of a fight when they’re used well, but they’re not so powerful that they ever override the emphasis on its central shooting mechanics.

If nothing else, this is a fun shooter where the gunplay feels good, and you can do a whole lot worse than that as a solid foundation. It’s the other stuff layered on top of that gunplay, however, that XDefiant struggles to mix into a coherent whole.

The hook is that XDefiant is a sort of multiverse of different Ubisoft worlds combined into a single competitive shootout. When you jump into a match, you choose a character from one of four factions based on Ubisoft’s games (a fifth can be unlocked through gameplay or purchased), which function as your classes, and they’re all just distinct and interesting enough to play differently without feeling like they’re mismatched and shoehorned into the same game. The Libertad faction from Far Cry 6, for example, is essentially a medic class. They recover from damage faster and can either fire off a fast-heal charge in a radius around the player who activates it, or drop a stationary device that slowly heals anyone nearby. Meanwhile, the Ghost Recon Phantoms are tanks that don’t die quite as quickly as other factions. They’re able to either deploy a stationary barrier that they and their allies can shoot through, or pull out a personal riot shield that’s pretty effective at stopping bullets in both directions. There are also factions based on The Division, Watch Dogs, and Splinter Cell, and like in any class-based shooter, picking the right ability at the right time is important enough that it can change the flow of a fight. But you’re not locked into that choice for the whole match, so every time you kill an enemy you know they can adapt to your strengths and come back as a new class with a different set of skills. Knowing how and when to counter an enemy’s abilities is almost as important to your team as your aim.

The final major difference between each faction is their ultra ability: This big special power can only be used after you’ve charged it by racking up kills or scoring points toward objectives, but unlike many games’ ultimate abilities, there’s usually a way for the other team to shut them down if you’re not careful. For instance, the Phantoms’ ultra gives them a personal energy dome that protects them from all damage coming from outside of it, but opponents who are quick and smart – and avoid the defensive cannon – can slip through and kill whoever’s generating it, canceling the ability. The same is true of the Libertad healing device that pumps up anyone in its vicinity to double health. Enemies might seem nigh invulnerable while standing in its range, but you can shoot the device itself to destroy it and make them mortal again. In that way, ultras are generally strong without being ridiculous and require you to be smart about how and when to use them.

Still, it’s important to add a caveat: while each faction mostly feels pretty distinct, balanced, and fun, some definitely seem to stand ahead of others, and a few come off as completely useless (unless the community just hasn’t figured out how to use them yet). The biggest offender on this front is DedSec from Watch Dogs, whose gameplay style leans toward hacking enemy abilities. Their deployable spider drones automatically chase down the other team and shock or totally blind them, leaving them fully vulnerable – pretty cool. Their other ability, however, allows you to hijack the other team’s deployables, and I’ve yet to see a single person use it effectively. There just aren’t that many things to steal or many opportunities to do so, and every time I tried to sneak up to a shield or health station to try to hack it, I was killed – by the players who, of course, were currently using the thing I wanted to hijack. That’s especially egregious because you either need to pay $10 to unlock DedSec, or sink a whole lot of time into playing the other four factions to earn it for free.

On the flipside, other abilities feel overly strong. The Echelon faction, which is inspired by the stealthy gameplay of Splinter Cell, can either become nearly invisible or activate a pulsing sonar ability that lets your whole team see enemies through walls. Their ultra ability, Sonar Goggles, greatly increases the range of that legalized wallhack and gives you the 5.7 pistol, which fires slowly but takes enemies down in one or two hits. The only way to deal with the Sonar Goggles, as far as I can tell, is just to kill whoever’s using it. Where the other factions have abilities that are a lot more situational or team-oriented, there’s basically no drawback here – it’s never not to your advantage to see through walls. The lack of effective balance at launch means some classes are more popular than others in matches, and that weakens the faction system overall.

Generally, though, the larger issue with abilities is that they don’t really fit with XDefiant’s “the quick and the dead” approach to gunfights. Since shootouts are often over almost as soon as they begin, a lot of abilities are just a non-factor in most situations. Firing off a heal or launching an explosive drone delays you from shooting back, which means you’ll almost definitely die when all it takes to drop you is a couple of hits. That means you must have a Jedi-like sense of what will happen to make real use of them, like leaving a healing device or a shield where you think a fight is about to break out or launching an explosive drone toward where you anticipate someone to be.

Why equip the moltov of The Division’s Cleaners faction, which you’ll only be able to use if you get within a few feet of an opponent, when you could choose the Phantom’s deployable shield and have several seconds of free shots at any distance? What good is the ability to hack a healing device from up close if sniping it from a distance is much more effective at neutralizing it without dying?

Balancing is an issue with some weapons at the moment, as well. The longer I played XDefiant, the more people started appearing in lobbies wielding sniper rifles, and it quickly became clear why: Sniping very often gets you a one-hit kill regardless of where the shot hits your target. Even at close ranges, if you can draw a bead on someone and snap off a shot, you’ll likely drop them before they have a chance to double-tap you. Skilled players picked up on this very quickly, and if you jump in today you’ll probably find yourself getting taken out instantly, regardless of how far away the enemy is. It quickly made me feel like a chump for opting for a different gun. So I guess I’m a sniper now.

It’s only partly because of the sniper advantage that shotguns and light machine guns feel a bit useless at the moment. Both have significant drawbacks; shotguns have very short range and slow firing rate, while LMGs seem to be tuned more to destroy enemy devices like shields and appear to do less damage to actual enemies. Both weapon types seem to punish you for choosing them over assault rifles or submachine guns, which have fewer drawbacks.

None of that is a dealbreaker, though, because XDefiant doesn’t care if your kill:death ratio is negative, so long as you’re helping your team get closer to the match objective. You don’t have to be among the fastest guns on the internet to grab a riot shield and focus on surviving long enough to push a payload from one end of a map to the other, or play support or defense on capture points by helping to keep your more lethal teammates alive. All of that is good fun, but it could certainly use a few more game modes with more imaginative and interesting approaches to shaking up gameplay in order to prevent us from falling into a routine for a bit longer.

XDefiant has only five modes at the moment, all of which are fairly standard fare for this kind of shooter. Those modes all support six-on-six unranked play – XDefiant will also have a four-on-four ranked mode, which will use skill-based matchmaking, but it’s only available as a preview right now. Zone Control, Domination, and Occupy are variations on capture-point modes, with Occupy taking place on a linear map while the other two are played in XDefiant’s big, dense arenas. That cuts down on variety, and a lot of the matches you’ll play during any given session start to feel repetitive pretty quickly. Whether you’re capturing one control point that moves around the map, three simultaneously, or several in a specific order, it doesn’t change the gameplay enough to really differentiate those modes from each other.

Meanwhile, Hotshot is a version of Call of Duty’s Kill Confirmed in which you only score if you pick up a dropped item after a kill, but there’s an added VIP twist: The person with the most items becomes speedier and scores more points for every item they pick up, so you want to protect your own team’s Hotshot and hunt down opposing ones. Escort, on the other hand, is a straight-up payload mission on a linear map, with no meaningful differences from the mode that’s been in Overwatch for years (and in Team Fortress 2 before that), so it’s not terribly novel or innovative. Neither of these options do much to play to XDefiant’s particular strengths or help differentiate it from other games.

The maps themselves, on the other hand, are largely standouts. Ten are arenas and four are linear, and they all borrow liberally from the same games from which XDefiant pulls its factions to make for visually interesting and varied spaces. For the most part they’re highly open, with multiple pathways in and out of any given place. That means you’re as likely to get shot in the back as you are to get the drop on someone, but it’s nice that they encourage fast movement and a minimal amount of camping, and facilitate a lot of different types of engagements with just about every step. That helps make all of the factions and weapons feel viable (except maybe DedSec), at least from a playstyle perspective; running around with a shotgun is just as fun as hanging back with a sniper rifle, even if the power of the guns themselves are a little uneven. The open design also keeps things fair, as there are no locations where someone can hide and dominate alone with a sniper rifle or where a team can hunker down to make themselves nearly invulnerable.

There’s also a fairly expansive (if basically standard at this point) progression system that unlocks weapons, weapon attachments like scopes, and various faction characters as you play. Additional pieces for are unlocked for a weapon just by using it, so you can start to kit out guns to your liking after a few rounds with them. Additional guns and characters require completing challenges by using the weapons you have in specific ways, like earning point-blank SMG kills or notching a certain number of one-shot snipes. The challenges help encourage you to vary your playstyle, and none of them are arduous to unlock – they perfectly balance pushing you to experiment with different loadouts and gear, while quickly rewarding you with new weapons for your trouble.

The same can’t be said of the grind to unlock the DedSec faction, however. Four factions are available when you start in XDefiant, but the fifth requires earning some 700,000 experience points from completing objectives, scoring kills, finishing and winning matches, and completing daily challenges. To put that in perspective, a kill gets you 100 XP, a finished match earns 2,000 – and another 2,000 if you win – while the four challenges available each day range from 5,000 to 10,000 XP. That makes it a fairly intense grind to do for free, but of course you can unlock DedSec instantly if you’re willing to fork over $10. But again, given how weak that faction seems to be with the current balance, neither the grind nor the cost seems especially worth it.