The thing is, from a business standpoint I understand the idea of a Live-Service game, like XDefiant for instance. Look at where this all started after all. Years ago the cost of development was already ballooning and a successful property could find additional ways to bring in revenue that were much lower risk. The absolute pinnacle of this is Call of Duty just printing dollar bills after release. And if you are a corporation like Ubisoft, just one successful Live-Service title could help fund any riskier projects in the pipeline… Like that Beyond Good & Evil 2, right guys? Remember that? Keep refusing to say it’s dead but haven’t shown it in 5 years? Are we still working on that?
Somewhere along the line though we must have lost our minds. Maybe there was never a time when these games at least tried to be a game and didn’t start as a dystopian clusterf*** of pay-to-win incentivization, poorly strung-together mechanics, with bad optimization, all stolen from other games where they are done much better while masquerading as yet another free-to-play shooter. But here we are with Ubisoft’s latest shooter XDefiant standing tall and proudly boasting that “yes yes, everything you heard is true”. I hadn’t given it another thought a few weeks ago, having been relegated to the shadowy corners of the internet, seemingly forgotten even by its parent company. Now that it is out, however, there is little choice but to acknowledge it, at least until it inevitably fades yet again, this time due to how memorable a shameless imitator it is.
Smash Bros. This Is Not
The weirdest comparison to be made here about this game is just how much it feels like Ubisoft attempting to replicate a Smash Bros atmosphere. The game features several trees of characters all pulled from a Tom Clancy-named IP’s and beyond such as The Division (which just got its upcoming mobile game Heartlands canceled), Splinter Cell (Which supposedly has a remake coming out but that hasn’t come up a while), and Watch Dogs (which new reports claim is now a dead franchise). The only franchise featuring that I actually have confidence in its future is Far Cry.
All of these worlds collide both figuratively and literally as each map takes inspiration from these games as well. These levels are… Pretty much what you might expect from a first-person shooter if you typed into an AI “Make me a first-person shooter MOBA. This involves having a major setpiece in the center of the maps such as a downed airship or mall lobby, and having smaller mini-conflict zones perfectly framed around that. In fairness, there is an interesting fight or two to be had in other areas, but you are usually within sight of that centerpiece which is designed to cause engagement.
Inside here, is a kernel of an idea. We have all these franchises with guns we are underutilizing, let’s cram them all together into a first-person shooter to showcase they still exist. The cynic in me looks at that and sees that and thinks there are so many issues, but the optimist in me (whom I have been trying to kill for years) says “But Zach, you enjoy those franchises and individually they all had good gunplay, together it could be a great fusion.” Somehow, even my optimist doesn’t have much to say after the first few rounds I played.
What a World of Worlds
In fairness, my issues started long before the first round even booted up, all the way back on the start screen… Well actually, before. The game has a lot of loading screens and they are all very slow so get ready for that fun. On the main menu though the game wastes zero time showing you all the ways you can give it money which was a similar issue I had with their additional nightmare of monetization, Skull And Bones which I outlined in my review earlier this year. At least there they let me play the game first before begging for tips. I guess the other distinction was that Skull & Bones was a 70$ premium game, I believe the lie that was chosen was the first “Quadruple-A” game, whereas here at least the base game is free. The lie here though is that the game isn’t pay-to-win. It becomes obvious that this isn’t true within minutes.
Like most free-to-play games a clear strategy is to offer founders bundles in which you can essentially pay to unlock everything right off the bat. Dead or Alive eventually offered a free version of their fighting game with only a few members of the roster to choose but this was made an alternative to buying the game, with buying being made clear their intended path. Here instead of skins, you unlock the additional hero characters the game offers, something even Overwatch 2 doesn’t do. Since these hero characters have way better abilities than that of the base roster, the most popular during my time was a Splinter Cell character that can turn invisible, these characters give a clear upper hand. Grinding to unlock them naturally is also a very slow and arduous process, clearly to attempt to make purchasing them the only favorable option.
Thankfully the battle pass doesn’t make additional heroes locked behind it, only offering the usual currency or character/weapons skins. However, having played about 6 or seven matches by the time I cared to track my progress, I was kinda annoyed to see I hadn’t even made a dent in my first level of the battle pass. I had yet to complete any challenges yet , then I looked, and of course not, I have to play the game exactly how the devs want me too to complete them. Most games through in a play 5 rounds, get 15 kills, etc for us plebs in the dailies but not here, you will need to go out of your way to do specific things to earn anything. The characters offer so little in the way of any sort of interesting characteristic in a sea of already forgettable faces, I could not see myself getting motivated to grind in any way shape of form for the prizes that are… For lack of anything better… Not worth the effort…
Shoot Them With The Shooty Part
All of this comes before we even get to the gameplay part, the bread and butter of a live-service SHOOTER, all of which failed to impress. The first thoughts that come to mind are just how much the game looks like it was built for mobile. The predominantly tight maps that just aren’t that nice to look at, the character models that lack polish, the gunplay. If you told me this was a mobile game that was ported I honestly might believe you, even though I was there when they first announced the game for every platform.
Rounds play using team-based modes like King of the Hill and other point-based objectives and honestly, this was the first community I ever played these games with that seemed to ‘get it’. Call of Duty was the bane of my existence with players queuing into headquarters and then playing like its deathmatch. Even in Overwatch 2, my current usual comp game, players never touch the objective and then scream at me because I’m the only person willing to sit on it. If there is one thing XDefiant has going for it over all its competition it’s a community that understands the game they signed up for.
What XDefiant doesn’t have going for it is gunplay, which honestly feels like a big part of what it should do right? Guns have very little to zero recoil and sound like nerf blasters. An assault rifle fires perfectly into its fixed location in the blandest way possible and looks awful doing it. Snipers almost always guarantee you kill your target and also have no recoil, as well as minimal drop-off. Shotguns might be the most disappointing as they are less than effective and have no kickback to them. Even on mobile, it would be dubious to call this good, but it would feel more at home. What baffles me is that Ubisoft HAS good shooters like Far Cry and Rainbow Six Seige, so how exactly none of those elements is even present here is a mystery even Scooby and the Gang might struggle to solve.
Each character also has abilities that will feel familiar if you have played literally any hero shooter in the past. What will not feel familiar is that the game caps progress on them only to kills and not to general damage and time like others, meaning you might never actually get to use yours. These aren’t killstreaks, these are integral parts of the character you choose to play at, and the game seemingly punishes you for not performing well enough. Most kills I got filled the bar about 5 of the 100 percent which means you better start nailing your shots. This being said, most of the character’s abilities, and none of the free characters, have ultimate abilities that even offer a sight deviation to a match. This feels indicative of the way the game constantly fails to reward you for the work you do, and then asks you to put a dollar in the Ubisoft tip jar.
Verdict
Housed somewhere deep, down, inside the framework of XDefiant is the kernel of an interesting idea. Merge all our shooters. Could work. Doesn’t sound like an awful pitch. In practice though, it is a lesson in financial greed done wrong. XDefiant barely, if at all, wants to be an actual game. It’s yet another vehicle in a growing laundry list of them where it feels like the right way to play the game is to insert your credit card.
As a game XDefiant fails on almost every metric. Its shooter, the most important part, is poorly designed, with bad level design and even worse gunplay. The look and feel are both dated in the worst possible ways, making the game feel like a dated mobile game at its absolute best, and at its worst a bad idea nobody had the courage to say no to. With teams that have absolutely had more success with these concepts in the Ubisoft family and none seemly approached to help, it makes this feel like a game that was never supposed to succeed in the first place.
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Reviewed on PlayStation 5, Also Available on Xbox Series S/X, Microsoft Windows, and Amazon Luna
Developer: Ubisoft San Francisco, Ubisoft
Publisher: Ubisoft
Release Date: May 21st, 2024
A ton of Ubisoft owned shooters collide in a free-to-play shooter.
Cons:
-Bad Level Design
-Poor Graphics
-Pay-To-Win
-Microtransactions
-Horrible gunplay
-Boring heroes
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XDefiant
